Progress and Development..the real story!

So I forgot to post this last week and decided to do that today.I have been thinking for some time what development or progress is as defined to us and if it truly is progress or development.I know this may seem confusing to some of you so let me try and give an example.
When the World bank gives a GDP for Ghana for example and says Ghana is now a lower middle income country,we usually rejoice and say we are now developing.But let's actually take a look at the situation on the ground and then make that decision for ourselves.This is what I mean.
There are two sides to this coin.The first is a predefined notion of what development in a country is supposed to be when cultural and situational differences determine this.A clear example of this is the setting of a global minimum wage when truthfully,that minimum wage is like 3 times what people in certain nations need for their basic needs to be met.Please note,I didn't say Ghana(lol).

The other side of the coin which concerns me more is the by effect of this so called development.I consider how lifestyles change and the environment is destroyed all in the quest for development and I question if it is true development.We cut down all of our trees to build skyscrapers,begin using fertilizers and pesticides because that's what development is supposed to be,drive cars that emit CFCs into the atmosphere leading to global warming and perhaps most importantly eat ourselves to death.Is this really a price we are willing to pay to say we are now a developed nation?Most developed countries have an epidemic of obesity,Type 2 diabetes and a host of other lifestyle related diseases that a change in lifestyle caused by so called development has brought.They fight  every day trying to fix this but its almost impossible.
We were purely organic farmers in Ghana.Now because of 'progress' and population explosion,we are now eating food grown with chemicals that are killing the farmers applying them to the crops.In a time when people in the 'developed' world are beginning to realise that organic food is best and are actually returning to it,is it true development to just follow in their footsteps?
This is something that we all have to think about.There are far reaching consequences of trying to model our country after the 'developed' world just because we accept blindly that they are developed.Our MPs now demand that we pay them exorbitant salaries simply because Kenya pays their MPs more.Really?When did Kenya become the standard of what we want Ghana to be?Isn't this just ridiculous?After all,don't you agree that people walking the streets of hot Accra in winter jackets is ridiculous?
We do this not just with our economic affairs but with our family and cultural habits.We are modeling our marriages after those in countries that we consider developed, modeling our families after theirs, even dressing more like them than us.Do we really want to go down the same path people have gone and failed?If we're really learning from them why can't we see that they have realised the way they do stuff needs to change?Do we need the divorce rates in our country to reach the level of that in the 'developed' world before we start to question if their methods really work for us?These are just a few examples.Maybe we need to stop copying blindly and start deciding what development and progress truly is in our own country.

Lessons at my Granny's knee

I started a series on the people that have been very instrumental in shaping and forming me into the person God planned for me to be.I am a work in progress,but I can definitely look back and see the impact that specific people had on me without even realizing or knowing it.One of such people was my maternal grandmother, or Dada as we called her.

Dada was one tough old lady.Having grown up in one of the remote portions of colonial Ghana, she grew up without formal education and learned to farm and to trade.That was what she did to take care of her family of five children,my mom being the second.My earliest memory of her would be her sitting on her little stool out in the sun weeding( yes weeding!) or cracking nuts or some such thing,and this was no mean feat for someone who was almost 70 years old.She was always doing something.If there ever was a firm believer in hard work.it was my grandmother.No idleness for her!That is one thing I have come to appreciate about her.She knew that there was so much to do and so she didn't believe in wasting time.

Perhaps the one thing I will always remember her for is the fact that she insisted on me learning to speak my mother tongue.I was about five or so and couldn't speak it very well, and she came and said I was going to learn to speak it whether I liked it or not.I am really grateful for that because otherwise I am pretty sure I would be lost if I had to go to my hometown!

Some of the best memories I have are of her telling us stories about growing up in her time and the things they did.She would also tell us all these parables and riddles that set us thinking till we could solve them.She would always give us kids a piece of meat from her bowl because where she grew up that was the culture.One of the most valuable cultural lessons she taught me had to do with honesty.She grew up in a large family, and this was fairly common in those days, so whenever the kids were eating together they had to find a way to split the meat fairly among them.What they would do was pick one person to split the meat into equal pieces and then everyone would take their share, but in order to ensure that the person doing the splitting up did not cheat ,he/she would be the last to pick their piece of meat.Morale of this?Be fair otherwise you get stuck with the smallest piece of meat!That was just one of the many things she taught us and I am grateful to have known and spent time with such a grand old lady.When she died I was devastated, but she was pretty old by then.I was in college at the time and she had already been ill for a while.She would always be complaining about being cooped up and so sick she couldn't do anything.She just hated being idle but I guess she had no choice then.It was tough on her and on all of us to see this feisty lady confined in such a way, but through it all we remembered that it would only be for a short while.

I thank God for her life,( because otherwise I wouldn't have been born)!But seriously, she taught me the importance of respecting your culture and the need for hard work.For that I will always be grateful.I do miss her, especially running to her whenever I got in trouble with my mum or auntie, knowing that she would be there to listen and protect me.It is an honor to be her grand daughter.
(image courtesy: jonathanpritchard.co.uk)