I have an accent??!!

I consider my spoken English to be at least a 9/10, and it was clear and concise. Growing up in Ghana, I had never had any accent problems, never. I am even one of the best speakers as I always got compliments on how good my English was. You can therefore imagine my shock when I realized that I couldn't be understood in America. In Ghana, we only considered people who talked with 'slangs' as having accents and little did I know I would ever be told I had an accent. An African accent.

My first encounter with this accent issue was in the Indian restaurant I wrote about in my previous posts, but I didn't make much of it because the waiter was Indian. So I thought it must have been him
Fast forward a few hours late,I am on the plane to Portland, Oregon, and the air hostess asks if I would like anything to drink. With a smile, I told her I wanted water, and she looked a bit confused. She was like ''what was that?"(American's way of asking you to repeat), and I repeated that I wanted water. She paused for some seconds, and said back to me "Oh you mean 'wader'?". I was like yeah, can I have some 'wader'? I quickly learnt not to pronounce the T in 'water' because for some reason Americans didn't understand you if you say water the way Ghanaians or should I say Africans pronounce it. I would be reminded of that many times to come.
The flight lasted a little over 5 hours(from JFK to Portland), boy was I tired. I had spent about 80% of that last 3 days in the air, and I was now experiencing jet lag. I slept all the way on the drive from the Airport home, so I couldn't see very much of this new city that night.