HaleyWho's blog

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.

Be aware of your resistance, and resist it!  Push yourself to explore beyond the program into whatever Accra has to offer you.  Don’t let fear or apathy or homework keep you inside the dorm.  It’s so easy to sleep in every morning, do only two or three things a day.  Accra moves slow, and so can you, but you will feel infinitely more rewarded and feel more at home in Ghana the more you do, and the more you push yourself.  A good friend of mine who was a Hungarian exchange student to my high school passed on his mantra for success to me: “Never say no!”.   I used it for the rule of thumb on my exchange to India and only ever regretted the times I didn’t follow his advice.  Here in Ghana, I have (more than I like to admit) fallen prey to the easy way, staying inside out of the heat and keeping to myself.  To reward me, I have no Ghanaian friends to say goodbye to, no real friendships outside of the program, and that break my heart.  I feel that in some way I have failed this experiment I have put myself to.  My friends who fought tooth and nail to engage, who let homework slide in order to meet friends, who went out during the days, in the weekday evenings, they are dreading leaving Ghana.  I wish I was, but instead I am ambivalent.  I am looking forward to going home, but my guilt at not trying harder will follow me home.
            Be aware of yourself, and how you interact with other people.  Accra is a small, small program, and frankly, it’s mostly women.  That’s a lot to handle for four months, even with the prevalence of single dorm rooms.  You owe it to yourself and everyone else to be as forgiving, conscious and positive as possible when things are hard.  Try hard to let things go, because when you come home it really won’t matter.  What will matter is how much you enjoyed your time in Accra, and that is up to you.
            These things said, Accra is not an easy study abroad site.  Open gutters and fufu and banku is not for everyone.  If you do come to Ghana, definitely make sure you do your research beyond Lonely Planet and come with an open and patient mind.  When you are here, don’t be afraid to ask for the things you need, but realize getting them will depend on your own persistence.  The Accra site offers you a place where you can engage in a million things or none at all.  Your follow up is important to your success and students are expected to do a lot on things on their own that New York would take care of.  One email or meeting in New York might mean four or five here. Live in either dorm, but known that Solomon’s is a traditional dorm, and Church is more like apartments and is therefore more independent.  Realize you will walk to and from school a lot, in the heat.  Pack and dress accordingly, and while the rule no short-shorts applies, everyday summer clothes are fine for Accra and for classes.  Outside, for internships and traveling, loose fitting and more conservative is better.  Girls especially, if you like cloths don’t expect to hit the mall, but don’t pack much.  Buying fabric and getting clothes made for you is one of the best ways to carry Ghana back with you in a unique way.  Go to Osu and enjoy Epo’s Spot and Sunshine and Pippa’s, but make sure you get recommendations from the CRA’s, University of Ghana students and other students at your internship.  Explore new places.  Accra’s nightlife goes as late at you are willing to stay up, so you have plenty of time.  Travel in small groups, and travel outside Accra. 

Most importantly, never, ever say no.

(The image is my own, from Independence Day)
 
 

This semester hasn’t been an easy one, but it is a semester that tested limits and preconceptions that I didn’t realize I had.   The Accra site is yes, one of the studio art sites, and the only non-European study abroad site at which I could complete my major, but Ghana is so much more than this.  One reason it is so much more than just a study abroad site is that it is also the place where slavery originated.  This study abroad site, unbeknownst to me is heavily centered around race, slavery, and identity.  Whether I should have been expecting this or not, (none of my guidebooks say anything about it!) I was blindsided within the first few weeks by dialogues about African American identity, issues of race and racism, both abroad and at home.  When the program screened a documentary on race that the program counselor designed, few of us felt obligated to attend.  We all had work to do, and frankly, I needed a break from a topic so many of my classes seemed to revolve around.
Unfortunately, the fact that so many students had chosen not to attend the program was a source of tension for the next few months.  It was fertile territory for assumptions to made, misunderstandings to blossom.  At some points it was unbearable, and at some points it as barely noticed; the tension fluctuated from group to group, individual to individual.  For me, it was the source of many conversations with unexpected people and unexpected conclusions.  It wasn’t the conversion topic I preferred, but they were conversations worth having.  And when the program re-screened the documentary, the turnout more than doubled, and was followed by an interesting and honest discussion.
I’ve never really thought deeply about issues of race before, mostly because I consider race such a non-issue.  People are people, and race is just a concept we came up with out our fever and confusion.  We come from different places and may look different, may even think differently, but in my opinion race is just about as important as hair color.  Ascribed, but cosmetic.  Subject to change based on identity and word choice.  Plenty of people do not think this way; I knew that before I arrived in Accra.  But being here with forty other Americans, in constant dialogue about race, I realized just how much baggage Americans as a culture carry about race, about class and background and ethnicity as heritage.  Whereas most countries claim a native population, their own people, the United States does not have a majority group in this way.  Instead we are a country of entirely immigrants, voluntary or forced, having marginalized the people who were native to our vast country.  We carry the history of our ancestors, or our lack of it, on our backs as a weight on our identity.  We chase our heritage all over the globe and look for the home our families lost as they fled or were taken.    And we carry this weight with us when we leave, and place it on the shores of some new country, hoping they will take that weigh away.

