"We moved out of our first accommodation to live with another Ghanaian. Three of us in a room. He put us up for a month then my friend and myself found another place.

"We were able to find a job, but only for three days. By now, we’d been here for two months and our visas were running out. So was our money. What to do next? We had no idea. We were in a terrible state of flux.

"Fortunately, the guy we lived with the previous month left Taiwan and handed his job to us. With that, we were able to pay our school fees, our rent and our food. Our visas were renewed, thank God.

"But the kind of work we did was quite unstable. Sometimes, we’d be laid off for three weeks, and we’d not work on rainy days. That’s the nature of construction work. Yet, we’d have to find money to pay for our room and the rest.

"Money is only one problem, police harassment another. I can’t remember how many times I have been stopped by the police. I was in the taxi the other day. The traffic was heavy. The police stopped the taxi and started asking us questions. We were taken to the police station and detained for six hours.

"People point fingers, laugh at and run away from you. I was on the bus one day and when we arrived at Fu Jen University, some girls got on the bus. As soon as they saw me, they started laughing and running away from me. I was so distressed of their demeanor. One of them noticed that I was hurt. She wrote a note to apologize. Old women on the bus would not sit next to you and all that. They muzzle their noses as if you have a terrible odor that’d knock them off their feet or something. This has caused many of my friends to buy motorbikes. No one can stand this nonsense.