Random Mansion, McCarthy Hill, Accra, Ghana

13 May 2012, 12:09 PM

five days left. I’m in a new beautiful place on the top of a magnificent hill that overlooks all of accra, and it’s a really amazing way to end an eventful, insane, and over wonderful three and a half months here. Long story short, my friend grace’s mom is coming to Ghana this week and so I was lucky enough to be invited to spend a few days here in this really cool guest house in one of the nicest parts of accra. All of this is doubly exciting because even though the other guest house was really nice, I had to pay, and money is super tight because…I haven’t had an income in over four months. It’s crazy to think this is the longest I’ve been not working since I was in high school. 

five days left. I just used a microwave and a washing machine for the first time in months, which was actually semi-jarring. In a good way. Knowing how much time these things save and how much easier they make life after months without them makes me appreciate them so much more. I hope that when I go home I will continue to appreciate all the ease of the western world, and use the added time to my benefit. It’s interesting because I feel like this place is something of a halfway-house between Ghana and the US, with it’s big screen tv and super awesome shower and washing machine and massive oven and so many non-ghanaian things. But it’s still Ghana, and so I had to take my clothes out of the washing machine and hang them up on a line, and the stove still needs to be lit with matches, and the water is still un-drinkable, and a million other things.

Time is going by super slow and super fast at the same time. Since the program ended on Thursday, I feel like I’ve done so much, but it’s only Sunday. It’s so hard to believe that everyone who left on Thursday only got home a day or two ago; it’s crazy that just three evenings ago I said goodbye to my accra homestay family for the last time. I spent all of Friday running a bunch of random errands (took some not-so-flattering pieces to the seamstress to be altered, got my hair done at Jannifer’s salon, bought groceries), and on Saturday I moved from the Madina guest house to the one I’m in now, looked for fabric with Grace, and spent three hours going stir crazy with Grace while we waited for the seamstress we wanted to use to arrive. Because I’m saving a decent amount of money by not staying in the other guest house, I decided to ‘splurge’ and try to get some really nicely made stuff done. Sara paid a lot for a skirt and top combo that was really cute, and so I’m hoping that spending almost three times as much on the last items I’ll have made in Ghana will be worth it. 

love, luv, lav,

y

SIT Classroom, University of Ghana – Legon Campus, Legon, Ghana

11:25 AM, 7 May 2012

hi from a may place. 

i’m sitting in the middle of presentations and it’s kind of tiring, but also kind of surreal. such a stereotypical word to use at the semi-end of things, but it’s true. there are so many things that are happening that…i don’t know. it’s weird. it’s nice to see people dressing up and having everyone back in the same places that we were in at the beginning of everything. like Saturday night we went out and i stayed in the same hostel that we spent our first three nights in ghana in, and walked up the same street where we first got in our first taxis and just so many reminders of first everythings. 

i did my presentation yesterday, and i’m binding my isp today. it’s been such a struggle- though i always have a hard time doing work, especially at the end of the semester. so everything was turned in insanely late. but whatever, it’s fucking done. but i don’t know. i wrote the title last night (and then promptly fell asleep on my computer), i think because i’m feeling not that great even though i’m finally done. i think part of it is because there’s some awkwardness at my homestay and i also have no idea where i’m spending my extra week here. i really really really really really don’t want to be here an extra week, i think it’s because i’ve been sick again (i’m tempted to look back at all these posts and see how few don’t involve the word sick), but also a bunch of other things – like apparently my dad isn’t feeling that great, i’m nervous for my transition to new york, i miss my friends so much, i just want to be home and comfortable and free.

i guess it would be fair to explore what’s happened in the past few weeks. i left grandma lucy’s house on Thursday, and today is Monday. i was sick all last week – i think i have a stomach ulcer, i’m trying to pretend that i don’t – and now i’m starting to feel better, but time is passing crazily slow. 

technically this is the time where things should be picking up, because this is the time where a  lot is starting to happen. tomorrow is the last day of presentations, Wednesday is our departure ceremony, Thursday almost all of my friends leave. I have no idea what i’m doing from Friday on, but next Friday either way (God willing) i’ll be on a plane to Paris, and a week later I’ll be on a plane to finally finally finally finally go home, and then two days later, on a bus to New York to start something mysterious, something  else new.

i guess a lot of the weirdness is that most of my friends are going home on Thursday, and have one set of feelings associated with that (excitement, fear, anticipation, etc.), and I’m not going to be home for nearly 3 weeks. and i’m really exhausted,  physically and emotionally.

but at the end of the day, it’s just 11 days. that’s less time than we’ve spent in most places since we’ve been here, just a week and a half. i guess a lot of the stress/thought is that i have no idea what i’m doing this summer for money, but things are slowly falling into place. 

but this blog isn’t about this summer – it’s about ghana, it’s about what’s happening now. but what do you do when all you feel like you can do is look ahead? for the first time since getting here, i can look at the calendar and see paris, see maryland, see new york, just a few days away. i can see what’s ahead, and as always, that makes it so much harder to focus on what already is.

