Surprise Post-Ghana Blog!

So my friends, it has been a month and 1 day since my return from Ghana, and I keep getting the feeling that I’ve got one more blog update left in me.

It took me almost exactly 34 hours to get from my homestay in Cape Coast to get to my house in Corvallis.  All of my flights went really smoothly, and unlike my travels to Ghana I made it on time.  I did get the somewhat hilarious experience of riding in a tiny tiny tiny plane from Seattle to Portland.  It felt like a trotro as it shook and rattled its way towards my home.  I may have laughed out loud, having to immediately attempt to cover it with a cough. 

 I noted a couple of things in my journal that were almost immediately slightly alarming to me as I was dunked back into US culture.  These included;

White people - we are EVERYWHERE around here!

Whiney white girls - also everywhere!

Safe running water – why do we buy water?  We have some of the world’s safest water and I couldn’t find a drinking fountain, I had to buy a bottle of water.  This is a well thought out scam. 

Automatic flush toilets - Really everybody?  First of all those are scary, secondly, how lazy are you?

Everything is sooooo expensive - snack mix for 5 bucks?! Where is some 1GHC street meat when you want it?

People don’t greet each other the same way - I awkwardly told quite a few people good morning/afternoon before realizing that wasn’t always normal. 

Grass/fresh air – I never realized that there is a smell here.  Well, there is, and it is AMAZING.  I was walking across the tarmac to get to my trotro plane in Seattle and although it smelled like jet fuel it smelled amazing, and crisp, and clean, and so good that I felt like I was going to hyperventilate for a little bit because I was gulping down air faster than was likely appropriate/safe. 

Skymall- Just…. Skymall. 

Also; no one here has limps, its frickin’ COLD here, peanuts cost the equivalent of 80 packets of groundnuts in the airport, people need to calm down and slow down. 

People keep asking me if I will be going back to Ghana.  It’s a difficult question to ask given the fact that I’m not a fortuneteller.  On the surface, of course I would go back.  The people, the food, my friends, the sun, the whole experience, would make a repeat trip more than worthwhile.  However, as many of you know, life is generally not so simple.  As for the time being, I’ve taken a job at Oregon Health & Science University as a researcher in the department of Behavioral Neuroscience, and just a week or so ago signed a lease for an apartment in Portland.  I’ve gone through a couple of grad school frenzies where I spent multiple hours researching schools, and freaking out about the GRE.  So do I want to go back to Ghana?  Yes!  When?  Well folks, I don’t really know exactly what I am doing next week.  So… ask me again in 2-10 years.  I might know what the hell I’m doing by then. 

 It is amazing how life continues to move along at the same blistering pace, even after big life events.  Sometimes as I’m driving my car, wandering around feeling cold, or eating yogurt I have a hard time believing that Ghana ever really happened to me.  I think that is partially because I spent just enough time in Ghana for that life to become normalized to me.  And after 20-some years in the Pacific Northwest that life holds a good deal of normalcy for me.  The confusion for me comes when those two normal lives meet and as I’m driving I realize I’m tailgating like a Cape Coast taxi driver, that I’ve turned to heat up so high that I’m sweating like I would in Ghana, or eating yogurt and feeling sick because I didn’t have milk products for three months.  I wonder how its possible for those two lives to coexist and it is odd to realize that just like how life in Oregon continued while I was gone, the life I knew in Ghana will continue in my absence as well.   

I will bring this whole blog thing to a close with another excerpt from my journal.  It’s the last one I wrote, and I wrote it while on my little tro tro plane as we sputtered closer and closer to home.

“I can’t believe this adventure is about to come full circle.  It all feels like a dream right now, like it couldn’t really have happened.  I spent three whole months working in western Africa, living with a Ghanaian family and having the experience of a lifetime.  I’m so lucky for so many things in my life and while I know things are going to be tricky for a bit when I first get home, I wouldn’t change a thing.  On top of a killer tan/sun burn, I’m bringing home a whole set of experiences that simply cannot be summarized.  I’ve made a couple of the best friends of my life, and even just that is a feeling that cannot be rivaled.  I know I mad an impact too, which feels just as good.  And talk about personal growth.  Nothing like flying across the globe by yourself to a country that doesn’t exactly speak your language, eat your foods, have much of the basic infrastructure that you are used to, and then starting a full time job on your third day there.  From sever malaria to going out drinking, learning how to azonto, how to eat soup with my hands, hail a tro tro, negotiate a taxi fare, succeed in a shopping trip to the market, give directions, speak (a little) fante, rock a sarong, fend off Ghanaian men, take a bucket shower, break open a coconut in less than three minutes, do emergency field medicine, reach out to people with HIV, teach girls about healthy relationships, how to sweat so profusely that you are just constantly dehydrated, I really can’t think about it without feeling at least a little sad about leaving but also pretty frickin proud of myself.  I told myself that I wouldn't chicken out.  And three moths later, touching down in Oregon I’m proud to say that I didn’t.”

Thank you for reading my blog everybody.  It has meant the world to me to know that you’ve cared.