Catherine McNamara arrived in Ghana in the late 1990s with a toddler and a suitcase full of Sydney sunshine.

She left ten years later with a second child, born in a local hospital with no doctor present, a heart stitched together by Ghanaian voices, and a collection of short stories that still make readers cry on tro-tros from Accra to Cape Coast.

Her book Pelt and Other Stories (2013) is not another expat memoir about beaches and jollof. It is raw, unflinching fiction written in the voices of Ghanaian market women, Italian migrants, pregnant village girls, and restless Australian mothers.

Catherine slips into their skin the way some people slip into kente: completely, unapologetically, reverently.

“I lived in Ghana long enough to stop being a visitor,” she says from her current home in northern Italy. “I stopped taking notes and started listening with my whole body. When my youngest son decided to arrive early in a government hospital in the middle of the night, there was no obstetrician, just two incredible midwives and a generator that kept dying. They delivered him by torchlight while singing me through the pain in Twi. That night is in every story I write about Ghana, even the ones that never mention the country by name.”

The result is Pelt and Other Stories, a book that moves between the red dust of Tamale markets and the cold marble of Milan apartments, between a Ghanaian widow selling plantain by the roadside and an Australian woman trying to explain her loneliness to an Italian lover who will never understand.

Critics called it “fearless.” Ghanaian readers on Twitter and in Accra book clubs called it “home” – even when the stories hurt.

One story, “Harbour View”, follows a young woman in Osu who falls for a visiting British sailor. Another, “Pelt”, is told from the perspective of a village girl preparing her own funeral cloth while pregnant with a foreigner’s child. Catherine insists every detail is borrowed from someone she met, laughed with, cried with, or bought tomatoes from over ten Accra years.

“I borrowed their truths and tried to give them dignity on the page,” she says quietly. “That’s the least I owe this country.”

Today Catherine runs a small guesthouse in the Italian Alps, but Ghana still calls her back every dry season. She returns with her now-teenage son, born under that flickering torchlight, to eat waakye at Papaye, swim at Kokrobite, and remind him where half his heart lives.

“Ghana didn’t just give me stories,” she says. “It gave me courage to tell them in voices that weren’t originally mine, but somehow became mine too.”

For any expat thinking of moving to Ghana, Catherine has one line she repeats like a prayer:

“If you stay long enough, Ghana stops being a chapter in your life and starts being the ink you write the rest of your life with.”

Isabelle, 36, stepped off the plane in Accra two years ago with a suitcase, a knot in her stomach, and zero friends.

Her husband had been posted here for work. She had never lived outside France. La Rochelle, her quiet seaside hometown of 100,000 souls, suddenly felt like another planet compared to the roaring, colourful chaos of Ghana’s capital.

“I arrived at the end of May,” she remembers. “I joined the French expat group Accra Accueil, excited to meet people. Two weeks later, every single woman left for summer holidays in Europe. I spent June, July, and August completely alone in a city I didn’t know, with a language I didn’t speak and heat I wasn’t ready for.”

That lonely summer could have broken her. Instead, it became the beginning of the richest chapter of her life.

One morning, scrolling Facebook in an air-conditioned room, she saw a call for volunteers at a small orphanage in Osu. She showed up the next day.

The children ran to her, grabbed her hands, and dragged her into the courtyard. Someone put on music. Isabelle, who had done Zumba back in Paris for fun, started moving. The kids copied her. Soon thirty little bodies were jumping, laughing, sweating with her.

“I cried on the tro-tro ride home,” she tells Expats Blog. “Not from sadness. From pure joy. In France I was always too busy managing teams and deadlines to volunteer. Here, I suddenly had time, and these children gave me purpose.”

Two years later, Isabelle is a different woman.

She still teaches Zumba to the orphans twice a week. She has sewn dozens of school uniforms with other expat women. She has slept under the stars at Mole National Park, laughing as elephants wandered up to drink from the hotel swimming pool at dawn. She has learned to bargain for kente and wax print at Makola Market, discovered the joy of fresh coconut on Labadi Beach, and now keeps a small stash of French cheese and decent chocolate hidden in her fridge “because a girl still needs standards.”

Yes, rent in East Legon costs more than central Paris (thank God for company housing). Yes, the traffic is legendary. Yes, she misses Zara and proper museums.

But ask her if she wants to leave and her answer is immediate:

“I hope I never go back to a ‘normal’ life. I love waking up knowing I can change a child’s day just by showing up and dancing. In France I had a big title. Here, I have big love. There is no competition.”

Her blog, My Expat’s Life Blog in Ghana, Africa, has quietly become required reading for hundreds of women preparing to move to Accra. In it, she is brutally honest about the hard parts (power cuts, expensive wine, loneliness) and unapologetically romantic about the beautiful ones (sunsets at Shai Hills, the smell of kelewele, the way strangers call you “sister”).

Her final piece of advice to anyone packing their life into suitcases for Ghana?

“Open your mind first.
Adapt.
Find something you love doing.
And if you have the time, go volunteer.
The children will teach you more about living than any guidebook ever could.”

Two years ago Isabelle arrived as a trailing spouse.
Today she says Ghana didn’t just give her a new address.
It gave her a new heart.