i guess one thing that’s relevant to here and now is a conversation i had with my friend bri about the effects that being away from home for so long has done to my psyche/personality. bri did her project on black repatriation to ghana and was telling me that she was thinking of repatriating to ghana at some point, and i thought about all the times grandma lucy’s friends asked me whether i would ever move here and how i told them that i couldn’t because i felt too american. and i think that in the most ironic way possible, being here has made me more comfortable in my identity as a black person at home. i think this has been a huge cincher in a journey that i’ve been on since childhood – first realizing in elementary school that i wasn’t a ‘normal’ black person, being irritated with ghanaian culture and tradition through my parents through middle school, finding a group of friends in high school (or really just friend) with a similar identity and allowing myself to explore the dynamics of balancing ‘blackness’ with ‘africaness’ through that relationship, and finally college, where i felt so marginalized by the larger white community and so well supported through the multi-dimensional black community without any of the distinctions of black vs. african that were so common to my upbringing. 

and now i’m here, where in a million different ways, i am a million different things. i am ghanaian, i am ghanaian-american, i am american, i am black, i am african-american. for example, today bri’s project advisor, who is a black repatriate living here in accra, talked about his daughter who just finished  touring yale and a bunch of other great schools at home, and who grew up here. and he was saying that she felt no connections to the ghanaian kids there who had only grown up in america, which obviously makes sense. and i’m the same situation, flipped. well, not exactly. but you get the point.

being so uncomfortable and out of place here for so long, and even feeling much more comfortable with my surroundings but still not belonging makes me realize that in the strangest way possible, i belong in the us. i feel like when i was younger i always felt like i was passing for a black person, but that as soon as someone questioned my last name or came to my house or met my parents, they would realize that i wasn’t ‘really’ a black person. but i think that while my parents raised me, i was socialized in every moment as a black person in america – through the media, my peers, and what my parents knew as black people themselves (albeit an entirely different type) in america.

it’s all interesting because bri, in her presentation, said that she didn’t expect that coming to ghana would break her sense of identity down, especially because most black people come here to try to ‘find themselves.’ i feel the exact opposite – i didn’t come here expecting to have any sort of identity crisis, but i ended up feeling more confident in the identity that i have assumed at home. 

i don’t know what else to write. i just ate two kabobs and i need to poop (read: explode diarrhea), probably because of something i ate previously, except i’ve barely eaten for the past week. i haven’t been in pain for the past 36 hours, which is amazing, so i’m hoping that continues so i can resume, you know, eating more than a few hundred calories away. i think my body is so annoyed with vomiting and not eating that i’m randomly bloated, which is annoying. whatever. i’m praying that my body returns to ‘normal’ – i.e. i don’t have permanent neurological, gastrointestinal, or emotional damage – once i get home. we’ll see!

for now, i’m trying to chill. the weather is wonderful, the last presentation (of the day) is finishing up now, and i can go home to (hopefully) a ghanaian movie with my friend regina, juice, and crackers and laughing cow (living that poor exchange student with no kitchen access life). my isp is being bound as we speak, there’s still at least four hours of bright shining daylight left. time will speed up, or maybe not. i’ll try my best to enjoy it either way. and i will write more!

from the land of the brave,

yasmin.

Some Lounge Type Place Where 2 Guys are Playing Ping Pong, KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana

April 20th, 2012, 10:42 AM

so. once again, i’ve gone weeks without writing. it’s not that i haven’t been thinking about writing, because i have. if there was an award for thinking about writing, i would have won it. but there isn’t. this will be a quick and dirty little post, because i am here, in this random campus lounge, waiting for someone who is helping me with my project, and the thing about waiting for people who say things upon departing like ‘just wait, i’ll be right back,’ is that you never know when they will be back. 

so. for now, it’s Friday, which actually means something for once. (it’s also 4/20, which means nothing here, or at least, nothing for me here). I’ve been working like crazy (or so it feels) on my independent study project (and by default, my senior thesis) for the past five days. with the help of a few ‘research assistants,’ i’ve gotten 38 interviews with people from a variety of backgrounds and ages about their views on contraception, which is exciting. it’s been a very interesting and difficult and fun process. it’s scary to think about how to synthesize all the results i’ve been getting. if anything, i’ve learned that peoples’ understandings are complex and multi-faceted and i know i’ll find it incredibly difficult to have to say ‘well, the data shows this about ghanaians and contraception.’ maybe once i actually transcribe the interviews and have everything side by side something will come up out of the ether. maybe not. 

beyond that, life has been pretty positive. having a modem makes it really easy to access life at home, which i think is actually a primarily negative thing. i never realized until now how depressing the internet is. all my favorite things – facebook, tumblr, feminist/racially-focused blogs, checking email obsessively – are actually depressing as hell.  these outlets only serve to highlight all the inequality and misery in the world. and don’t get me wrong – i love being informed and feeling/pretending like i am doing something against injustice (like signing online petitions and reblogging things), but…they don’t make me happy. i know that sounds incredibly basic, and since when is life about being happy, but i guess what i really mean is there’s so much less satisfaction in sitting in bed and browsing the internet for hours and reading racist comments and angry feminist responses to misogyny and then closing my laptop and sighing vs. spending the same amount of time reading a really good book, or writing, or watching the news with my grandma, or playing games with my little cousin. it’s just much nicer in general to do things that feel like real life. lessons i have learned over and over. i am currently running out of modem credit anyway, and maybe i will just not top it up. or maybe i’ll top it up with much less than i need so i’m forced to do other things. it’s also rather expensive. thing 2930239 to be happy about once i go home – free wifi and no limit on how much you can download/upload. 

unfinished-ly yours,

yasmin