‘Sometimes weather wise you hardly even see your neighbours here in Ireland’

There’s a great burst of Africa in the middle of Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin. Behind the shop counter of Sahara on George’s Street Upper is Kisu, who has built this large Aladdin’s Cave of beautiful things from scratch. It’s a cold December day and she’s close by the heater; she has lived in Ireland several years but still feels the cold, joking that a nice summer’s day here would be a cold one in Ghana.

Barikisu Ali Telfer, or Kisu, grew up in Bolgatanga in northern Ghana as part of a large family. Her mother, Salamatu Yahaya, has long had a shop there, changing from food to furniture to fashion according to demand. The children worked in the shop during holidays. “That was how we were all brought up. I always looked up to my mum. She’s groomed me into [retail] since when I was a child.”

Kisu lived in different regions, living with grandparents, secondary school boarding (which is common in Ghana), a BSc in banking and finance in the capital Accra, where she worked later at the national identification authority. She met her Ghanian husband there when he was home on holidays from working in London. “He tried to keep the relationship really going” and they visited each other, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to live in London. They married in 2012 and shortly afterwards he was offered a job with Dell in Dublin. “He asked me if I wanted to move to Ireland and I was like, I don’t mind.” Neither of them had visited Ireland but online research indicated “it was a nice country, a nice place to bring up kids”.

She joined him in Dublin, where they lived in an apartment at Grand Canal, close to the city. “I came in December, and it was cold!” She laughs. “It took me weeks before I could even get out of the house on my own.” She would only leave the house in the car to go shopping. “He was always pushing me, come on, get out of the house.” When she did get going, “it was lovely. I loved it. I walked into town on my own to do stuff. Grand Canal has quite interesting places.”

‘There’s more of a laissez-faire kind of thing in Ireland and especially that translates to driving’

---

We must do more to welcome Irish people returning home

---

‘Ireland is a country of people who are very friendly, no shooting’

---

But when they had a little boy, Niboi, without a support system in a new country and with her husband at work, “I couldn’t actually handle it alone”. She went home to Ghana for a year, returning in 2016. “It was different because he was quite a big boy, and would love to play. He is a kid that doesn’t like staying indoors. He’s still the same! That forced me out. Everyday we have to look for somewhere to go, which was good. He got me to go to the playground, play dates. I got to meet more people. It helps my friendship with other parents too.” She made other friends through her husband’s colleagues, and at her shop.

All the same, “sometimes weather wise you hardly even see your neighbours here. In Ghana your neighbour’s knocking at your door all the time!”

Minding each other’s children is less casual here. If she needs to go somewhere, “if it was in Ghana, all I have to do is call my sister, or knock on the neighbours’ door and say go inside there and wait for me. Sometimes here you are really not sure to even ask. We are coming from a different country. It’s one of the challenges we face, with childcare.”

Niboi is in afterschool three days a week. “It’s something he doesn’t love. I think he feels like he’s limited. He’s been in school the whole all day. And not long after he gets home from afterschool he has to go to bed. He feels he’s missing out playing with neighbourhood children.”

There’s a great social scene among children in their south Dublin suburb, playing in an open area. “It’s perfect. They try to make the best out of the day after school. The neighbourhood is the best. All he just has to do is open the door and he’s off.”

She had “always wanted to do something for myself”, and after Niboi began school she started her business. Kisu had always brought things back from holidays in Ghana: jewellery, clothes (“during summer I like to wear African clothes”), homewares. In Dublin “when you come into my house there’s so much to see”. We look at the handcrafted shopping baskets surrounding us, beautifully made with different patterns and colours.

When out with her baskets people used to ask where they came from, and where could they buy one. Her home place Bolgatanga is famed for basket-weaving, with communities of women making baskets. She spoke to some weavers she knew and placed her first order.

She sold some baskets in a DLR shared pop-up, then rented her own pop-up, and set up a website sahara.ie. She opened the shop Sahara in late 2021. It was a lot of work; rent, rates and utilities are very expensive. Business is best in summer. “You get a lot of people out.”

She sells other Bolgatanga basketware: handbags, decorative plates, huge lampshades, fans, baby-baskets, cat-baskets, laundry-baskets. She added other African products to her range, from Senegal, Kenya, Zimbabwe: clothes in bright, bold prints made in Accra, wood carvings, hairbands, paintings by Djibril of Ghanian scenes (going to the beach, fetching water), jewellery (“people don’t ever have enough jewellery!”), some of which she makes herself from hand-painted recycled glass. She makes striking fabric lampshades too.

People tell her Sahara adds colour to the street and that they couldn’t resist coming in. Fellow shopkeepers on this quiet end of George’s Street are supportive of each other. She points out their 12 days of Christmas displays. It’s got livelier in the past couple of years, with new shops opening.

Kisu misses Ghana’s outdoor lifestyle. “There’s always parties, and there’s always somewhere to go, occasions, mostly outdoors. If you get bored you just go to the beach. You don’t have to worry about the water being cold. And then family, which plays a very important role.”

Here “I feel that when it’s raining everybody’s indoors”.

“Irish people here are very welcoming and friendly. When I opened the shop people knocked at my door, congratulating me, wishing me well. People come in and ask questions: where the things are from, where I am from, what is Ghana like, would it be nice for holidays?” (Yes! “Ghana is peaceful. If you go to Ghana, you decide not to come back!”)

Kisu’s speaks English and five of Ghana’s 23 languages. She’s dismayed “most people don’t speak the Gaelic. I tell them they are lost for not being able to speak Gaelic”. She’s learned some Irish words from her son; “his teacher says he’s good with the Irish!”

She doesn’t see herself moving again soon. “My son, I think he’s Irish now. He loves to go to Ghana. But he loves being here. He tells me he has all his friends here. We miss family back home, but he puts a smile on our faces. And he doesn’t look like somebody who wants to move from Ireland.”

https://www.sahara.ie/We would like to hear from people who have moved to Ireland in the past 10 years. To get involved, email newtotheparish@irishtimes.com or tweet @newtotheparish