I’ve finished my Ghana writeup, and you get privileged first showing. Let me know your comments, whether spelling mistakes, factual errors, or your thoughts and feelings about it.

Special bonus bit that didn’t fit in anywhere on the page, another exclusive to this blog:

In Ghana, we were a bit puzzled because whenever we introduced ourselves everyone would stumble over Stu-art and Gray-ham’s names, but when I said I was called Francis this was very exciting to them. Quite a few of our taxi drivers were called Francis as well, and it turns out to be a very popular name in Ghana.

The reason they know Francis as a name is because it is a Christian name, named after a saint. Stuart and Graham are both Scottish, and hence unknown and unpronounceable to them. The irony was that out of the three of us, it was the non-Christian who had the Christian name!

The phrase “Christian name” probably used to mean the same thing in the UK, but it has since lost that meaning and now just means “first name”. In Ghana people would sometimes have a local name and a separate Christian name, which they changed to upon conversion.