(The image is mine, taken at the Independence Day celebrations.)

Being a photographer in a foreign country, especially one where you do not speak the language, can be daunting.  Perfect pictures flash away from you as your big tourist bus flies by.  You never know how, or in what language, to ask to take someone’s picture, especially without disturbing the image you want to capture.  You nearly always run the risk of offending someone, of violating something, and you never have the words to say, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’ll delete it, forgive me.  My pictures of India were the first I’d ever really taken, and I had no idea then that my camera  was invasive, could be a weapon- could be a new form of colonialism. I have pictures from that year of people telling me not to take photos of them.  Some of them are beautiful, but they without fail make me uncomfortable after my semester examining photography, imagery, and fine art from a “Post-Colonial Studio Arts” perspective.
In Ghana, I have had my fair share of unsolicited photos, as in India.  They always make me feel like a zoo animal, especially when people don’t ask.  Now, I ask because I know exactly how it feels to be a curiosity instead of a person.  The difference between India and Ghana in this case lies in that fact that here in Ghana, I have also have my fair share of portraits solicited.  That is, people have solicited photos not of me, but taken by me.  I have more than fifty portraits I’ve take of children, adults, men, women, strangers and those close to me.  They will travel home with me, faces frank in the lens of my camera, sometimes smiling, sometimes not.  I remember meeting each of them, even people I to whom I barely spoke.
People here in Accra want to reach out, to say hello and acknowledge your presence.  They ask simply that you do the same.  After a few semesters in New York, this is surprisingly difficult.  I grew up in a small neighborhood, where more often than not you said hello to the people you passed in the street or who walked by your porch.  New York lets me sink into my natural tendency to keep to myself when I am focused, on getting somewhere or on doing something.  New York demands nothing of me, other than I be kind to tourists and not step out in front of traffic.  In a lot of ways, Accra demands much less, except for where its people are concerned.  Its tempting, in my new found New York way, to stay inside, work on the mounting piles of homework, and day dream in my air conditioning.  But increasingly, with less than 25 days ahead of me, Accra demands my attention, and my engagement.  It demands I seek comfort in sweat of the marketplace and in local mangos, instead of care packages and air conditioning.  With finals fast approaching, I hope I can oblige. 

(The photo is mine, was taken in the Palm Sunday procession I took part on the week before Easter)

