Citizens of the World: A Stoic Podcast for Curious Travelers - Ghana: Must-Have Travel Experiences

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Today I’m continuing my conversation with Dr. Chocolate Kristy Leissle. an American who now lives in South Africa.Kristy, author of  Cocoa and co-founder of the Cocoapreneurship Institute of Ghana, spent four years living in that country. In this episode, she shares why this part of Africa is so special to her and what we should see and do when we visit Ghana on our travels. sarahmikutel.com❤️Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free Conversation Cheat Sheet with simple formulas you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you’re in a meeting or just talking with friends.Download it at sarahmikutel.com/blanknomore and start feeling more confident in your conversations today.

Welcome to Live Without Borders, a travel and wellness show for expats, the expat curious, and globally minded citizens of the world. We are the travelers, the culturally curious, the experiences and not things kind of people. And we know that freedom is about more than getting on a plane. It's about becoming the most heroic versions of ourselves, which is why on this podcast you will hear insider travel secrets, inspiring expat stories and advice on how to live abroad. but you will also hear episodes that will help give you the clarity, focus, and skills you need to create a life that will set your soul on fire. I am your host, Sarah Micatel, a certified clarity coach trained in the Enneagram, and I first moved abroad on my own at age 18, and I have been permanently enjoying life in Europe since 2010. If you are ready to make some big moves in your life

and want my help moving from someday to seize the day, visit live without borderspodcast.com. Today I am continuing my conversation with Dr. Chocolate, Christy Leslie, an American who now lives in South Africa. Christy is the author of Coco and co-founder of the Cocopreneurship Institute of Ghana, and she spent four years living in that country. In this episode, she shares why this part of Africa is so special to her and what we should see and do when we go to Ghana on our travels. Enjoy. You spent about four years in Ghana. Why did you choose to make that your home for several years? Wow, it's, oh gosh, I love it so much. I love West Africa. And my first experience, after that first trip through Southern Africa, where I was a traveler only, I went from Cape Town to, I went from Cape Town to Nairobi. That was my first trip, but it was just travel. Not just travel. I shouldn't say just because travel is important and meaningful and we can learn many things. When I came back to live here, though, my first experience living in Africa full time was in West Africa. Africa in Benin, in fact. And I just felt like I, at first I didn't comprehend the world, but I started myself on

that journey of wanting to comprehend this different place and wanting to immerse myself so much that I, that became a second home for me, an environment where I felt like I could move like fluently, you know, in my every day. And, and I probably wouldn't have expressed it like that at a time, but I know that's what I felt. I wanted to make a life for myself that was different to the life I'd known growing up. And so when it was time in my, my graduate career, to choose a place to conduct my, my field work, my research, and show. And, shape, you know, my dissertation, West Africa was for me the first choice always. And so Ghana, you know, I study cocoa and chocolate and Ghana is the world's second largest cocoa producing

country. And it was the obvious choice for me from an intellectual perspective, from a fieldwork perspective, it just also was an emotionally, you know, good choice for me because I loved that part of the world. What do you love most about it? Ghana is in my experience unique, you know, and I know that maybe people might say this about other places too, but it's, it is so welcoming. I felt from day one like I, to say I belonged would not be correct. I won't, I won't say that, but I always felt that there were people looking after me and who had care and concern about me. And that's not something I've experienced in other places. Like when I went, I'll just give you a contrast example.

Maybe that will help illustrate better. When I was doing my doctoral field work, I was six months in Ghana. And the next phase was to research in London. And I had lived in the UK for two years, you know, before that. So I had many friends there. I had a kind of network that I could plug into. And going from Ghana to London, I felt, completely anonymous. I felt like, and don't get me wrong, I love London. I would not, I just,

I felt like I did not matter. And in Ghana, I felt like not just I mattered, but everything mattered. You know, there's, there's no superficiality there. Everything is kind of stripped down and feels very human to me, like very connected on a human level. I think a lot of that has, you know, comes from the fact that people are often struggling to meet their basic needs. And so you don't really, there's not a lot of extra energy, you know, for superficiality. But yeah, it just feels like a place of connection to me. And it felt like I could learn about myself through these relationships with other people and through my relationship with this context that was totally different.

