Features
My journey through childlessness …Rev. Ama Abedi shares story
Pastor Mrs Nana Ama Abedi
For the first five years of marriage, Rev. Mrs Berlinda Nana Ama Abedi and her husband battled infertility and stigmatisation.
“I had five miscarriages and the last was a set of twins after carrying them for five months.
The previous pregnancies lasted three months each. It was a terrible moment in our lives. The last actually broke my husband,” she said with tears in her eyes.
In an interview with The Spectator last Wednesday, Rev. Abedi disclosed that even though she went through difficult moments, she remained optimistic that one day the story will change for the better because of assurances from specialist doctors that they were medically fit to have children.
“God is an amazing God. I don’t know how he did it but the next five years he restored us. He blessed us with three children and wiped away all our tears,” she said smiling.
Rev. Abedi said she feels well positioned to advise people who are battling infertility and stigmatisation ‘because I think I have seen it all,’ she said.
She said she was convinced that God made her go through those ‘difficult times’ because He had an assignment for her in that delicate area of people’s lives.
She said at the time she battled infertility, she was not a Rev. but now, both she and her husband are Rev.s.
“Imagine that I was in charge of the Children’s Ministry but didn’t have my own children. Sometimes people looked at me in a certain way and I could understand what they were saying but I did not react no matter how much it hurt me. A children’s teacher who didn’t have children. Indeed, it was a difficult situation,” she disclosed.
She recalled how she nearly got into a fight with a Rev. from another church because he told her that she was unable to have children because of her name Berlinda and so she needed to come for deliverance at his church.
“Berlinda as I know means beautiful lady and so his comments really baffled me,” she said.
“I told him that I had been praying and God had not told me anything contrary so I couldn’t take his words seriously. I didn’t want to disrespect a man of God but I felt I had been pushed too far.”
“Thankfully, he travelled out of the country almost immediately and when he returned after a year, I had become a mother. I felt God had wiped away my shame,” she stated.
Rev. Abedi cautioned couples who were going through such difficulties to be careful to prevent people from taking advantage of them.
“They can even tell from your looks and conversations that you have become vulnerable and so they will package anything as a solution for you. If you are not careful, in trying to solve one problem, you would end up adding more problems to your life, “she admonished.
According to her, she had to deal with insensitive comments from people and it was worse when it came from the church which was supposed to be a place of consolation.
“I remember there was a lady who always had one medication or the other for me every Sunday. I tried to avoid her because it was taking a toll on my mental health but she might have observed it and so would always be waiting for me at the main entrance of the church.”
“It was so depressing that I nearly left the church. The development has an interesting way of making you lose your strength to fight back even when you are overly provoked,” she disclosed.
She, however, acknowledged that there were some members of the church who were genuinely concerned and so would encourage more prayers.
“In fact, there were others who never discussed the issue with me but when I became a mother, I found out later that they were seriously interceding on my behalf and I thank them so much. I think this is what people should do and not be confrontational with childless couples as if they had committed an offence and under interrogation,” she prescribed.
Rev. Abedi who is also a journalist said losing a pregnancy was something that no one should even wish for an enemy because aside the psychological and emotional torture, the physical process to take out the foetus was a pain ‘that was out of the world.’
Recounting some difficult moments, she noted that there was the need for people to be sympathetic to childless couples to prevent unpleasant comments to break them.
She observed a practice where people gave their babies to childless couples to carry at gatherings, claiming that if they carry them they would soon have theirs.
Rev. Abedi who has been married for over 16 years now said countless times she had heard people say their intentions were good with no malice intended but which she found unfortunate.
She said it was worrying to see people who married years after she did conceive and have children almost the same year of marriage.
She commended her parents and mother-in-law who she said stood firmly by them during the period by constantly speaking words of encouragement such as ‘God’s time is the best’ among others to her and the husband and also prayed for them.
Rev. Abedi advised all persons who were trying to conceive to avoid people whose comments made them feel bad.
From Dzifa Tetteh Tay, Tema
Features
The Tema palaver
There is a legend about what Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah wanted Tema to be like.
According to the prophets of the pre-coup era and those who claimed to have known the Osagyefo’s plans, Tema was being gradually developed to become a model city, a workers’ paradise, not a Chinatown.
Today if you see the Meridian Hotel, you’ll think it has just suffered from a bomb attack. Kokotako recently told me he was sure the once elegant hotel was suffering from a virus infection.