 
I can’t help it; you never abandon your first love.  Given the out of “a place you visited this semester,” I had to give in, and give myself to the genius loci of another country, another continent… a subcontinent.
My diary from my first trip reads like a love letter to the city.  Even though it stole my wallet and phone this time around; the first time I arrived, Mumbai stole my heart.  Or should I say, I tossed in out across the rocks and into the Arabian Sea like an offering to Mumbaidevi.  I relinquished it listening to a boy describe his favorite place in the world- The Sea Link, the Queen’s Necklace, sitting on the wall looking out over the sea, watching the monsoons roll in and wash the city clean.  I walked around the city trailed by a Guju boy’s daydreams, through the city that held the dreams of an entire nation.
I was hesitant about India my first few months there, not sure how I felt about the madness.   Bombay seduced me, Mumbai held me- the city of schizophrenia, with all of humanity’s sorrows and joys contained in its twenty five million inhabitants.  Within its bounds, the dreams of nation are created and dashed.  The seat of power may be Dehli, but the seat of Bollywood is in this mega city, straddling seven islands and ever expanding.  The more people, the more dreams dragged through the dust from every corner of the subcontinent to fill its slums and mansions.  It’s heady mix into which I fell head-first;  I was a goner long before I wandered past the graceful Gothics of the Raj, picked up Shantaram, that outsider, underworld guide to the city.  I breathed in that sweet polluted air, full of dust and auto rickshaw exhaust and God only knows what else, and decided I never wanted to go home.
It was the first time in four months that I was totally, blessedly anonymous.  I could have been a tourist, I could have been a prostitute, I could have been a college student. From my seat in the Irani café on the corner, with my chai and biscuits and Indian friends, I was simply someone that everyone had seen before, and would probably see again, a small fleck in the great mass of humanity that writhed and seethed its way down the crowded streets, through local trains with shallow air.  It is a profoundly human city, marked on every inch with an intense desire to live and somehow carve out an individual space on those crowded seven islands.  Whatever it was in its former life, Mumbai or otherwise, this place has reinvented itself so many times, is the product of so many lives, that the conglomerate name of Bombay will always seem more appropriate: Portuguese, British, Marathi, Gujarati, layers of ownership and distortion across the centuries.
When I arrived in New York, five days after leaving the dusty cities I would dream about for years after, that famed city felt too empty.  I felt like I was walking school corridors during summer holidays, the clean swept empty echoing space.  A little haunted. A few bodies here and there on clean empty streets hurrying to get out of the heat, improperly dressed.  Covered in mendhi and still carrying my Indian accent with my jetlag, New York felt like a city abandoned.  I craved the dust, and the millions of people who stirred it.

(Image is my own, taken leaving Mumbai with just enough money for the taxi, relieved of my phone and debit card, with 40 hours of travel ahead of me.)

(Due to being very, very sick since I came back from India, I am quite behind with posts, but I will be posting up the missing ones in the next 24 hours, as well as trying to catch up with everyone else's blogs.  Sorry for the influx of comments in advance!)

I am, by most people’s definitions, a bit of a loner.  I prefer coffee, alone, to a round of beers at a bar.  I prefer to visit museums in the company of myself, and no one else.  When I do socialize, I prefer parties at home, relaxed and full of conversation, when the beer hits you only when you realize you are all laughing much too hard at the last joke.   I have become accustomed to being someone who does not “go out.”  Certainly not to the club, maybe to the bar.
And yet, and yet.
I have to say, there’s a small bright spot in my heart for Epo’s Spot.  Tucked back behind the busy lane of Oxford Street, garishly lit with red string lights but somehow perpetually dim, it welcomes everyone.  Come evening it’s nearly always bustling, doing a fair trade in beer and popcorn and pizza, accented by one cedi Cokes in glass bottles.  Not more than plastic chairs downstairs, a chaotic mess of  bar, restaurant and flip cup tournament grounds upstairs,  Ghanaians and expats alike come for the ubiquitous pizza and cheap beer towers.  These eighth wonders of the world provide a veritable fountain of beer for 15 cedi, making it the cheapest, most relaxed way to sit back, hang out, and get properly smashed, knowing that there is always a taxi outside waiting for you.  Given the longevity of Accra’s nightlife, even in a place as relaxed as this, you will always turn in before the bar closes down.
Whenever I am pulled out of the house, convinced by my friends we need a Saturday that does not consist of us working sleepily on a bottle of wine, or following a friend to his dj-ing gigs, the night starts or ends at Epo’s.  There we find the uproariously drunk Dutch, extremely forward Ghanaian lesbians, AFS volunteers and university of Ghana students, all lured by the promise of cheap beer, lackadaisical service, and a table that is yours until you abandon it.  It is one of the very few places that NYU recommended to us that we actually go to, and lay claim to as our own. In fact, when a scholars group came to visit NYU Accra, a few were invited, a few turned to many, many turned to a flood, and suddenly the whole place was filled with NYU kids, taking up too much space and talking too loudly.  And those who live here, they moved themselves downstairs and away from the din.  It felt like a violation of something that was not an NYU campus, an intrusion on one of the few slices of real life that study abroad students could participate in without calling attention to themselves.
It was that night that I realized I didn’t need to be pulled out to Epo’s.  I actually really liked its slow paced, relax with your beer atmosphere.  Since that night, with Spring Break and being very, very sick on the other end, I haven’t been back, though my friends have.  I found myself jealous I wasn’t out with them, helping finish the beer tower and passing the time.  It’s been a long time since I was jealous I couldn’t go out to the bar.

