My apologies for the horrendous length at which it has taken me to return to this blog – the town of North East, Pennsylvania, is a virtual black hole, the fates conspiring against my attempts to connect to the outside world.
In any case, as the above statement implied, I am, in fact, back in the US and back in my hometown… for the moment. The return trip included 24 hours without sleep due to energetic small children on planes, an emergency landing in Dakar to see to a sick passenger, delays in and out of JFK, and overly talkative women chatting about bad relationships and cat urinary tract infections at midnight en route to Buffalo, NY. Still, safely returned I am. (Truth be told, I think the 24 hour lack of sleep saved me from a more painful jet lag transition.)
While I am, of course, happy to be back in the US, as with everything, there are pros and cons. For instance, while I am overjoyed to be back in a culture and society that enables me to walk into public without being gawked at, hit on, and/or proposed to, my visit to Washington, DC, in the past week was a stark reminder that this also meant I had to retrain myself to walk quickly, limit eye contact, and limit smiling needlessly. Then, though happy to be back in a land of sour gummy worms and sipping chai latte in a café (as you now find me), using my layover in JFK to seek out dinner was a harsh return to US prices – everything is so expensive in this country!
More seriously, though, I have now experienced firsthand that which they (that ambiguous “they” which seems to rule the world) call “reverse culture shock.” I’ve dropped from the capitol of Ghana, West Africa, to a stereotypically small, conservative agricultural town in suburban Pennsylvania. A week’s escape to visit friends and bum around in DC helped ease the transition but, for better or worse, only encouraged my ever-growing wanderlust. The author Paul Theroux once described travel as “intoxicating,” and I’d have to agree.
Now nearing a month since my return – as I know from the gradually depleting supply of anti-malarial medicine – I have consistently faced one particularly frustrating question: “So, how was Ghana? Tell us about it.” Here’s the thing, though: one can’t summarize a country in a few sentences worth of a narrative. I’ve fallen into the habit of commenting in heat level, validation of the stereotype of friendly Ghanaians, short explanation of how I ended up there, and a note that I explored a bit on the weekends. And voila, you have a summary of my two months in Ghana. Better yet, I’ll hand over my photo album and welcome questions as the audience flips through, lingering on some and merely glancing at others.
While I prefer a more Q&A, discussion based sort of conversation, I suppose some factors of the experience can be broken down. For instance, favorites: that stereotypical Ghanaian friendliness and welcoming atmosphere, the canopy walk at Kakum National Park, and chatting with locals. Most awkward: being the only one in a room not speaking Twi, and thereby going from unavoidably gawked at to virtually invisible, and being unaccustomed to the services of a live-in cook or a driver. Most frustrating: seeing issues – on both sides of the ocean – and knowing that there is little I can do to better the situation.
It is that last factor that, admittedly, struck me the most: gross disparities of wealth, natural disasters striking at the most vulnerable and impoverished, political corruption and unrest, mistrust of others and of one’s own abilities, and complacency on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly in regards to racism and racial profiling. As we drove to the office one morning, I stared out the window as per the usual, but couldn’t stop one question from coming to mind. How do you fix this? Or, more appropriately, how do we fix this?
Frankly, I don’t have the answer, but I can’t ignore the question. It’s maddening, really – but I’d rather be unspeakably frustrated in this way than be blissfully ignorant. Of course, I was well aware that such things presented massive problems before my trip to Ghana, but seeing them up close and personal raised the bar of irritation. It makes me want to shake people, crying “How do you not see it? How do you not care?” More than that, though, it makes me unbelievably grateful for having had the opportunity. May it be only the beginning of my intoxicating wanderlust, and here’s hoping my experiences and the sharing of them can bring some amount of learning or benefit to others, limited though it may be.
*Ah, and speaking of intoxication: for me, travel and writing go hand in hand… travel implies observations and thought, translating into words, etc etc. Now that I’ve completed both my DC blog and my Ghanaian experience, however, I’ve decided to see if I can’t start up something with a greater longevity and somewhat larger breadth (being fairly unrestricted). Thus the work in progress, http://theresgrassinmyloofah.blogspot.com. Feel free to take a gander.
