Interview with Mabel in Ghana

While I spend my 6 weeks in Ghana, I saw some things I would never see back at home. For instance, one day when I was playing with 'my' kids under a three, a snake appeared! I was very affraid but luck was on my side, because Mabel was with us. Mabel is a girl who lives in the community of the Children's Home I did my voluntary work. She killed the snake en laughed the incident away. Snakes appear often in Ghana. After this snake day, I started to think about Mabel. I didn't know her very good before, but even though she saved me from the snake.

Because of the snake experience, I started to think how I could use this in my interview for Worldsupporter. After a few days of thinking I knew what subject my interview would have. I would talk with Mabel about friendship. I chose this subject because I realized that friendship is something you share with people. It doesn't matter in which environment you are brought up or wheter or not you went to school. So, after a while, I interviewed Mabel about the subject friendship. Mabel is also 17 years and lives in Tongo, Ghana. She attends Senior High School right now and wants to be a nurse when she grows up. When I asked her why she wanted to be a nurse, she answered: "I want to save people's lives, but I know I can never become a doctor. That's why I will become a nurse."

I asked Mabel how she thinks friendship builds. I asked her this, because whe became friends even though we come from diffrent sides of the world and diffrent cultures. But I can be somewhere for a month with somebody who is from my country and is brought up in the same culture, but we might notbecome friends. How does she think people get friends?

Mabel answered that she thinks people become friends because people open up to each other. She said that she became my friend because I was so generous to her from the first minute I got there.

I asked her if she believes that friendship is a sort of chemistry; people don't choose their friends but because of chemistry, people are drawn into each other. I think this was a hard question for her, because she didn't really answer this question.

I also asked Mabel if she thinks she would have been my friend if I would not have been so open to her. She answered that she thinks she wouldn't. In her opinion, people who are quiet and introvert don't get a lot of friends. I replied on this that they might get friends who are like them. She agreed on this but still laughed a bit. I thought this was something which really identifies the Ghanaian culture. Ghanaian people talk to everybody and they don't like it if you don't share everything with everybody.

Overall, I think my interview was a very unique experience. I'm happy about the subject I chose because it is a subject that everybody in the whole world knows. Everybody can relate. I can say that I made a real friend, even though we are not Facebook friends. It was not only a conversation between two girls in a community in Ghana. It was a conversation between two cultures. The fact that we could talk so open with each other without judging was something the world can learn from, I think. Not only the interview but the whole experience of living in a totally different culture. I have learned so much from people who have another way of thinking about the world. My hostfather for instance had such a different way of solving problems, that I feel very rich now. And that's what I believe very stong: being able to see that your way of doing things, even though you live in Europe or another wealthy part of the world, is not always the best.

I tried to attach the video of my interview with Mabel, but the sound is so bad (the wind was blowing very hard) that I have chosen to only apply a picture of us.