A Visit to the Faculty of Law

Last week I spent two days attempting to conduct preliminary research at the University of Ghana's Law Faculty. My first challenge was in finding the university and the next was to find the faculty itself. Neither of these proved to be easy.

I am now living in an area of Accra known as "Labadi". I rent a room there from a lovely old lady who cooks for me :)

Labadi is no where near the university.

But for 60 pesewas (about 30 cents), I can take a trotro up to the campus. I could take a taxi there too, but that would cost me 20 Cedis per direction (about $12.00) which adds up!

Anyways, a couple of trotros later and I did eventually find the university -- which is beautiful and sprawling:

I spent about 2.5 hours wandering around the campus trying to find someone who knew where the law library was. I had managed to find the law faculty building, with the help of google maps


Yep, this is it:

but it no longer houses the faculty, apparently. And no one seemed to know where it had gotten off to!

I had to take several breaks during my traipsing to recover from the effects of the heat. Wandering is not easy work.

This exercise did teach me one valuable lesson, though, and that is that if one needs help in Ghana, it is best to make a rule of only asking women. The men may have the answer, but they are more likely to want to be paid for it in either cash or digits, neither of which was I particularly interested in giving out...sigh.

I did eventually get there,

And it is a beautiful new facility, located about a stone's throw from where I started (I had circumnavigated the entire campus by this time...blast my choice to go counterclockwise!) but its time to add some signs somewhere folks! (maybe a friendly note on the old faculty building that google maps is directing poor folks to might be the thing...)

That reminds me of an amusing anecdote which concluded at this library -- before I left for Ghana I had to get rid of a bunch of extraneous items in my room, including several old laptop bags which were donated to Value Village. I kept a couple stored in Ajax, and brought only the laptop sleeve with me to Ghana because of size. But I FORGOT to bring my shoulder bag that would accommodate the laptop! One does not carry a laptop around in plain sight in Accra, especially day in and day out (I need my laptop every day for work and cannot leave it at the office). So I, regrettably, had to buy a new one in Accra. I decided to avoid ridiculous prices by buying one from the local hawkers, which was a crazy mistake. I had 35 Cedis with which to accomplish the task -- not because I could only afford 35 Cedis or only wanted to pay 35 Cedis, but because my bankcard refused to give me any more than that that day. So my bargaining position was difficult. I'll spare you the details of the difficult conversation I had with the exasperated vendor, but what I was not prepared for was the literal flock of hawkers that silently had congregated behind me once they saw that I was actually purchasing something. Once I was finished with the bag salesman, I was forcefully encouraged to consider the purchase of sunglasses, belts, wood carvings, paintings, gold, and beverages all being held under my nose by several different men the moment I turned from the bag guy.

Then I got to the law library and found out you're not allowed to bring laptop bags inside.

Yeah... I had to take all my stuff out of my hard-earned bag and leave the bag outside the library in a pile of various laptop bags and cart my stuff inside, hoping my remaindered Dell bag would still be there when I re-emerged. It was still there, by the way, but that's not the point.