A sweet deal

I met Mohammed just after I’d walked through the front gate of my yard yesterday morning. He had a plastic blue container, which resembled my kitchen garbage can, perched on top of his head.

“Want to buy some honey?” he asked. “You can drink it with your tea, better for your health than sugar.”

“How much? I asked.

“40,000 cedis,” he said.

That was about $4.50 – way too much, I knew, but I agreed to pay it (A hopeless negotiator, I’m at a loss without Janet, a master of the art.)

He lifted the top off the container, grabbed an empty water bottle and began scooping out honey and pouring it into the bottle.

I peered into the blue container; it was full of dark, molasses-like liquid and floating chunks of honeycomb.

“Where does this honey come from?” I asked.

“In the north of the country, near the border of Burkina Faso,” he said.

He told me that his family was nomadic and had migrated to Ghana from Niger, a country northwest of Ghana. They herded cattle and goats, he said, and they also made honey. They had transported 400 litres of it by truck to Accra, where they it was sold in markets and on the streets by Mohammed.

There are a lot of small-time sellers like Mohammed in Ghana. People who peddle household products and food to car drivers in traffic jams. People who operate roadside stalls that sell as little as a few vegetables and cans of tomato paste. I always wonder if they sell enough to get by.
“Do you make good money?” I asked Mohammed.

“Small money,” he said, closing his thumb and finger together for emphasis, but enough money, he said, to make it worth the trip. - Mark