First day of work was awesome, except for waking up an hour early after dreaming I was an hour late :-/. I met Evans at the Tro-Tro stop at 6:30. To get an idea of how big these things are, imagine either the Joey, a Jersey City Dollar Van, or the Trader Joes shopping shuttle (depending on where I know you from....and if you don't know what any of those things are imagine a sardine can with wheels) ...shrink that down to 2/3's the size....but then throw in twice the people. Add a potholed filled road and you got one sweaty party before work. In the end i got to work 20 minutes early and got to cool off in the AC (which felt too luxurious).
I met my office mate, Nii (pronounced Knee) before anyone else came in and he invited me to court. We set off at about 8:30 with DD (the most Junior associate and my assignments manager) and Christian and the firm's driver, Tony. Christian took me under his wing right away, grabbing me away from the rest of the group to file a motion with him. The process was kinda crazy. First Cristian pushes through the line and shoves our affidavit through a bank teller type window. Then we got the newly stamped document back and ran (literally) over to the bank to pay the court fees and get another stamp (they love stamps in Ghana). Finally we ran it back the the first office wheeeeeeeeeeeeere...we had to wait for hours to get it photo copied...to spare me that boredom.
I was sent to meet up with Nii who was about to argue for a hearing. In case you haven't heard, Ghana is pretty prone to power outtages. Today just happened to be one of those days and the courts lost power. Nii and I ran up and down the stairs peeking our heads in different court rooms, but none of the judges were sitting. After a couple of hours of this business I met back up with Christian to try to get the documents in order. Long story short, the Ghanaian court system is as big of a bureaucracy as the American court system!
Eventually I was driven back to the office where I was advised to research any book I wanted in the entire legal library until Christian and DiDi got back :-/ I decided on the Ghanaian rules of civil procedure. This turned out to be helpful a couple hours later when I was assigned by DiDi to draft a memo related to a court pleading. Overall I'm excited about the firm. There are lots of things that interest me including landlord tenant, human rights and family law. There are also things not so "public interest" that i'll be assigned too, but I'll try to keep that (although much appreciated) to a minimum so I can stay true to the purpose of my fellowship. Phew, time for bed to do it all again tomorrow! Promise I'll get a few pics up by the end of the week.
No comments:
Post a Comment