Dying.... just another part of life.

This blog may seem a bit morbid - apologies for that, but I'm just trying to record all different aspects of life here.

We have a regular driver named Daniel, who is lovely and always very helpful to us. He had told us last week that his mother was sick in hospital, and then on Tuesday night he rang to tell us "my mother is dead". He wanted to check that it was alright with Warren if he took the car to Kumasi where his mother had lived. He sounded very matter of fact about it - he didn't actually know what she had died of, just that she was sick and then died. When I said to him "That's very sad Daniel", he replied "Oh I'm sorry madam" - like he was sorry that he had made me sad!! So he went off to Kumasi that night, but was back at work again first thing in the morning - ready to go. Life goes on....

Unfortunately people die here quite regularly - the life expectancy is only about 57, and infant mortality is about 1 in 20 of babies under the age of 1 years - that's not good odds. The main causes are malaria, tuberculosis and polio - strange, because those are diseases we don't even have in Australia! Thankfully we've had vaccinations for them, or have medication to treat them, but some of the local people either don't have their children vaccinated, live too far from a hospital, don't have the money to pay for good medication or don't get good quality medical treatment. I think there's a funeral pretty much every Saturday; everyone dresses in black and goes to the church, and then they have a "party" afterwards! A celebration of life if you like. Everyone goes along, and they give a gift of money to help the family pay for the funeral expenses.

We had a funny discussion with Rita and her sister just recently - they were saying that their grandmother had died and that she was "on the fridge". We didn't really understand, they were pointing to the fridge - I thought maybe it was her ashes there? Then I thought maybe she was in that particular fridge! But no - eventually we figured out that she had died about a month beforehand (just when we arrived here) and that she was in the morgue at the hospital "in the fridge"!! We all laughed about the misunderstanding, but I thought at the time I wouldn't be laughing if it was my grandmother! They will be having her funeral next month when some of her children can return to Ghana from overseas.

So that's a bit about life and death in Ghana...