Home sweet Ghana?
I wake up this morning and find myself wishing, just for a moment, that I was back in the bottom bunk in the humid house at Okpongolo Junction in Accra. I’m shrouded in fleece blankets and completely comfortable, but I want to be laying on the moss green sheet I bled and rubbed dirt on for 6 weeks, deciding whether decency by wearing clothes was more important than walking comfortably through the house in boxers.
I didn’t think re-entry would be hard, or nearly this confusing. See…I’m happy about being home; I really am. I love my family and friends. I love the lack of humidity and dust. I love planning August with a bunch of fun little trips and activities.
But as I sit downstairs and munch on cinnamon toast crunch and remember living without
Western luxury, I realize how much I miss Africa and how unpredictable every day was. Here…things are so understood and planned; and though it may be stable and good, there are huge parts of me that want to wake up, go outside, and prepare myself for an unpredictable day. Nothing was typical there…no day was like the other. Every day I walked out of that screeching metal gate onto the dusty street, I knew something unimaginable, hilarious, or so meaningful would happen. Things I’ll never forget.
I miss that unknown. I miss saying the phrase “Absence breeds invention” with my roommates every time we’d run into a problem and have to create some new, awkward way of doing a task we found so simple in America. I miss walking through Accra and really, never knowing what person or event would come barreling around the corner or yelling at me from across the tro tro station. I miss walking everywhere and having kids yell at me in hopes that I’ll turn around, smile, and wave…because I’m this anomaly of whiteness parading as a local.
Of course there are things here that I love dearly and am happy to come home to (friends, family, carpet, drinkable tap water, grass, etc.). But I keep going back to what I left behind…which is funny because I did the same things there, only with thoughts of home.
I just need to channel these feelings into something different. I need to get to Eugene and see more people and get back to the life I had before I left. Things just feel so predictable and safe now…and all I want is danger and unknown. Ha…I bet in a month I’ll retract that statement due to some harrowing experience or crazy love triangle…but for right now, it’s the whole truth.
So…
Re-entry gives me a strange stress and awkward desires. Desires I never thought I’d have. I mean who really WANTS to go back to a country where malaria is common, humidity haunts you, and poverty is “just the way it is.” I know I’ll be fine and come around, but I know now that the privileged life here can be challenged with one of absences of comfort and ridiculous heat. Ohhhhhhhhhhh life how you like to fuck with me.
Things are good. I’m glad I feel like this, I think it would be awkward otherwise. Just gotta keep on keepin’ on…
I didn’t think re-entry would be hard, or nearly this confusing. See…I’m happy about being home; I really am. I love my family and friends. I love the lack of humidity and dust. I love planning August with a bunch of fun little trips and activities.
But as I sit downstairs and munch on cinnamon toast crunch and remember living without
Western luxury, I realize how much I miss Africa and how unpredictable every day was. Here…things are so understood and planned; and though it may be stable and good, there are huge parts of me that want to wake up, go outside, and prepare myself for an unpredictable day. Nothing was typical there…no day was like the other. Every day I walked out of that screeching metal gate onto the dusty street, I knew something unimaginable, hilarious, or so meaningful would happen. Things I’ll never forget.
I miss that unknown. I miss saying the phrase “Absence breeds invention” with my roommates every time we’d run into a problem and have to create some new, awkward way of doing a task we found so simple in America. I miss walking through Accra and really, never knowing what person or event would come barreling around the corner or yelling at me from across the tro tro station. I miss walking everywhere and having kids yell at me in hopes that I’ll turn around, smile, and wave…because I’m this anomaly of whiteness parading as a local.
Of course there are things here that I love dearly and am happy to come home to (friends, family, carpet, drinkable tap water, grass, etc.). But I keep going back to what I left behind…which is funny because I did the same things there, only with thoughts of home.
I just need to channel these feelings into something different. I need to get to Eugene and see more people and get back to the life I had before I left. Things just feel so predictable and safe now…and all I want is danger and unknown. Ha…I bet in a month I’ll retract that statement due to some harrowing experience or crazy love triangle…but for right now, it’s the whole truth.
So…
Re-entry gives me a strange stress and awkward desires. Desires I never thought I’d have. I mean who really WANTS to go back to a country where malaria is common, humidity haunts you, and poverty is “just the way it is.” I know I’ll be fine and come around, but I know now that the privileged life here can be challenged with one of absences of comfort and ridiculous heat. Ohhhhhhhhhhh life how you like to fuck with me.
Things are good. I’m glad I feel like this, I think it would be awkward otherwise. Just gotta keep on keepin’ on…