Hard Work in Ghana

So this is actually a serious post. In many places around the country one sees people doing all sorts of manual labor that in the US we would have machines do or otherwise find a simpler way to do it. Example - Construction materials seem to generally be carried atop someone's head to the destination. Granted, this is Africa and materials are scare, but to me it seems like it would be easier to create a solution that involved putting a lot of materials onto a cart and pushing/pulling that cart to its destination. A more relevant example of what I want to convey is the process of 'weeding'. Weeding is young men (and boys) taking a machete (called a cutlass or matchet here) and manually cutting grass with the blade. They hunch over, swing, and can clear a little bit of area with one stroke - overall an inefficient way to clear a large area, unless you have an army of students. The question I posed to my host brother was why no one used either a lawn mower, create an old push-mower, or even develop a scythe type tool that could cut grass more effectively. His answer was simple - in Ghanaian society, you are considered lazy if you don't do a given amount of manual labor. Even a metal grass mower that could be fairly easily made would cut down on weeding time, but the impression I got was that some type of machine doing the work for you is equated with you being lazy.
This is a huge difference than the US where efficiency has driven most inventions to be better and better, but here in Ghana you need to do a certain amount on labor, spend a certain amount of time proving you are able-bodied enough to possess a family. Playing games such as chess or scrabble more than once or twice a week is frowned upon because it means you dont have enough time to do your other activities.
In summary, the culture I have experienced is one that emphasizes hard work over efficiency, washing your own clothes by hand over spending that time reading a book, and more emphasis on working hard than thinking hard. Perhaps that last part is a bit unfair, so hard work is preferred more than finding an easier way to solve the problem. As a consequence (this is just a conjecture), people seem to waste a lot of time weeding (a simple mower could be better), washing clothes (a child could wash the same clothes and not use the adult's time), walking (perhaps a money constraint to take a taxi), or fixing things (time and money costs to repair a bucket as to buy a new one). I realize that there are a lot of people here with excess time on their hands, especially children, so labor is not a problem, but I'm just surprised that efficiency, at least in areas I pointed out, has not taken hold.
FACTS -
If its raining, every shop shuts down.
A training session was delayed because we had a rooster in the church we were meeting in.
People try and talk to me while I run, so I just have to ignore them and run at 530 when people aren't on the streets.