Orchestrating Care in Time: Ghanaian Migrant Women, Family, and Reciprocity

People in southern Ghana provide care by attending to and synchronizing their and others' life courses. Women, in particular, synchronize their life courses with the developmental and aging pathways of others. Since the 1970s, younger women in southern Ghana have migrated to urban or rural areas to earn money, leaving their children in the care of their mothers, whom they support with their remittances. As migrant women grow older, they return to their hometowns to provide elder and child care. Although female transmigrants also use these temporal strategies of care, the synchronization of life courses proves more difficult to coordinate in transnational contexts. For these reasons, time and timing is as important as space and location to transnational migrants, and migration is transtemporal as well as translocal.