Giving thanks in Ghana

It all started with a spray-painted cardboard sign that said "turkeys," tacked up on the side of a dusty road in Ghana.

Jonathan Morgan and Frank Kelly, American exchange students at the University of Ghana, saw the sign while riding in a tro-tro, a dilapidated minibus, from downtown Accra back to their dormitory in nearby Legon. This simple sign led the two new friends, who hail from North Carolina but first met thousands of miles from home, to create a Thanksgiving feast to remember.

Morgan, a senior majoring in "math, philosophy and truth" at N.C. State University, and Kelly, a senior majoring in marketing at UNC-Asheville, took part in separate exchange programs during the 2004 fall semester. They both landed in Ghana, a West African country bounded to the east by Togo, the west by Ivory Coast, the north by Burkina Faso, and the south by the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean.

Morgan chose Ghana because he "wanted to get out of my element. Ghana served that purpose very well." For Kelly, Ghana presented an opportunity to learn firsthand about a non-Western, developing nation, the different people who live there and the pros and cons of globalization.

Although the country has many beautiful areas, Morgan said, the poverty in and around Accra, Ghana's capital, was initially startling. He described seeing rows of tin roof huts as far as one could see and open sewage lines emptying into the rivers. Despite such conditions, however, he also was struck by how happy the Ghanaian people seemed.

"The Fante proverb 'a good name is better than riches' sums up a lot of that initial Ghanaian hospitality," Kelly said.

According to Morgan, by mid-November, the realities of life in Ghana had started to take a toll on some of the American exchange students. Rather than giving in to the melancholy of being so far from home during Thanksgiving, he and Kelly took a different tack. Remembering the sign from several months earlier, they decided to hunt down a turkey and share Thanksgiving dinner with their new international friends -- Song Mbangtang from Cameroon, Philip Vietheer from Germany, Ben Bruehwiler from Switzerland, and Joedee Appiah and Emmanuel Abbah from Ghana.

"We wanted to share a nice slice of America that doesn't get much PR abroad," Kelly said. "Around the world, folks know American movies, American militancy, American products, but they don't know our most practiced holiday. We also just wanted to make a meal for our friends, enjoy them and maybe remember the people we were missing at that Thanksgiving."

The meal they chose was simple in theory. In addition to the turkey, Morgan wanted to make a broccoli and cheese casserole that his grandmother always makes at Thanksgiving. The novice cooks also decided on white rice, bread and for dessert, pineapples and bananas. In addition, Mbangtang volunteered to cook a spicy tomato-based rice Ghanaian dish called jollof.

That Morgan and Kelly, neither of whom had ever cooked a turkey or any other part of a Thanksgiving dinner, actually pulled this off is a credit to their ingenuity, perseverance, youthful exuberance and no small amount of heart.

Their first obstacle was the matter of scrounging up the necessary ingredients.

Morgan knew from past experience that it was a lost cause to try to find broccoli and cheese in the open markets and stalls where most food is sold. Cheese, which everyone had been craving for months, was an especially rare commodity, he said. So, armed with the casserole recipe received via e-mail from his mother, he headed off to "No. 37," the only Western-style supermarket in the capital.