Friday, April 8 - Day 28
It is strange to recognize that you both love a place as home (albeit a temporary one) and will miss fairly few things about it when you leave. This is my feeling about Ghana at the moment. I will miss the smiling kids and the other volunteers, the distinctly African rain, and the walks along dust-covered paths roads to a beautiful waterfall or a haven for monkeys. Though every day here is amazing, there are many things I will not miss. I will not miss being covered head-to-toe in sweat and dust within five minutes of stepping outside or the rivers of muddy sweat that run down our obruni skin after carrying firewood. [Note from the future: Surprisingly, I actually did miss the former during my first air-conditioned office job. Impressive?] I will not miss the constant sickness, how this morning alone at least four kids were running fevers. I will have a greater appreciation for a seemingly unending supply of clean, drinkable water. I will miss practicing my algebra and long division, but I will enjoy the intellectual stimulation associated with higher literacy levels. Immensely thankful for my supply of dried fruit, I will barely miss the food. I may miss the amazing pineapples and mangoes we got on rare occasion, but not the bread for breakfast, noodles for lunch, and rice for dinner with some fried plantains stepping in now and then. I have a greater appreciation for protein now. I will not miss that every day is part of a continuous heat wave or that the streets carry the acrid odor of the trash fires. I look forward to safer driving and vehicles not filled past capacity. It’s a different world out there, a world in which clean, healthy people drive clean, uncrowded cars down clean, paved streets while sipping on clean, drinkable tap water and watching the world rush past. The movies and other media aren’t the only culprits in making American and obruni life seem glamorous to Ghanaians; huge cultural and access divides exist.
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