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Keeping in touch while living in Ghana

Last activity 25 October 2017 by Rod Darby

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Priscilla

Hello everyone,

What are the best ways you've found for keeping in touch with friends and family back home while living in Ghana? How frequently do you stay in touch with loved ones?

Are there local equivalents to common instant messaging and online video calling services that you prefer or are more widely used?

If there is a sizeable time difference, how do you manage this?

Do you make international phone calls from a landline or mobile phone from Ghana? What do you think of the cost?

Thank you for sharing your experience.

Priscilla

hkann

Ghana works on Greenwich Mean Time so from November to March the time is the same.
The major cities have reasonable internet services which make contacting family and friends easy.
International calls from mobiles is very cheap so very easy to stay in contact

Rod Darby

Hey Priscilla,

yes indeed, I've been having to deal with this during my long visits since 2013.

For business (I'm a freelance DE>EN translator) I use email and phone calls from my Ghana mobile. Calls to European (landline) numbers are incredibly cheap from Ghana.

I don't have a big problem with the time difference, my customers in Germany are on CET/CEST, i.e. GMT +1 or GMT +2 during the European summer. (GMT = Ghana Maybe Time.)

Privately speaking, I personally detest Skype, but WhatsApp is really good, because a) it's more or less instant b) you can exchange photos and c) you can send voice recordings (if you like that kind of thing).
(I must have an internet connection at all times anyway for my business.)

Apart from that, I'm on Facebook for more general stuff with my family and friends, and email for a handful of friends who believe Facebook is the Work of the Devil. If there's anything urgent there's the phone of course.

I guess you could say keeping in touch is the least of my problems in Ghana, dum so dum so the biggest.

Rod (ye fere me Kweku) Darby

Rod Darby

hkann - "the time is the same" - er, you're kidding

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