I have a confession, I have had this post written for nearly two weeks.  I just couldn't bring myself to post it, because it meant saying goodbye to Ghana officially.  I tried to post it a few times but I was too busy crying, and Ghana was actively thwarting me via internet issues.  So here is goodbye- I get on a plane in 7 hours....

Even though I once thought New York was the once place I’d feel at home, from the moment I arrived there. I daydreamed about filling suitcases and hopping planes.   I flirted with New York but never gave it a commitment.  It was a love affair I refused to consummate, not matter what the city promised me, no matter that I had picked it, and not the other way around. Instead I drowned myself in all the joy and heartbreak I had brought back from India and pretended it was New York’s fault. Eventually we realized it wasn’t working out, New York and I, and I took my nomad heart elsewhere. I needed to find out if my love for my adopted home was singular, or if I would fall in love with anywhere I traveled.  On a whim that I later justified by academic relevance, I packed my bags again, and arrived in Ghana.
Ghana only reminded me my heart had miles yet to go until I figured the world out.   It was not an earth shaking revelation but rather snuck up on me while writing blog posts, stewing over photo assignments, and as I tried to motivate myself to at least go out and get a beer.  There were flashes when I saw the Ghana my friends had fallen in love with, but even when I loved those moments it felt like cheating.  If India was a love affair, we broke up after figuring it wouldn’t work long distance, but the feelings are still there. I’m not sure I can love anywhere else again; it’s ruined me for all other places.  To go back to see its familiar streets felt like going home, but it also felt like stepping into a dream.  It also felt like sobering up, washing my face and remembering what real life is.  In hindsight, I know I did not spend the semester learning about Ghana but rather learning about myself, how to be myself, and still leave bits of me wherever I go.  How to carve up chunks of my heart and leave them places so they can give me something in return, if only the feeling of having missed something.  I came to Ghana to run away, to disappear and press pause on my racing heart. Since wherever you go, there you are, all I found was an insatiable desire to be everywhere at once.  With too many plans and no idea where they will take me, I have taken these past few months to remind myself of all the things I had forgotten since I left that small town north of Boston.  Some people go home to locate themselves, and to remember home; I went to Africa.
            Seems right to me. Ghana changed how I thought about myself, how I contextualized myself.  In the eye of the hurricane, on the cusp on coming and going, ko bra, I stand on the wreckage of my former self.  I remember this feeling all too well, knowing that you’ve changed but not knowing how, that breathless anticipation of returning combined with the ache of leaving a life that you absolutely cannot go back to.  Its bittersweet but mostly it is addicting, beguiling you with exotic images of the things you have seen while causing you to confidently forget for just a moment all the small wrenchings of the heart that one experiences when living elsewhere.  Compared to the biggest wrenching of all, the tearing of the new you from your current context, every moment of boredom and sadness disappears, and you are left with a glow constructed of every happy memory, of new friendships and days drunk on sunlight, nights just drunk.   The glow of feeling down to your soul of sheer wonder and exhilaration of everything, everything new and everything possible, every time you step on and off a plane.  That glow has become my addiction; it the particular shade of limelight that matches my pale complexion. 
Before I came to Ghana, my concept of myself was narrow, limited.  This semester has put me in my place, rightfully, with far less self-importance and far more wonder.   About to step back onto a plane, rocketing toward my old life, I am drunk on wild possibility.  This time, I want to make it last, take it back with me and grow it in the greenhouse of my soul, let the sun and make it grow instead of locking it back into myself.  When I came back from India, I was so scared; of what, I am still not sure.  Of being too different, of losing identity in order to gain a new one.  Now, suitcases packed and out on the sidewalk, I am laying claim to my wandering heart and feet, which will lead me to new continents and a new selves.  Beverly gave me a base to stand on, India gave me my locomotion; Ghana may give me my wings.  Maybe I won’t know what Ghana has given me until I arrive in Buenos Aires, seasoned study abroad student and travel extraordinaire.  Or maybe I’ll have the wind knocked out of me and replaced with the Spanish languages, and I’ll start the process of confusion again in Prague.  Locust, nomad, tornado, I am whirling through the world and coming to rest only when I have spent my dervish energy, and I refuse to look behind me.  As Kwame Nkrumah said, ever forward, never backward.  Now, going backward and forward at the same time, my impulse is both to hold on tight and jump into the fray.

