"How was Ghana?"
The Past
“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living, breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.”
“It is not okay to color us as these dumb do-gooders who you have the special privilege to watch us work. Please, don’t act like you have ever held the hand of a child here or will ever connect with a human in Ghana.”
Now that I’m graduated, it’s time to speak honestly about my study abroad experience. I had no bold epiphany, blinding luminosity, and no great burden of the developing world hurtled toward me. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy Ghana. It was simply, incredibly, incredibly, difficult. I quickly realized that humanitarians’ propensity to take themselves too seriously were inhibiting honest dialogue about our program and its industry that could catalyze transformative change. The words I’ve held suspended until now were the carapace that kept me safe. With 12 girls and 2 guys all under the age of 24, group dynamics was a constant frenetic crossfire of passionate opinions. We all changed and morphed together, and I am so proud of them. But they say love is blind when you travel internationally, so I closed my eyes, and I fell the hardest break of them all.
The day my father died, I stared at the pale yellow wall in front of me. My ears rang. My mom came over and hugged my skin that I couldn’t feel. I was on my knees, screaming inside, but no tears came. My friend brought me tea. I stared at the way the milk swirled and chased the stonewashed tea water. That night I dreamt of worms eating out his decomposing gray-blue eyes that used to relentlessly detonate with love in the morning and under the moon. Because those worms probably were.
In Ghana, we visited villages where they were allowing a rotating door of volunteers, resulting in additional harm and unhealthy attachment for the children in need. I felt the same weight of being a fatherless individual. I felt it all over again—the yellow walls, my ears ringing. I knew, at a minimum, what these children were going through. They have already experienced loss and abandonment, and to perpetuate this cycle by allowing volunteers to come and go has been proven to be detrimental. These children didn’t need short-term love—they needed it for a lifetime. (*Cue humanitariansoftinder.com*) This feeling is in a place that's not of the physical world. I wrote about it, and there were knee-jerk reactions. People wrote things about me and the way I see the world. People had break-ins and stole things, which provided the unalloyed kerosene for their anger. Some people had accidents and broken limbs and had to fly home early. A burn book was written to me, a malaria scare surfaced, I contracted typhoid (a bacterial infection due to Salmonella) and was hospitalized, and I have never been so aware of the color of my skin. Now we know why storms are named after people. I made wonderful, unexpected friendships internally and externally from my program, but this was not a typical study abroad experience.
It’s tempting to want to go rogue, keeping your life and burdens to yourself—true community can be scary. My writing was invariably the target of someone else’s prior hurt, past experiences, and lazy stereotypes. People were capable of being reduced to trolling for a negative response and little else. The words, “…these thoughts aren’t something you share. Tuck those away,” were shared among my fellow colleagues. To say that I didn’t see race was almost to say that I was going to use my place of privilege to refute and deny the challenges of those who do not have white privilege. The only reason people have said that race is not an issue is because they wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I’ve never left a place feeling so small and overwhelmed by the historical, immediate, and cultural implications. I loved Ghana and was so scared of it at the same time. The strong and negative reactions to my writing didn’t change how I felt about being living as a minority woman in a completely different world, with some communities involved in voluntourism. It just made me question how forthright I could be about who I am, and how much I could trust my community. I loved Ghana, and I loved its people. But I was surrounded by academics who built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge—if an experience is not familiar, it’s unbelievable. Some came back with exaggerated (and unexaggerated gratitude) that came with traveling abroad. Some feel that it apparently changed their lives, and some left the same way they came, both instances being normal. I felt the weight of being white, and I felt what people of color feel in the States. The relationship I had with studying abroad was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out. I wanted out. And I wanted out now.
But there’s a kind of light that spreads out of living in a developing country—everything changes and the world opens up and you’re not afraid of living abroad anymore. I learned to be where I am—it takes a lot of intention, cultivation and vision to really lean in and engage with the small things. Too often, we think travel and adventure will fix everything—when they won’t. And that our lives need a total overhaul—when they don’t. I had to pray when I didn’t feel like it. In the matter of King David, it didn’t matter what he felt, he embraced it and lifted it to God. And rather than carefully choosing or censoring his words, David shared with unabashed honesty. He felt close enough–comfortable enough—with his best friend to share his heart. He knew simply, that God could handle all that it felt in any given moment.
“I am still confident of this; I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Be strong, take heart, and wait for the Lord.”
