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Although he had taken local flights within Ghana and travelled by road to Abidjan with his father, the trip to Congo-Brazzaville was his first experience of international air travel.
Founder of A&C Mall, Dr. Andrew Asamoah has recalled that had never travelled outside Ghana by air before boarding a plane to begin his career with the World Health Organization,
The journey from Kumasi to Congo-Brazzaville would become the first chapter of a career that took him onto the global stage.
“I had never travelled before,” he told Kafui Dey. “It was my first international flight.”
Although he had taken local flights within Ghana and travelled by road to Abidjan with his father, the trip to Congo-Brazzaville was his first experience of international air travel.
Arriving in the Central African nation came with an immediate culture shock.
“We reached there and everybody was speaking French.”
Fortunately, the multilingual environment inside the WHO regional office made settling in much easier.
“You have people from every part of the world… friends from China, from everywhere. So it was okay.”
Dr. Asamoah said the office was unlike anything he had experienced before, bringing together professionals from different nationalities under one roof.
He also recalled that he and a few others were among the first Black international staff members assigned to the regional office, aside from local Congolese employees.
“We were the first Black international staff to go there. It was very interesting meeting different people.”
Wherever he went, however, one topic almost always came up—Ghana’s first President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
People often assumed that, as a Ghanaian, he would know everything about the country’s founding leader.
“Nkrumah! They expected you to know him. They would ask, ‘Why did you people get rid of him?’”
The experience, he said, taught him the importance of understanding his country’s history before representing it abroad.
“You have to know your history before you go to places like this. They’ll ask you all the time.”
Looking back, the boy from Kumasi who boarded his first international flight with uncertainty says that journey opened the door to a lifetime of global experience and lifelong lessons.
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