(Image is my own)

As someone who is working on an art minor for their study abroad semester, I couldn’t write about art and travel without talking about the particularities ofcreating art in a new, foreign place.  I came to Ghana looking forward to creating art in a new and inspiring environment, and instead was forced to confront truths about my art practice, and Western art practice in general that I had not previously considered. 
It’s said that Picasso created modern art by engaging in new practices in response to his interaction with African masks.  This reaction could be take a variety of ways, but in my Post-Colonial Practices in art, we looked at this sort of work through the lens of colonial and post-colonial interactions, and saw that what could be an iconoclastic and positive reflection of value of this response could also be taken as a new form of exoticism, an imperialism of ideas and appropriation.  These are the questions we face every time we snap a shutter, every time we make as sketch of the world as we perceive it.  The motions of making art become more directly and profoundly political as we engage with out relationships with Ghana, with post-colonial countries, with anything outside our own context that we view as the other.
While being in the consistently new and therefore exciting world of Ghana is inspiring, I find that I am constantly questioning the things I create, even as I create more.  This semester, I am writing more than ever, sketching more than I have in years, and engaging with my ideas about art and documentation in entirely new ways.  I tend to stay away from the political in both my writing and my art, feeling more comfortable when the only thing I am making a statement about is my own experiences and myself.  Here in Ghana, I’ve become increasingly aware that even the self is political, the way one perceives and the way one interprets the world around them.  I am reading post-colonial art theory and can feel its relevance not only in my work but in my everyday experiences.
Choosing to come to Ghana, I am realizing, was one of the best things I could have done for myself, and for my concentration.  I could shy away from important questions of identity and politics when I was in New York, hiding in a cocoon because there were so many people around me and I could allow myself to be drawn along.  Here in Ghana, with less than forty students, and less than ten students in a class, there’s nowhere to hide, and you are forced to engage in a way that is unlikely the classroom in New York City.  The same goes for engaging in your own artwork and writing; with these topics as your only classes, your are forced to engage in your own work in whole new way.
 
 

It feels odd to consider the touristic space when our whole goal is to transcend it.  Or maybe its not so odd, as we actually exist within its continuum- neither here nor there, floating somewhere between the local and the foreign, constantly surprised by what Ghana has in store for us even as we walk now familiar streets and frequent now-familiar places.  Very few of my fellow students have seen the real Ghana.  I know I certainly have not.   In staying in our compound, air conditioned and  isolated, we feel the pull of the “real” Ghana, and the guilt of not seeing it, but we do not know where to look for it.
Is the real, non tourist Ghana the one we found while we wandered the streets of Cape Coast Township, in the shadow of the famous slave castle.  If it was, it was nothing remarkable, nothing postcard perfect or exotic.  It was real people living their lives, as we stumbled in and out of their stories with cameras in hand, foreign accents and good intentions.  Or maybe we passed it as we walked on a canopy rope bridge in the rainforest, swaying over the man-made precipices and praying that the ropes really could hold a full grown elephant.  I hadn’t known until the that slices of the real Ghana were shades of green that outnumbered the names I had for the color.  I thought then that maybe the real Ghana tasted as oddly sweet and bitter as freshly cracked cocoa fruit.
Or maybe the true is our Ghana, the one with dusty Accra roads and honking taxis, but also with many obrunis and neighbors who knew our names and faces.  I think I once held hands with the real Ghana as the security guard grasped my wish and said a prayer for my safe return from Spring Break.  Maybe now Ghana knows my name and sends me its blessings.
It might be that I cannot see the intimate Ghana until I go and come, ko-bra, ko-bra, and think of flying home to Ghana as just flying home, when that hard dorm mattress is the one that I cannot wait to collapse into and I am missing the rhythm  of Twi and Ga around me.  I will have a chance to test this hypothesis soon, as I leave Ghana for Spring Break, to go home to India, to sleep in bed I still think is mine, even after more time gone than I had spent there. 
I am very rarely interested in tourist attractions, even for all the colors that take my breath away and bring the exotic so close to me I can breathe it in.  My own experience abroad has only ever been the intimate setting of a home, the sweaty skin smell of someone else’s kitchen.  Ghana is a whole new level of the touristic experience, with a stark separation between us and them.  I am learning to seek Ghana in new places; it requires that I be braver, and more adventurous. 

(The picture is my own, of the security guard at Solomon's, where I live.  I've been doing a series of portraits of the Guards.)

