Here I am, facing a very difficult task. I’ve been asked to write a short story about my Aiesec experience to give other people an impression of what an Aiesec traineeship can be like.

 

Let me start with the easy part by introducing myself. My name is Patrick Just de la Paisières, I have the Dutch nationality and last year I obtained my Masters degree in Business Strategy at the University of Nijmegen, Holland. Since I wanted to experience life in a completely different setting I chose to go for a traineeship with Aiesec. After a few weeks of looking for an interesting traineeship, I decided to go to Accra, Ghana to work in a consultancy firm for eight months.

 

Now there’s the tough part. What do I want to tell about my traineeship in the very limited space available to me? So much happened in such a short period… Therefore I think the best thing is to give an overall impression. An average week could look like this: from Monday ‘till Friday I was working in the office to write reports, attend meetings and discuss a variety of things with my foreign colleagues.

 

Furthermore, every few days I went to some (potential) clients all over town to discuss our consultancy and training services. In the evenings after work I sometimes went to see the other Aiesec trainees, or I went to restaurants to eat and enjoy the environment and the evening temperature. In the weekends we often travelled outside Accra to learn more about Ghana. Sometimes we went to tropical beaches, sometimes we visited old forts, and sometimes we visited other Aiesec trainees who were located outside Accra. When we stayed in Accra, we went to clubs and bars where we even met more interesting foreigners and Ghanaians. 

 

Every two months or so, those ‘average’ weeks were replaced by ‘travel’ weeks; in those weeks me and some colleagues had to travel to some of our clients outside Accra to provide training programs. This often happened at gold mines located in the middle of the Ghanaian rain forest since they were some of our most important clients. Those weeks were amongst the best of my traineeship since they allowed me to see a lot of Ghana and to see things the average tourist won’t ever see.

 

Of course now I only gave a very limited impression of the everyday life I experienced in Ghana. However, the best thing about my traineeship was that the everyday life wasn’t that ‘everyday’ after all; any moment at any day it was possible to see and/ or experience strange things! Let me just give you a very few examples.

 

In my third week in Ghana we all left the office at some Wednesday morning to watch a full solar eclipse. Seeing a full solar eclipse on a cloudless sky already is the most beautiful thing one can possibly see, but combined with all the confused bats leaving the trees at 9am because they believe it is night again, hearing a lot of people praying to God in the distance since they believe the eclipse is a sign of the devil arriving and with all your colleagues around you shouting in an ecstatic state makes it even more memorable!

 

Ghana also has some wild parks; Mole is probably the most famous one of them. Of course I also went there. In this wild park there are some hotels which enable tourists to stay in the park overnight. On one morning one of my travel companions called me to come outside. After getting awake I hurried outside to see what all the fuzz was about. Then I saw something I didn’t quite expect. A wild African Elephant was eating from the trees in the middle of our hotel garden!

 

I hope the above three examples give you a bit of an impression of all the strange things I encountered in Ghana. Since the space is limited, I didn’t even tell about experiencing the World Cup football in Ghana, about the electricity rotation system which caused us to stay in the dark for twelve hours in a row every three days, about the friends I made from all over the world, about the rat which fell into our soup from the window located in the kitchen, about the long journeys on very bumpy ‘roads’ in the middle of nowhere which could easily take 15+ hours, about the tours I’ve made through the cocoa farm and the gold mine etcetera, etcetera.

 

I guess I have made my point. Going on a traineeship with Aiesec is a life changing experience! Not only you do see a lot of strange things, you do meet a lot of people from all over the world, you do learn a lot about your own country thanks to all the conversations with foreigners, you do learn to speak foreign languages fluently, you do get an interesting and valuable working experience in a totally different culture, and you are guided by a professional organisation which helps you settling down in a strange environment. It is a lot of fun too!

 

Patrick Just de la Paisières.