A familiar face for citizens of West Africa’s Ghana is embedding with The Hawk Eye newsroom to cover the last week of the 2016 presidential election in Iowa.

Evans Mensah heads the political desk at Joy News in Ghana. After navigating a career spent reporting on human rights violations in his own region, the U.S. Department of State is paying for Mensah, along with 24 other journalists from 15 countries, to cover the U.S. election from a foreign perspective.

He was placed in Iowa because it’s a battleground state in the coming election, which he supposes makes it a prime example of American democracy.

Before flying into the Quad Cities airport and driving to Burlington, Mensah met with national media and state officials in Washington, D.C. Mensah said he was surprised to hear from virtually everyone this election seemed different than usual. The conversation was about Donald Trump.

“From an outsider’s view looking in, this is the United States of America,” Mensah said. “The greatest nation on Earth. The greatest democracy on Earth. So what happened? Why are people actually talking about post-election violence seriously?”

To Mensah, Trump is individually responsible. It isn’t an issue with the system, it’s an issue with a candidate publicly claiming the election is rigged as part of his platform and refusing to say he will respect the results of the election. That makes this race different than those in the past.

“There is no talk of rigged elections in Ghana, and this is a tiny little county in West Africa surrounded by countries torn apart by post-election violence,” Mensah said. “We know what it is like, because most of the time when it happens, we take the refugees.”

Mensah is free to cover whatever he wants without outside input. He is a broadcast journalist and already is filing stories for radio station Joy FM and Ghana television’s Joy News, which he describes as a CNN equivalent.

He earned his masters in media communications from the London School of Economics, where he met his wife. They’re raising a 3-year-old son together while he works as an anchor and she works in international relief with the U.S.-based Catholic Relief Services.

“I come from a very humble background, so I identify with topics like that,” Mensah said. “That’s what made me want to be a journalist, so I can give a voice to the voiceless like I once was.”

The Ghana Journalist Association awarded him their Best Reporter Award in 2008 for his work on local maternal mortality rates.

This is Mensah’s second time in the U.S. and first time in Iowa. He’s covering the election in the states knowing the outcome typically predicts the outcome of elections in Ghana. The country holds their elections in December. He’ll return to his own election coverage cycle once the U.S. has a new president.