When it came to the choice of books on the Accra list, I read a few reviews and mostly went with my gut.  And while I didn’t enjoy the first book I tried, I moved on to the next in hope that I would find something relevant to my own experiences in Ghana.  What I found in The Village of Waiting was a narrative of another country, another experience entirely, but somehow the author put on paper many of the questions I had here in my isolated NYU Accra bubble, far away from village life in Togo.
NYU Accra is about as far from an assimilation into Ghanaian culture as you can manage in a program.  Behind thick barbed wire and electric fence topped wall, we live in compounds set back from the road, in self sufficient little communities with their own muliple internet networks on battery packs and generators that run constantly.  When Ghana faces rolling backouts, we have a flicker of power and then again stability, and when the worst happens, we go without running water for an evening, maybe without internet another evenng.  A Belgian student living with host parents came to visit and has begun referring to our dorm as “the palace’.  He comes to stay when he needs a dose of the obruni life.
I knew this the moment I stepped through the doorway of our dorm, that without a tie to the real world of Ghana, we would be in limbo.  Too American to assimilate, but so obviously in Ghana, in Africa, far from familiar people and places.  In reading George Packer’s story of transformation to a stranger to struggling aid worker and out the other side was to gain a glimpse into what the world around might be like if we had been able to experience it in a more organic, integrated way.
This is not to say that this integration is the easier or even better way.  To live alone as a stranger to a culture with only strangers to guide you can be lonely and terrifying.    And one is not given privileged view into a culture simply because of where you live but also because your attitudes about joining.  Packer’s unsentimental portrait of taking in Togo and being taken in by Togo is honest in a way I have felt in sorely lacking in the way many people fashion “Africa” and “Africans” in their mind.  A country of real people with complex problems concerns every bit as dear as anyone in the United States; not only a canvas on which we can project our hopes, fears and criticisms.  In truth, I have felt my semester, and its dialogues, is far more about American thoughts, ideas and conflicts that anything involving Ghana.  It is interesting to consider the post-colonial context of an aid worker through his own eyes, seeing honestly his position of “irrelevance, impotence and contradiction.” (xiii)


Photo credit goes to a friend, Mia, who took this photo of me on one of our NYU trips.

We had no idea where we were going, only the glorious feeling of salty skin and sundrenched window seats, aerated by the wind that pushed reddish road dust into our pores and lungs.  We were at least an hour away from home, with little to no knowledge of how to get from here to there, jus infinite trust in our driver, our fellow passengers, and our selves.  This was our first experience of the infamous tro tro.

In general, Ghanaians laugh at us when we ask how the tro tro systems work, how we tell where they go and how much to pay.  They don’t mean to be cruel, or to strike fear into the hearts of novice travelers; I can only assume that to them, the image of a white person on a tro tro is roughly equivalent to seeing a camel dance the conga; it just isn’t done, and tends to fail miserably when attempted.  The fact is, however, that taxis are still a  luxury to us, and two or three cedis will buy a few days worth of fruit.  Thirty cedi, the cost of a tai from Kokrobite to Accra, the distance we intended to travel, was groceries at the supermarket for a week.  When trotros are less than one cedi for the same difference, who could blame us for being interested?
Unlike my friends, I had faith in the system, and our ability to get home eventually.  I wasn’t worried that the tro tro would take to the wrong place, or that we would miss our stop. I had faith in the driver’s ability to understand the conversation we had had before boarding.  “Will this bus take us to Accra?”  “Yes.” 
Seemed simple enough to me.

But my friends panicked and fretted over the roads we were taking, what direction we were headed, should we get off here?  Each time I pointed out that there was literally nothing at this stop, and plus, we had barely been on the bus a half hour.  It took at least a full hour to get from the beach to Accra.  At the first sign of city life, my friends rushed off the bus in order to hail a taxi, but as I followed behind them, I knew we had no idea where we were.  In a place where you name your price for a taxi and bargain from there, to not know your location put you in a precarious position.  So we puttered around and flagged down a taxi, guessing at the price.  “Ten cedi to Accra?”  The driver refused, which meant, quixotically, that we were on the right track.  After bargaining to thirteen, we climbed in the taxi, luxuriating the in the legroom and the fact we were no longer human luggage racks.  Luxury of course came at a price, but everyone let out the breath they had been holding since Kokrobite when the recognizable landmarks of Accra came into view.  Next time, I’ll trust the tro tro a little bit longer, stay on to go a little bit farther.  In theory, when I leave Ghana, I won’t look quite so strange to the everyday riders. 

