After settling into Ghanaian life pretty fast, I have come to realise that I will soon be unable to function in a work environment at home. I fear I have adapted to working life here to the extent that I will be completely unemployable back in the UK.

I am not trying to suggest that people in Ghana do not work hard; in fact many people work extremely hard, just not in the format of the standard 10-hour (or more) work days we are accustomed to in the UK.

In my observation in Jirapa, the jobs people have don't define them and aren't the complete focus of their life. For example, an officer at the Ghana Education Service in Jirapa will also have a small business or two on the side - perhaps running a bar, or selling wholesale goods, or rearing animals, farming, or owning a tro-tro. They will also have a family, usually with several children, as large families are valued. On top of this it's not unusual to make plans to build a house or make improvements to an existing house. And if this isn't enough to be dealing with, they will also be helping a never-ending stream of relatives with their businesses/houses/education fees/funeral arrangements.

Unsurprisingly, people in Jirapa often get up very early in the morning. The women will prepare food and sort out the children, while the men will perhaps feed the animals or attend to some other business. So on arrival at their workplace at the Ghana Education Service, my colleagues will have been up for several hours and they're often thinking about a million things other than the latest workshop or education project.

For these reasons the following practices are entirely acceptable at work, some of which I have readily adopted:

· On or around payday, take a full day off work to stand in line at the bank. (There is one rural bank in Jirapa which has no ATM and there are long queues on payday. Some people have to travel 62 kilometres to a bank in Wa).

· Run around the town trying to organise the resources and refreshments for a training workshop at 8.45 am, when the meeting starts at 9.00 am

· Take several weeks off work to organise the funeral of a close relative

· Leave the office by midday every Friday, or take the whole day off, to attend the funeral of a distant relative/a work colleague/the cousin of the lady who does your washing/someone from your ancestral village

· Take all your nine weeks of leave in one bloc in order to build a house. There's no requirement to hand over your responsibilities to another officer.

· Eat a plate of rice the size of a small child for lunch and then take an afternoon nap at your desk for anything between 30 minutes and 2 hours

· Have a two or three hour lunch break accompanied by several bottles of Club beer

· Take the afternoon off to travel to a nearby village to buy some new chickens

· Take the afternoon off to paint door frames for your house

· Take the afternoon off to visit a sick relative or friend in hospital

· Arrive at the office and report for work, proceed to sit for an hour on a bench outside and pass the time of day with other colleagues, then leave work to pursue other business which may or may not be related to work

· Attend meetings an hour late. 8.01 and 8.59 are all within the hour of 8 o'clock…

· Open and close every meeting with a prayer, usually thanking God for the safe arrival of participants

· Expect to receive extra cash-in-hand for turning up to a work meeting that is part of your job responsibility to attend

· Complain if lunch is not provided in addition to payment at the meeting

· If the meeting is long but doesn't cross-over lunch time, expect to be given a bottle of Fanta and a meat pie as a snack

· Rely on a long tradition of African oral culture and write nothing down during meetings - no notes, no plans, no action points

· Realise later that something should have been written down and continually ask colleagues to remind you to carry out tasks

· Don't start any organisation for projects until funding has actually landed, after all, the funding may not materialise. When funding comes and a deadline is attached for spending it, panic and start to haphazardly plan five projects across the same two weeks.

· When someone asks if you're on your way, simply say 'I'm coming' and know it means very little

Thanks to our watchman who guards our house during the day, I have also been collecting a fabulous range of excuses which explain absence or lateness for work. I'm not denying the truth of these excuses; they are part of life in a rural village and entirely believable. However, I wonder what would happen if I tried some of these in the UK? Our watchman's excuses always start with the following sentence: "Madam, sorry for the inconvenience…" and continue as such…

· "My tyre has punctured on my bike" (fairly standard)

· "The rain came last night and washed the crops that were drying on my roof, so I had to move them to another roof to dry this morning"

· "I had to take a baby in my village to hospital"

· "A scorpion bit my leg"

· "I have to organise a funeral" (this excuse can be pulled out at least five times in a row without questions asked)

· "I was knocked off my bicycle by a man on a motorbike carrying a large plank of wood"

Although at times, I can get frustrated by attitudes towards work, there is a pleasant moral attached to this blog. Work and work targets are not everything in life - people and helping people are far more important. I know that if my motorbike breaks down, or if I fall sick, someone will be on-hand to help out; regardless of the latest project they have to organise at work.