Station

Most towns in Ghana have a centralized location where the “tro-tros” (vans reminiscent of the 1960s’ hippie period which are retrofitted to pack  in passengers for regional transit) do their business. Usually, such a place overlaps with the local market, and the result is horrifying: imagine an ill-advised community chooses to have their Saturday farmers’ market in a baseball stadium’s parking lot at the very time a hoard of angry fans are returning to their cars after a home-team loss, and you will begin to comprehend the spacial disaster that is called the ‘station.’ Passengers unload out of vans while traders remove goods strapped on the tops; boys run flat-bed trailers of yams, cassava, or construction materials through crowds; cars that have been filled aggressively weave toward the exit; new cars cram into half-spaces; prospective passengers search for the correct cars; drivers and their henchman (or “mates”) stand outside their own cars and shout their intended destinations as loud as possible (as if the prospective passengers are undecided where they want to go and simply need some cajoling); and sellers with basins on their heads filled with fruits, snacks, chewing sticks, and sweat towels meander through the chaos trying to make a buck—all parties apparently un-phased by the untimely end-by-collision that seems all but inevitable.

Last Tuesday, I walked into such a warzone in Ho with all my luggage, ready to depart Ghana’s Volta region—a region that has fostered the most intense eight months of my life—for the indefinite future. I laughed at the fact that I would have to endure a long series of dangers endemic to Ghana’s ground transportation system before even reaching Accra’s airport, leaving me with the strange feeling that my attempt to leave the continent would be foiled and, like Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Blood Diamond’, my fate would be consigned to the red soil of Africa…

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Melodramatic? May be, but this feeling underscores the sense of disbelief I’ve been having these past few weeks that I’m truly leaving Africa. These eight months, as fast as they have gone, seem to have spilled both forward and backward in time so that I can’t quite remember my world before Ghana nor imagine it after. The intensity of the experience envelops every ounce of my being, and as such I struggle to accept my being elsewhere (despite the fact that I write to you from an airplane en route to Egypt and then onto Thailand!).

Ok, all of that said, what can I say about my final days in Ghana? I think they have summarized the broader experience: exciting, stressful, beautiful, sad, and strange. A thousand loose ends, many of which couldn’t properly be tied. A thousand young men who think we’re best friends and a hundred middle-aged women who believe they have adopted me, all of whom insist on lengthy goodbyes. Gift-giving and gift-receiving. A farewell dinner in my honor where I was dressed in local garb, we prayed standing up holding hands, and my host father ceremoniously and without warning shoved a piece of a boiled goat organ into my mouth (still unsure what it was) and then insisted I return the favor. 

 In the final week, we finished setting up the new library, organized and ready to go for the next term. I had several meetings with teachers and education officials to attempt to leave durable plans in place for it as well as the other programs I’ve initiated at school. I took a trip back to Bakua—the place of my first love and first broken heart (in Ghana)—and, not surprisingly, it was bittersweet. However, I think it was all worth it when one of the village women approached me to tell me her daughter could now read and that before I came she could not (thank you Phonics!).

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I survived the station and the trip to Accra (although I was compressed into a row of five and my nearest neighbor was salivating uncontrollably). My last two days in Ghana were spent in the capitol city’s oasis of luxury and development. I slept in a nice bedroom of a nice house of a wealthy Ghanaian family friend who sips tea while watching terrible British daytime on her unnecessarily large plasma TV.  I played tennis for the first time in a year, and I had my first brownie in eight months. I hung out with ex-pats who actually get my dorky jokes. Above all else, I felt an indescribable lightness. This was not due to the air-conditioning or diet coke, but rather because, for the first time in a long time, I was not surrounded by or thinking about people whom I felt obligated to help. That can be a very heavy weight.

Ok, goodbye for now, I hope to write again from Southeast Asia, and I still plan to post some more pictures from Ghana and possibly East Africa too. In other words, stay tuned (if you like)….