The End

It is winter!  For the last week, I woke up feeling quite chilly (although I later found out at the hospital that it was only 75 degrees…) and there has been a fog-like haze.  Every year, the Harmattan (northern winds from the Sahara) sweeps up the dust of the desert and carries it over West Africa.  But the severe reduction of visibility is more than compensated by the relatively cool weather.  I am a little upset that this weather began just as I will be going back – it would have saved a lot of sweat.

Tomorrow, I go to America!!!  The nurses at the ward, as well as my host family, gave me a kente (traditional Ghanaian) shirt.   Initially, I did not think that I would have very many occasions to wear the African man-dresses in America unless I convert to Islam, but the outfits that were given to me were western modified, complete with a collar, buttons, and separate trousers. 

The hospital work became monotonous after the first month or two, but I will miss the people who I worked with.  I particularly enjoyed sociological discussions with the head nurse, a sixty-year old man (although he seems a lot younger) who was second child of the second wife of a man who fathered eighteen children with five wives. 

It is truly amazing how much one can become used to in four months.  As I looked out of my plane window to the disorderly and dimly lit Accra four months ago, I already began wishing that I had simply gone to college.  It is hard to explain why I felt like this, since I already had a good idea of what Ghana would be like through extensive research.  But after living in the organized and predictable first world, from Seoul to Oahu to Miami to Johnson City to Augusta to Pensacola, simply seeing the dim lights of disorderly low-rise dilapidated houses from the air first hand was enough to make me wish I had never undertaken this trip. 

But after the initial shock of the first week, the life in Ghana became perfectly normal.  I have ridden on tops of vehicles, eaten food that I would have previously considered inedible such as rats, insects, fish bones, animal bones, intestines, etc, climbed a thirty-foot coconut tree for a snack, stepped on human feces on a beach, took multiple showers in the rain, and many other experiences that I would have certainly considered unusual, if not impossible, in America.

From what I could see, there is little positive correlation, if there is one at all, between a society’s material wealth and the society’s general happiness.  Ghanaians, on the whole, seem very content and happy with their lives.  One Ghanaian friend asked me why there is such a high suicide rate in America --- he could not fathom why a society with as much material wealth as America would have unhappy citizenry.  Perhaps Ghanaians’ religious devoutness gives them a sense of certainty of the world.  Or perhaps one does not miss what one never had.

After four months in a developing country, I am not most thankful of the material good that I have in America, but of my parents.  Once, my mom could not contact me for two days and thought that something horrible had happened to me, so she called my volunteer office repeatedly in the middle of the night until she finally could talk to me.  While on one hand, this was exasperating (you'd better not do this when I go to college..), it truly moved me how much she cares.  I could especially put this into perspective, as the kids at the orphanage would probably have given a dozen years of their lives for such parental care.

Before Ghana, I flatly was not ready to excel in a hyper competitive research university.  In high school, I was plainly lazy and unmotivated - how many people get the highest SAT score in the surrounding dozen counties but don't even place in the top quartile of his class??!! - but ironically, the free time that I have had in Ghana made me more focused and a better planner.  Most days, I set a strict schedule for studying, exercising, and reading - all of which I kept - and I discovered that I am fascinated in the physical sciences.

As much as I appreciated my stay in Ghana, I am very much looking forward to coming home to enjoy the fruits of my parents’ hard work.  It is weird thinking that 'tomorrow will be my last tro tro ride,' 'I will probably never see anyone I have met in Ghana again,' but I think it is the right time to return home, refuel, and prepare for my next leg of my year in China.