In Many Ways, A Return

After a rather long--at least for me--hiatus from field research, I am returning to Ghana for January 2012. In the future I will upgrade this website, maybe merge it with my academic site, maybe publish some papers to make my academic site an academic site and hopefully finish my PhD at a reasonable age.

In any case, I will still be taking photos. Look, here's my trusty Kelty backpack that has accompanied me on every trip to Ghana.

It even still has the orange stains from the trip to Mole. For those of you keeping score, I have a new lens, a 50 f/1.4. I'm very excited to get more practice on it.

While the lens may be new and other equipment has been updated, my research is actually coming back full circle to where I started. Bureaucracy.

I know that you're holding yourself back with excitement, that you can't wait to hear it again. Bureaucracy. Okay, maybe it's just me. But for me it's an exciting, understudied area of comparative politics, an area that really can make a difference in people's lives and not just in journal pages.

I believe that politics and government are two different things. Politics you see in the papers, hear on the radio; it's measured with vote counts, with speeches, with campaigns. We may not know our local politicians, but we each have our own definition of what a politician is. As one friend told me, politics comes from the Greek, "poli" for "many", with "tics" from the English for "blood-sucking animals."

QED.

Jokes aside, I do think that many people do enter democratic politics with a desire to change things for the better. Many do, of course, enter to enrich themselves. But I think somewhere in there there must be even a slight tendency toward positive change.

If that's politics, government is everywhere. But it's so everywhere that you might not notice it. It's the pothole that gets fixed. It's that stamp in your passport. It's the teacher in the school.

It's also the lack of all those things, whether across the board or just in certain places. Why is it, that when the policy is 'improve education', we get an additional teacher, rather than innovative teaching methods? Or that improve transport means 'build more roads' rather than 'fix existing roads'? I think that answer is somewhere in between the politicians and the bureaucrats, and I want to find out how we get there. And how we get there will matter for policy makers, aid workers and the private sector.

So that's why I'm here. Actually, I'm here to pilot surveys and then hopefully launch something bigger later this year or next year. But it's exciting times in Ghana. Election is coming up, and already the radios are buzzing with the parties speculating about fraud. There are more ads at the airport. Two different people today have pointed out that a KFC is open in Accra. There are more hotels. So things are different, and I'm excited to see how the country has changed in the year that I've been away.

But some things don't change. People, for instance. This afternoon I did some grocery shopping at the Accra Mall. I hailed one of the outrageously priced taxis from the mall (I justify this by the fact that it's my first day back and I just want to get back to the apartment), and start getting into it. At that point, I detect another cab driver sprinting towards me, yelling something ...

Me (mentally): Seriously, man, I already got a cab.

Him: Hey hey hey hey! I know you!

Me [slightly recognizing this voice]: Wh-What?

Him [extending his hand for the Ghanaian handshake]: It's me, Prince! You're Joe! It's good to see you again, my friend.

Indeed, it was Prince, my go-to driver in projects past, Prince the King of drivers. If any of you need a good taxi driver, just let me know. He has a great car--which basically means three things: (1) there are seat belts in the back, (2) the windows roll down and (3) you can't smell the enging fumes. First day back, and I run into him. The more things change, the more they stay the same.