When I first came to WWC, I was not planning to study abroad. I had traveled all over the world working with my mother and thought I would not like a trip where I was learning rather than working. However, when I saw my name on the list of eligible study abroad students for the 2009/2010 year, I decided to check out the trips just in case I wanted to do one of them. I wasn’t interested in going to London, Costa Rica, Italy, or Mexico. However, when I saw there was a trip going to Ghana, I knew I had to go. It was a short-term study abroad course called Globalization, Culture, and Development in Ghana. Short-term study abroad courses meet for a semester and then go to the place of study for a couple of weeks during winter or summer break. I applied for the trip and was accepted. Every Monday at 4:00 during spring semester, I met with a group of seven other students and my professor. We learned about the many cultures in Ghana. We learned to critically look at the term “development” and understand the real implications behind “globalization.” We started learning a little bit of Twi (pronounced “tree”), one of the main languages spoken in Ghana. We had a lot to learn but we also took time to get to know each other. It was a very diverse group of students and we weren’t sure we could all get along for two weeks.Finally, it was May 19, the day of our departure. I got up at 5:30 in the morning, cooked myself breakfast, checked my email one last time, and walked across campus to meet the bus to the airport. Three plane flights later, we were in Accra, the political capital of Ghana. As soon as the plane touched down, all the Ghanaians on the plane erupted into applause (something or professor told us they would do) and for the first time it hit me that I was finally in Ghana. Over the next two weeks, we did a lot of things. We were based in home stays in Accra but also spent time traveling outside of Accra to see various sites around Ghana. It was an eventful trip about which it would take pages to write. However, there were a few days which stood out.
The day after we got to Ghana, we went to a restaurant called Chez Afrique where every Friday a live band plays Highlife music. Highlife is Ghanaian music which mixes Ghanaian drum beats with western instruments. We danced from 8:00 PM to 12:30 AM. While it would have been nice to sleep in the next day, our bus picked us up at our home stays at 7:00 to go sight seeing in Accra. For the next couple days, we traveled around Accra, visited a primary school in Pima (a very poor, coastal section of Accra), and had a generally fantastic time. Six days after we got to Ghana, we headed out to Cape Coast to visit Ghana’s most popular tourist attraction, Elmina Slave Castle. Elmina is a beautiful fishing town on the coast of Ghana. Elmina Castle was built by the Portuguese to assist with gold exportation and later was used in the exportation of slaves. The castle consists of a chapel, dungeons used to hold the people before they were loaded onto ships, and officer’s headquarters. While I have seen first hand the legacy slavery has left in the US, it is different seeing the legacy slave exportation left in Ghana. We were shown around the castle and given vivid descriptions of what the people taken into slavery would have experienced before being loaded onto ships. We were given the opportunity to look out the “door of no return” which leads out of a room whose walls are now lined with wreaths in memory of people’s friends and family. While looking out the door of no return, I started crying and could not stop until well after we were back on the bus. It was a hard morning but I am very glad I got to have that experience.
That afternoon, to help us unwind from a very intense morning, we drove to Kakum National Forest. There, we took a walk on a swinging canopy bridge and got to see the incredibly beautiful Ghanaian rainforest from the tops of the trees. That evening, we drove to Kumasi, the cultural capital of Ghana. There, we toured the Asanti kings’ old palace which is now a museum, and visited a couple of villages which make beads, Adinkra cloth, and Kente cloth. Then we drove back to Accra. After two nights back with our families, we were on the road again, this time heading for the Volta region of Ghana. The drive was spectacular. We drove much of the way next to the Volta River which looks something like what you would expect to see in a fairytale. The water is almost silver; small, multicolored fishing boats can easily be seen floating along catching fish; the banks of the river slope up into mountains which are silhouetted by a beautiful blue sky. On our way to Ho, the capital of Volta, we stopped at a community-run monkey sanctuary where we fed bananas to a troupe of Mona monkeys.
We spent the night in Ho and in the morning headed to a secondary school for the service section of our trip. There, we were working with a group of students age 15-22 teaching them internet skills. Because there were not enough computers at the school for each of the people in my class to teach on one, I opted to stay outside with my professor and the students waiting to go into the computer lab. Outside, we danced, played circle games, and sang with the students. By the end of the morning I had exchanged email addresses with around 20 of the students and was thoroughly sunburned and exhausted. I was glad to get back on the bus and head back to Accra. The next day was our last day in Ghana so we went souvenir shopping at an incredibly overwhelming art market. At 5:00 the next morning, we were headed to the airport to catch our plane home. For me, coming home was the hardest part of the trip. The entire group had gotten really close during our travels (we all got along the entire trip) and I knew I was going to miss them a lot. I had also fallen in love with Ghana. My last taste of Ghana came when we touched down in New York and yet again all the Ghanaians burst into applause. This time, we joined them as well.
Victoria