The picture is mine, from the final group trip to Wli Falls.

The biggest problem I faced with this course was most definitely remembering to keep posting. However what I really liked about this course was reading about the experiences that all the other people studying abroad were having both at my site and different sites. I liked that through the course we drew connections between our experiences although we are all spread out across the world. The fact that we are all students with different backgrounds who came from studying and living in New York to studying in different countries and that we come together to share thoughts over the website is almost like a very interesting social experiment in which the experimental variables are culture, nationhood, and travel.

I think the most rewarding aspects of the experience was improving my Spanish and learning to be comfortable expressing myself in another language. I feel like studying in Spanish has improved my communication skills as a whole and expanded my understanding about communication theory in general.  In my courses, not only have I had to do the same type of critical thinking that I normally do in school, I also had to read and understand the reading in Spanish, listen to lectures in Spanish, and express my thoughts in class in Spanish. When writing or speaking in English, I often want to mix Spanish words in my sentences that express my ideas more precisely than any word I can immediately think of in English. However more generally I feel that by studying another language I have been forced to think much more about words, sentences, and grammar as tools of communication because I suddenly am using a whole new set of rules to communicate that are not built into me from youth. 

I haven’t yet thought about what I think will be different in me when I return home. I will definitely know much more about Argentina and the Spanish Language, that’s for sure. However I wonder if I will rethink about my own country, our language, our politics, and our cultural norms. I am so used to studying these things here that perhaps the comparison will make me understand the “United States” in a different way, or at least all the different United States I know: New York, California, and the rest through literature.

After my experience here I know that I want to come back someday to travel through South America and see the other Latin American countries and people. I can’ help but imagine what it wil be like to be back in Buenos Aires when I return in a few years… 

The first stop on my grand spring break adventure was Ushuaia, the self-proclaimed “El Fin Del Mundo” (The End of The World) situated in the southernmost region of Argentina, Tierra Del Fuego (Land of Fire). It’s a beautiful, wind-whipped town that feels slightly desolate and always looks as though it is covered by the shadow of a giant cloud – the colors of all the buildings slightly muted and everything a shade darker than you think it should be – even if the sun is shining and there are no clouds in the sky.
 
This is the town with the strongest connection to Antarctica, being the place from which all boat cruises depart, weighed down by hundreds of flushed foreign faces eager for an expensive adventure. A small town with two giant casinos, the larger of the two directly facing the harbor as well as a large shipwreck that seems to be in perfect condition (ropes still sway in the wind and lifesavers cling to both sides) except for the network of gaping, rusted holes on one side. A place where next to faded Argentine flags, most doors have large stickers plastered on them telling you one last time that the Falkland Islands are the Malvinas and they belong to Argentina, in case you had forgotten.
 
But all this is the town itself, and this collection of neat city blocks and small details is all placed in sharp relief against a backdrop of giant snowcapped mountains that create a strange rainbow of colors – white at the top, brownish-gray in the middle, followed by a deep red that fades into green at the very bottom. These mountains are all you can see when you step out of the airport and let the cold air and wind hit you for the first time, when you walk through the sloped streets, slick and shiny black from recent rain, when you take a tour on a boat that lurches through rough water and turn around to get a good look at it all – crushing the small candy dots that are cars and the pinprick steeples of churches with two fingers while not being able to wrap an entire hand around a single mountain.
 
And every single one of these mountains – there must be more than twenty peaks that you can see if you slowly spin in a half circle at the edge of town closest to the water – they all have names. They each have a name, and the taxi driver that picked you up from the airport pointed each one out to you and told you their names in Spanish, but you couldn’t remember all of them and the German stranger that you shared a cab with wasn’t helping record the names. All the names are lost except Cinco Hermanos (Five Brothers), but even though the five jagged peaks really do make sense of the name, all the names don’t matter. They are all made of earth, all surrounding the town, both cradling it from outside disturbances and at the same time, united against it, effectively cutting it off from the rest of civilization.