Phones

We are back at my Aunt's house now.  It's 5:54am currently and we have a busy day ahead of us.  First and foremost I am getting my phone up and running.  The process is fairly simple.  You go to one of the many phone companies here and buy a sim card for your phone.  Once you do that the card is registered and you pay for how many minutes you want on your phone at any given time.  The sim card is only 1Ghc (1 Ghana cedi) which translates to less than $0.01 American.  This also gives you a phone number. Then for about 22mins/1cedi you can call anywhere in the world and you add minutes as you need them.  A very simple system.  The only thing you must keep in mind is that you will need a sim card based phone.  I would recommend an AT&T based phone.  Verizon and Sprint do not carry sim card based phones at this time I believe.  T-mobile phones seem to work pretty well as well.  Before you come to an African country also try to get your phone unlocked or as they say here, decoded first.  To unlock/decode here is about $70USD.  That's a lot of money for something you could have done free in the US. 

Also, for those that are wondering why you can't just buy a phone here the answer is of course you can, but you pay full retail price for it.  Which can be anywhere from $100 to $1000.  Yup you read that right!

Any SIM card based phone can be used.
Your carrier should be able to unlock it for you or you can  have it unlocked in your host country.

MTN is the largest pay as you go carrier in Ghana.
SIM card costs $1 GHC and you can put any amount on it from $2GHC on up.

All cellphone companies here are pay as you go carriers.  The SIM cards are usually only $1GHC.  I went with MTN because they are everywhere so buying more credits and having any technical issues dealt with quickly is very easy.  There is also Vodofone (UK based), TIGO, Airtell and a new one from Nigeria called GLO.