my really strange job

i work for commonwealth human rights initiative which is an NGO thats based in india. we're part of the africa office, but mostly we just focus on Ghana as far as i can tell. we have two projects on the go. a police accoutnaility project and a right to information project which is what im hellping with. our organisation is trying to get the ghanaian government to pass freedom of information legislation so that anyone can go to the government and ask how their tax money is being spent, how the government power structure works and stuff like that. the legislation will cut down on corruption in the government and make it more transparent. because right now, the government is shrouded in a lot of secrecy and no one really knows what happens behind closed doors. anyway thats not the strange part.

my boss is a very nice, but very strong willed ghanaian lawyer named nana. she does a lot of very good work as far as i can tell and she is kind of a celebrity in ghana. her picture is always on the first few pages of the newspaper and shes always doing tv and radio interviews. anyway she's a pretty big deal here. so on tuesday she told me to wear my suit because we were going to a roundtable discussion with the international finance corporation which is a wing of the world bank. so i thought i was gonna go and sit at some meeting all night and just listen. its turns out however that when we pull up to the place its not a roundtable discussion. its actually a very fancy and outdoor party at the new headquarters of the ifc outside of accra. there was an open bar and speeches and stuff and lots of tv and newspaper people. basically the reaosn i went a long was so that Nana didnt have to talk to any of the finance people. basically the party was for the launch of the IFC's new leasing program in ghana (whatever that means) and i think we were there so they could say that they were engaging the human rights community. or something like that. so i met some very very rich people from all over africa. it was a pretty stark contrast from slummy accra. i thought it was kind of ridiculous because they spent a lot of money on the party which im sure could have been used for better purposes.

the strangest part of the night was the fact that the cameras spent a lot of time on nana, me and her husband who is defending the expresident's wife in court, so hes a bit of a celebrity too. the cameras had a huge floodlight that they followed around to take good pictures. nana said it was because i was white and they probably thought i was a donor. tony, nana's husband said it was probably because of nana. whatever it was, it was very strange because we would just be standing there talking and all of a sudden these massive lights would come on us and stay there for a minute or two. i dont have a tv so i dont know if we made the news.

so thats pretty much the craziest thing thats happened so far. i didnt have much to talk about with the african millionaires so i was a little out of my league. i was pretty happy to get out of there.