from what I had grown up. It's like I grew up mostly on Long Island. And to move to a rural, you know, agricultural setting where the primary, you know, livelihood is farming cocoa, I had to interact with my world in very different ways. And that was a, a profound connection that I forged with my environment and with myself. So you were in a rural area. So how did you get to meet people and what did you do with your time when you weren't working. Different things. You know, I kept an apartment in Kumasi, which is the second largest city in Ghana, I'll tie the capital of Accra. And it's in the, it's the capital of the Ashanti region. And in many ways, it's the heart of Coco territory. So, you know, Coco was grown on a large scale

in Ashanti region, you know, like 100 years ago. So, but it's just, it's still a city. And so, you know, the way I kind of forged my path was, and I felt fortunate because I understood urban environment. You know, I understood how to connect with people there. I understood, okay, you might go to this cafe because it's a central meeting place and people are social there. And then you meet one person and that leads to another connection and leads to another connection. And that's literally how I did it. It was like, I suppose the snowball method of like you meet one person. and then you, you know, they lead you to someone else and they lead you to someone else.

And it was really from kind of having grown up in a more urban space, being able to identify, okay, here's where I'm likely to find the people that I need to meet. And, you know, obviously I also reached out directly to the organizations that I wanted to work with. But in my experience, the former method was the more successful one. So yeah, I had a kind of very nice life in Kumasi. I had my apartment. I had friends. You know, I eventually got a roommate, you know, and, you know, we had a ball.

We were all sort of, what I would say now, young people, like learning our professional potential and having fun and go out to dinner. We do, you know, just do normal things. And then my field work time was in the bush, and I would go for days or weeks and maybe stay in a guest house or maybe stay in someone's home. And it was very quiet. You know, life is dictated by the sun, basically. You know, you're up when the sun rises and after it goes down, there's not so much to do. And those were very, very precious times because it was a time of quiet reflection and comprehending or trying to comprehend what I'd seen or witness that day.

in the field. And I credit, you know, so much of my learning about my industry to that time when I was kind of in this enforced period of just contemplation and observation. I mean, that's what fieldwork is, really. What would you say your most important learnings were from that experience? From my field work, you know, probably my most, among my most, important learnings were that I was as different as the experiences that other people have. And, you know, I'm talking about cocoa farmers who I was interviewing and doing participant observation with, you know, as different as our day-to-day experiences were in our growing up contexts where we also had commonalities, you know, it's like I think there's a danger in research

in a different place, not your own, or maybe any place, of kind of going in and not maybe taking the time to immerse enough to have something beyond an introductory view, maybe if I can put it that way. And I'm grateful that I had an anthropologist on my doctoral committee who, you know, encouraged me to use this ethnographic approach where it really requires immersion. And yeah, I think learning that we're all people, we're all the same, even though the way this person gets their water and their food and meets their basic needs was like totally different to me. We are both still people and I found that I could have conversations about things, especially

with women. We would talk, I know, I talk with some of the women, Cocoa Farmers, about like preparing meals and how do you get food on the table, whether for yourself or others, like these kind of domestic responsibilities that we all shared. And we could understand each other. You know, so it wasn't just like going and find out all about cocoa farming. You know, it was like discovering that there were things we shared. And I'll say the opposite thing too.

The other really meaningful thing was that I understood difference. I understood that I will never understand this other person's experience because our contexts were so different. And that was equally important for me as a learning to begin to recognize that I didn't know what I didn't know and that I'd probably never find out. So shared experiences but also experiences that would be impossible to share. I think would be the best way I can describe it. What is the postcard for people who aren't familiar with Ghana? What did it look like this place where you were living? Well, Accrol, you know, looked like a city.