(Photo is my own, from Kokrobite)

“On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.”

I remember staring at my cobalt Samsonite, trying to envision packing four months into it.  I once packed a whole year into its narrow frame, but that was as unfathomable then as four months is now.  I packed this same suitcase full to bursting just travel home for winter break freshman year.  I packed and unpack and repacked for weeks, unable to fit everything within the given limit. 
It felt like being in limbo, with a suitcase half packed and the plane ticket bought, when all I really wanted to do was snuggle into the couch with my dog, my family, or my friends.  I wanted more time to ramble around my hometown, wanted to extend my period of limbo indefinitely.  I couldn’t pack up my family’s love, my childhood bedroom, my wonderful friends.  I packed my photographs, but left my beloved books because they were too heavy.  No art supplies, none of my favorite shoes.
I’ve always been a stuff person, a collector.  My bedroom is covered in things I’ve collected from flea markets and thrift stores, travels and gifts.  I love sculpture and large scale painting and took four years of classes in high school and another three semesters in college.  My artwork fills shelves and wall space, tucked into corners and behind furniture.  When I came home from India, I swear the sheer amount of stuff I own doubled.  Now that I had to pick up and move my life again, I cared about the things I had collected.  Those items were repositories of my memories, physical representations of parts of my life I had left behind me, and the people whose love I could not feel directly everyday.  Every statue and pair of earrings cradled my memories, and if I couldn’t pack those memories, I had to leave them behind.  It felt like leaving chucks of myself behind.
My best friend laughed at me as I freaked out over all the items I wanted, and all that I would have to leave behind.  His idea of packing for a foreign country entailed throwing all his clothes in a duffel, and maybe, just maybe, a toothbrush and comb.  He packed for college in trash bags.  He does not see the need for stuff as a repository for his memories.  I’m not even sure he owns a single photograph.  Sometimes, when I have to pack my entire life up to move from place to place, I envy his lack of physical attachment to the stuff of life, and when I arrive in my new home, I’m always glad to unpack quickly, with all I need and very little forgotten.
But I have to admit I miss my giant library of books.  I miss the twenty millions pillows I kept on my bed, my artwork and years of collected art supplies.  I do really miss my things, not because I am unable to live without the things but because when I am far away from home, those things give me comfort.  And so I filled the cracks in my suitcase with statues of Ganesh and bags of tea and photographs and tokens from home, even though they can’t replace the people and places I miss.  And when I miss my mother, I will make a cup of tea from her kitchen.

(Picture is mine, of my hometown)

I’m warming to Ghana- or should I say, Ghana is warming to me, whether I like it or not, because Ghana grows hotter by the day.

I was born in the Northeast, born and raised just outside of Boston, right on the ocean.  Now I stand on the other side of that ocean, and I’m finding it just a bit disconcerting.  Far from the familiar faces of my tiny town, and the easy grid lines of New York City, I’ve put myself in the interesting position on being abroad for a semester in a place I know absolutely nothing about.

I’ve always had a case of serious wanderlust, whether in my feet or in my head.  I voracious reader ever since I can remember, I used to wander through the library stacks of my small town, devouring everything could get my hands on- language books, poetry, novels, travelogues.  It was all the better if that took my dreams to faraway places. 

Despite my wandering mind, my feet didn’t leave the country until I begged and pleaded with the Rotary Exchange Program to let me into their program.  When they asked me where I wanted to go during my interview, I said anywhere- just as long as you send me.  

They sent me to India to live for a year, and changed my life.  I flew to India thinking I wanted to be an artist of some sort, with no clear direction and a vague inkling of what life after India would be like. But the experience redirected my life, and when I was spit back out into the western world, I had the mother of all identity crises. The next year I shuttled my battered heart between New York and Massachusetts, dreading the packing and unpacking of suitcases, and the inevitable tears as I tried to figure out where home was located.

And when I figured out that all I really wanted was to travel, and document the experience, I realized all the things I loved fell into place: art, culture, language, history, photography, writing.  Now I’m less like a person running and more like someone on the chase.  

I knew, or thought I knew what I was getting into.  I needed a break, cleanly, from my life in New York, which felt like it was getting away from me.  I needed to spend some time honing skills and thinking about when I wanted while existing outside of that constant drive of the city.   And so I find myself in Ghana, feeling as though I’ve stumbled into half a dream.  I have a feeling its going to be an interesting semester.