A  Memoir. From Bekwai, Ghana to America

A Journey of Faith, Dreams, and Unshakable Determination

PROF. AKWASI AFRIYIE ACHAMPONG

In the autumn of 1984, a young man stands in a ticket office in Accra with forty dollars in his pocket, a visa about to expire, and three weeks to cross an ocean.

The fare to London has climbed from six thousand cedis to thirty thousand to ninety thousand, a number that rises faster than he can chase it in an economy unraveling by the hour. He is not a wealthy man’s son.

His mother is a petty trader; his father is a world away in New York; every letter he writes begging for help returns the same answer: We are sorry. We cannot.

This is where From Bekwai, Ghana to America opens, not in triumph, but with a boy at the edge of the widest water he has ever tried to cross, empty-handed and running out of time.

From that suspended moment, the memoir turns back to the red-dirt town of Bekwai, where the author was raised by his grandmother, Akua Afriyie, the woman who took a small boy by the hand and walked him two miles to the farm before sunrise and, in his words, “taught me how to cross an ocean.”

These early chapters are the beating heart of the book: a childhood of discipline and tenderness measured in water barrels and pounded fufu, in letters traced in the sand because the family could not yet afford a slate, in Wednesday-night prayers at the church that caught him.

Poverty is never romanticized here, but neither is it the whole story. What the boy inherits instead is the conviction that would define his life: that work is worship, and that help, when it comes, arrives through people.

And those people fill the pages. There is the hunter who stops grandmother and grandson on a dark forest road before dawn and turns them back from danger.

There is the journey to the coastal city of Tema, undertaken with nothing but a relative’s name and no address, and the factory security guard who, rather than send two weary strangers into the night, makes call after call until he has found them a bed.

There, too, the boy sees the Atlantic for the first time and mistakes it for a river, not yet knowing that the same water stands between him and his father.

Three older brothers take him in and teach him to survive; a market woman named Akosua gives him honest work when the world has already written him off as just another village boy.

Woven through it all is a single quiet act. At two o’clock in the morning on August 15, 1981, the young man wakes with a vision so vivid that he writes it down in a notebook, obeying the prophet’s charge to “write the vision, and make it plain.”

He will go to America. He will be educated. He will help others. He will honor the God who gave him the dream. That written page becomes a covenant with his own future, the one he returns to a hundred times as the ticket price climbs and every door swings shut.

Then comes the miracle, precisely when he has reached the end of himself. A letter mailed in desperation to a family friend in Germany is answered not by post but in person.

A stranger appears at the door in Bekwai, having crossed a continent and an ocean, and presses into his hands an envelope of Deutsche Marks, enough and more than enough, with a single message: “Your help comes from the Lord.”

On September 27, 1984, he boards a plane, watches Ghana fall away beneath the clouds, passes through London, and descends at last over New York, a city ablaze with more light than he has ever seen, into the presence of the father he has not embraced in three years.

From Bekwai, Ghana to America is more than an immigrant’s success story. It is a meditation on faith that works, on the truth that the distance between a vision and its fulfillment is not empty space but a forge, and that our beginnings never decide our destination.

Told with warmth, humility, and unforgettable detail, it closes with an invitation the author extends to every reader standing at their own impossible counter: write the vision, do the work, pray the prayer, and watch for the helpers who are, he insists, never accidents but appointments.

The boy who once wrote his letters in the sand became the man who wrote this book, and his message could not be plainer: if God gave you the vision, He will make the provision.