Because that was where I was living most recently. Kumasi looks like a city. The rural areas look both beautiful and materially poor. Like, it's equally both because you will not find paved roads. you will not find electricity, you will not find running water or plumbing, you know. So there's no escaping the material poverty and the infrastructural challenges. We might put some label on that third world country, developing country, whatever, but that's the fact. Then there is also like just incredible tranquility and moments of like stunning

beauty. You know, it's like when I would go into the bush in the height of the cocoa season, and I would travel a long way, and I would travel on horrible roads, and it was quite uncomfortable from a physical standpoint, and then I would arrive, and the scene would open up of like, sometimes dozens of men and women sitting around, like, cracking open cocoa pods. It's like you feel like, you know, you've stumbled upon a, uh, treasure, you know, it's, it's just incredibly beautiful. And, um, people work together and there's fun and levity and laughter. And, you know, for me as a chocolate lover my whole life, being able to like, witness the origin of this thing, for me, a lot of meaningful beauty.

Very green, it's very green Ghana. It's very green. Ghana. It's very, it's very, green, quite lush, and uncomfortable, but lush. And so once you make the journey on the terrible roads, you are rewarded with images that I certainly would never have encountered growing up. So you mentioned that, you know, it's very hard conditions, people who are farming cocoa. But I'm wondering, so would cocoa like tourism exist or would that be like too rough? Okay. No, absolutely. It does. And it and it is rough and it well it can it can be rough or less rough depending on where you go. But absolutely like and it is probably the the thing that people are most enthusiastic about in Ghana on the cocoa side is is establishing ecotourism and bringing

inviting outsiders into the world of cocoa. And so there's every opportunity to go to Ghana and like immerse yourself in that environment. And you can choose from lots of different levels of immersion. So, you know, on a kind of you have a day, you have an afternoon free, you go on a farm tour, you know, and there's lots of different people who offer that. Do you have any recommendations? Yeah, absolutely. So like Ohene Coco, which is run by a man called Nana Aduna the Second.

He's a chief with land holdings in the eastern region. His company runs farm tours, beautiful, beautiful environment. I mean, just magical farm, you know, where multiple farms actually, where you could go for a day and get there and back from a craw quite easily within an hour or two. and just have that experience of being on like just a gorgeous farm where there's so many things that, you know, beyond cocoa. And then you've got more immersive experiences that require more time. So a Bokva, which is a cooperative also in the eastern region that I've worked with extensively. They do farm immersions where you go and live for a week and you eat local food and you sleep in local accommodation. and you just immerse.

And the whole point of that is to see things as best you can from the perspective of a farmer. And so there's like and everything in between too. You know, Three Mountains, Coco, also in the eastern region, quite a bit more distance from a cross. So you couldn't come and go in a day. Also offers like any, any level of immersion that you would want. But because it is farther away from the capital, you kind of have to dedicate time to it. So, yeah, I mean, just, oh, many possibilities. Those would probably be my top three recommendations.

Okay. If somebody visited you, what would you take them to see? Oh, everybody visited me over the four years that I lived there. So that's an easy question to answer. So there's, like, really varied things, and I'm not at all equating these things because they're, like, different sort of types of things to do. But in, like, the restaurants and the final. dining in a car is out of this world. I mean, there's, I miss some of the restaurants too.

I live in Johannesburg now where I have every, every kind of cuisine you could imagine. So lovely, lovely, lovely restaurants where you can go and have like a wonderful dining experience and, and enjoy like a cultural, like, food that you might not get at home. There's like the Indian food is amazing. The Lebanese food is amazing. You know, there's Ghanaian food amazing. Like so many Italian, like so many different cuisines on offer. So there's like that kind of thing where you go to Accra.