Tema, it has been said, was meant to be a thoroughly planned heavenly-city under a presidential blueprint to be eventually decorated with two border posts. You couldn’t enter using bush paths and grasscutter routes. No rat-catching gimmicks!
According to the sages of those times, non-residents of the city on a visit would have been required to go through a bureaucratic and medical procedure.
First you’ll have to produce your passport cum visa, or a travelling certificate, lassez de passe or carte identite (identity card). Your forehead would have to be examined by an expert to make sure you are not a magician. No magical shows in the city. No Kofi Larteh!
You’ll also be required to produce a medical certificate to prove that you’ve been vaccinated against yellow fever, typhoid and poverty. You don’t come to the city to become a beggar. No way!
In a nutshell, the city was meant to become the model city of West Africa, the Vatican of Sikaman; a state within a state, a wonderland of no mean accolade.
The 1966 coup was a national tragedy although Ghanaians hailed the coup. To the Osagyefo, it was a personal tragedy. His dreams of a glorious harbour city, for instance, with its night-time glow and daytime glitter were washed away as the sub-machine guns rattled the signal of the advent of Ghana’s woes.
Nkrumah probably lamented the coup for one main reason that Tema would never be what he visualised it to become. Some people say the tears he shed were laden with an anathema, a bit of which has probably been visited upon Tema.
Yes, visit Tema and you’ll see vestiges of the old plan, now adulterated and totally confused with gross lack of maintenance, irregular development, over-flowing manholes, dark streets at night, beggars, and people who would have been denied access to the comforts of the city, had the Osagyefo been alive.
Tema is no longer for workers. It is now a free-for all, a boiling pot of all ethnic groups like fufu-eating Ashantis, butter-smearing Fantes, akple-eating Ewes, kontomire-swallowing Akwapims, khebab-roasting northerners and Brong self-imposed exiles who would eat nothing apart from unripe plantain. Very delicious, you know.
The shoe-shine boys are in their hundreds and wayside chop bars especially at night are common feature. You’ll be glad to meet an ex-seaman at a drinking bar talking about the good old days when Black Starline was indeed a national line. You’ll notice a retired seaman by his swag for the unmistakable seaman trademark in the gait.
Tema of today is famous for its brand of Pidgin English. It is next to the Nigerian version which is acknowledged by linguistic experts as the cremé of pidgin. Not good for SSS students, though.
The city is also famous for its high cost of living. Those who come from Accra and Kumasi to live there often pack bag and baggage after a few months and run away without anybody chasing them. Sometimes they leave their jackets behind. Life is no joke.
If you can, however, stay in Tema for over five years without suffering from financial constipation, then you are qualified and baptised to live in the ‘hard’ cities of the world including Hanoi, and Bombay. As for Mogadishu, I doubt it. Sometimes you have breakfast once in two weeks and that’s not a cheap situation. You’ve got to bow.
Surprisingly those who live in Tema and have got used to the rough weather don’t want to live anywhere else. They love the city, the breeze, the pidgin.
Today, the new SSNIT flats are giving the city a new class just as fast as the deteriorating conditions of the Tema Development Corporation (TDC)-owned houses are de-beautifying the city. No maintenance whatsoever and the corporation is beset with problems and matters that need redress.
At this very moment, the Tema Tenants Association (TTA) and TDC are at each other’s throat, in a dangerous horseplay that can degenerate into something else. The corporation intends to sell its rented units, meaning that if you can’t buy the house you’re living in, then you’ve got to quit and probably go to your hometown for good.
So whether you are a rich business tycoon or a mandated church mouse, you have to, within three months from now, make ready over three million cedis for the place you are occupying.
There is, however, an alternative. Poor tenants who can’t afford the outrageous prices will from October 1 pay 300 per cent on rent. A single room will now cost 7,000 cedis per month.
Members of the tenants’ association who are ready to take to the streets in protest have accused TDC of having woefully failed as a landlord because it has not maintained buildings it is supposed to maintain.
Some of the buildings are in a real mess.
The association has called for a commission of enquiry to investigate the matter to ensure that propriety and neglect no longer become good bedfellows and also to enable the poor worker and his family to have a place to lay their heads without being intimidated with outright sales and high rents.
The Tema Development Corporation (TDC) itself has a lot of things happening in there, the public would be very much interested in knowing. Many things in fact.
I’ll revisit the issue sooner than you’d expect. Watch out for the bombshell!
This article was published on
Saturday, August 6, 1994
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Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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