Then as you live there longer you find out that people actually guard privacy with a persistence unknown in urban Canada where people have to exert a great deal of effort to know anything about neighbours.
In Ghana nothing is carried in the open. Black plastic bags are ubiquitous. Couples are advised to wake their mates at 5 a.m. in the morning to discuss problems in a private way. A friend moving house from town to “quarters” did it under cover of darkness so that people generally wouldn’t know that she had done it or see what she was moving. Information is not just casually bandied about. Is James in the office?
“No, he’s out.” But unless you have the right to the information, and then only if you ask, you will not find out if he just stepped out on a five minute errand or if he’s gone to Timbuktu for a month.

There’s a general problem with tools – we’re supposed to direct the tools, but they always wind up directing us and implicitly specifying which problems we choose to tackle (and how we tackle them).

As far as “disconnect” is concerned, I have a bigger problem with the converse: a false friend is a bigger problem than an open friend.