A view of Obama's visit to Ghana

I received an e-mail from Africa, and it wasn't from a businessman I never met informing me there was a sizable amount of money awaiting if I would help transfer company funds to an offshore account.

This e-mail was from my friend and former neighbor, Ray Johnson, who along with his wife, Jill, is on a service mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Ray and Jill are stationed in Accra, Ghana, where Ray, a lawyer, is helping the church straighten out its legal affairs and Jill is helping straighten out Ray.

The house where they are living is about three miles from the spot where President Barack Obama gave his speech this past Friday.

Wrote Ray in his e-mail: "If you get real pressed, I can give you my view of Obama's visit — completely without charge as I now seem to give my opinion all the time without charge."

I e-mailed Ray back, thanked him for his kind proffer and agreed to his price without further negotiation.

In Ray's return e-mail he reported that he had just finished jogging through the streets of Accra during the hour Obama was giving his speech.

"While I was running," he wrote, "I heard bits from the radios (the national language in Ghana is English), and Obama sounded as beguiling on the radio as what the American public bought last November (I should probably point out that Ray is a Republican). It was a good speech. It was 'Yes we can' about every other sentence, and the audience got into it and echoed it each time he said it."

Overall, Ray reported, the people of Ghana greeted Obama like a conquering hero/rock star, bursting with pride that he would pick theirs to be the first sub-Saharan African nation he would visit as America's first African-American president.

"They painted up the curbs and American flags were everywhere. Hawkers on the street were selling his picture on all sorts of things," wrote Ray. "Everywhere were photos of him and John Atta Mills (Ghana's president) with the title 'God's Chosen Presidents.' "

Ray guesses the reason the president picked Ghana to visit over Kenya, the homeland of Obama's father, is because Ghana is one of just two African countries (the other is South Africa) that have had free elections more than once since the end of colonial rule.

The president's visit, he wrote, "kept a few thousand policemen (10,000 extra, the newspaper said) employed for the day. While I was running I saw most of the 10,000 along the route.