And every time someone came, I would start with a list of my favorite restaurants here. Go eat here. What is Ghanaian food like? So it's typically like a starchy meal base, most often Fufu, which is made from, it could be plantain, it could be cocoa yam, it could be yam, cassava, and you essentially boil it and then pound it in a mortar and pestle so that it gets very, very dense. And that will be the basis of the meal. And then you add to the foo, which is quite bland, doesn't have a lot of

flavor on its own. It's more like the filling starch component, the carbohydrate. You add a soup or a stew to that, which could be, it could be ground nut, it could be palm oil soup, it could have some meat in it or some fish and then like the greens based ones like contamere like made from the um the cassava leaf you know like different like leafy based soups and stews so and that's just the beginning i mean there's all different kinds of like a starch that's been wrapped in a leaf to ferment it all all different variations but usually a starch there's also So Jolliffe rice, which is probably maybe the most popular after foo-foo, like a kind of tomatoy, spicy rice that's served with chicken.

Delicious. What would I bring people to do? So, you know, I would always start with like go off to eat in a craw and have an amazing experience. And then Cocoa Farm Tours would be another big thing I would bring people to do. So you can, you need a little bit of organization for that, but you know, can definitely go and have a farm experience, the ones I mentioned before, or just the best way to do it is kind of like, who do I know there? Or do I have a friend of a friend, you know, and you just send the email or call. And eventually, probably not after very long, you will get to someone who is involved with Coco.

You know, you just don't have to go very far to find someone who can facilitate a farm tour. So that's always nice. and, you know, the, the, and this is what I mean when I say, you know, I would never equate these things as kind of visitor experiences, but the most profound thing to do really on many levels is to visit the slave castles in Cape Coast, you know, so there's Almena Castle and there's Cape Coast Castle. And I've been to one or both, I think, a total of three or four times. And it's, often I would send visitors there on their own. I wouldn't go with them because it is a harrowing experience. experience, you know, but one that I feel, you know, very strongly, anyone who comes to West Africa must have. And really bringing you in, in a visceral way, into the environment and experience of the, essentially, the trade in human beings. and the moment where slaves, many millions of them, were leaving their homeland for the last time. And so that is very difficult, emotionally, mentally, psychologically, it's a very, very, very hard thing to do.

But I think anyone who traveled to West Africa would be remiss if they didn't do it. It's a part of our history and confronting that history, I think, is very important. Yeah, I think bearing witness is something that we should all, what's like our duty. I believe so. We're all bound to it, even if it didn't happen during our lifetime. And it's a necessity, I think. I mean, and then a different thing, which, again, I'll really, I can't say this enough, but it's like, I'm not equating these things. I'm not like making a laundry list of tourist activities and saying they're all similar, but you have to go to the markets, you know.

And so every Saturday in a crowd, there will be multiple markets, crafts, food, produce, you know, like the most incredible fashion. You know, it's like I had a fashion designer that I love to shop with and got his name is Larry J. And, you know, just incredible hot couture, like, and everyday items that, you know, you just are magical in that, you know, they just capture the essence of West African culture in ways that, you know, very few other things do. So, yeah, definitely hit up the markets. There's a great market on Saturdays at the Du Bois Center, W.V. Du Bois, who died in Ghana. He, emigrated and lived out his final days in Accra.

It's now a cultural center where they have a wonderful Saturday market and there's others as well. Ah, these are all great ideas. Well, thank you so much for making the time. Where can people find out more about you? I'm always at Doc of Chalk, D-O-C-O-F-C-H-O-C, short for Doc of Chocolate. Yeah, so Doc of Chalk, on Instagram and my website, doc, jococcom.

And, yeah, different conferences. I'm usually around during the conference sort of season, which is generally this time of year, we're a little bit earlier. Great. Well, thank you again. This was a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much.

This is just fantastic. We really, really enjoyed it. And really grateful for your thought-provoking questions. So thank you. That's all for now. Go ahead and follow the show or hit subscribe so you can hear more episodes like this. And if you would like my help taking bold action on your own dreams, like living abroad, changing careers and other life transitions, visit live without borderspodcast.com. Thanks for listening and have a beautiful week wherever you are.

Do you ever go blank or start rambling when someone puts you on the spot? I created a free conversation sheet sheet with simple formulas that you can use so you can respond with clarity, whether you're in a meeting or just talking with friends. Download it at sarahmicatel.com slash blank no more.