The Present
Before I embarked on moving to Ghana, it seemed everyone had a warning word to say about culture shock upon arrival and reverse culture shock upon returning. As for the little things, I felt hot water for the first time in months (Ghana has hot water, just not where I stayed). My fingernails don’t have dirt under them constantly. Curly fries are delicious. There’s nothing too terribly different about the lifestyles I can have between America and Ghana—it’s just the little things. A couple weeks after I returned to the States, my boyfriend and I visited Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia for my master’s degree. Everything about it was perfect—the limitless resources readily available to me for free, the state-of-the-art facilities, and the community of people who just got it. They understand design, the urgency and hustle of the work, and the drive and fulfillment that comes from not being able to get up until you’re absolutely and unquestionably done with your work. The kind of people that hunch over their screens and drafting desks and know that if no one else will, they can. And it was perfectly human, and so refreshing and thrillingly new. We walked around a beautiful park that scales a historic district, and all of the sudden, between the live oak trees, the bustle of the people running around, and the grass—the grass—grass that went on for 30 acres—my ears started ringing and my body felt heavy. There were many white people who had never experienced West Africa and what I had seen there, and it wasn’t their fault. Too many white people in their $40 t-shirts and designer wedges. So many people who had never had the heartbroken desire to come back home. People who will believe all kinds of shit about Africa if you just include the words “adventure”, “Jesus”, “my calling”, and “village” in the same paragraph. I felt contradicted and the logic was skewed. After five months of wonderful new Ghanaian friends, deliciously new foods, and a bevy of new experiences, I returned home, only to find myself breaking down on a neighborhood curb less than 2 weeks later, self-consciously crying because there was so much grass. Ridiculous. My boyfriend just sat there, my knight in shining grace and patience.
At the time it seemed too absurd to fully comprehend. I had mastered the Ghanaian trotro system. I had passed a four-hour language test in French. I had gained friends in multiple countries. Had I really overcome all this only to be trumped by grass and white people with their selfie sticks? And the $6 cheese in the flipping grocery store? And ice in a glass of water? What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was suffering from crazy, extreme reverse culture shock.
“But I do make one promise. That such an exploration will infuse your life with a meaning and sense of purpose you cannot now predict. Happiness — not in a blissed out unicorns and rainbows sense — but rather a deep satisfaction that your life has value. A value that is infectious; and can be shared. Passed on as inspiration in service to others who feel impossibly stuck. Imprisoned by a life not of their conscious choosing but often compelled by circumstance; and the perils of the thinking mind — an organ wired to prioritize comfort, security and avoidance of fear and challenge over adventure and the depth of experience.”
The Future
I’ll lay it out and forget being all meta about it: I don’t care about my culture. It’s been 63 days since my undergrad college graduation. One semester I took a literature class on the horrible, habitual livelihood of the middle class through the context of Russian literature. Sounds like a weird mix, but it was one part amazing and the other part made me internally barf on my own culture three times a week. I listened to lectures on how the middle class graduates from college in a decently ordinary major due to societal expectation, lives in their comfortable suburban neighborhoods, goes to their 9-5 desk job so they can have a nice salary to buy things they don’t need to impress the people they don’t honestly care about, and do it all over again every painstaking 6am until they retire, clip coupons all morning and die thinking they’re in Candyland. And the best part about this is that I’m noticing this lecture theory everywhere afterwards. Let me set this up for you: somewhere, on a Saturday in the local supermarket of a middle class community, all of a 40 year-old businessman’s cares will rain down all at once, a fiery rainstorm of impatient inconveniences and silent death wishes will slowly but surely mist over to a 17 year-old who takes an entire cart full of bulk Pizza Rolls and Red Bull to the 10-items-or-under self-checkout kiosk, and it’s so hideously beautiful because in that first-world moment, it’s the most uncomfortable he’s been all week. Settle down, buy your Subaru, give time and commitment to your career, and never leave the comfortable life. You live your incredibly easy, middle class lifestyle. Most of us, most of the time, get sucked in by life’s cruel trivialities, steamrolled by its unimportant dramas; we live and die by the side notes and distractions and vicissitudes that suck the energy out of us. And this is our peculiar American culture. After living abroad, I’m asking myself, “is this the culture I really belong to?” After all, Americans always have to be right about everything.
Now, this is an extreme commentary. I have inter-generational respect. But the first-world is overrated. And I don’t care about my culture. And I think not caring about your culture can have a positive effect on our families, churches, and society. We should move from caring about our culture to seeing that we are not first-world heroes. We’re struggling as a first-world, too. We’re just hiding behind all of our stuff. There is material poverty, physical poverty, spiritual poverty and systemic poverty. I’m not talking about the “I am so thankful for what I have, because they have so little” bullshit. I knew upon return that my coffee costs as much as many people spend in a whole day. I’m talking about these first-world conveniences thrown everywhere. Strewn about like seeds. And for what purpose? For what reason? Easy comforts? This is the problem, friend. But what if I just didn’t give single damn? Now, not giving a care and not caring about my culture may seem simple on the surface, but it’s a whole new animal under the hood. Because when we forget about our conveniences, when we choose to give a shit about everything, then we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times, that’s when life screw us over. Essentially, we become more selective about the cares and goals we’re willing to give inside of our culture. We should care about becoming people who don’t give a single damn about adversity or failure or embarrassing themselves—the people who just laugh and then do it anyway, because they know it’s right. They know it’s more important than them and their own feelings and their own pride and their own needs. They reserve their goals and cares for what truly matters. Friends. Family. Purpose. Pizza Rolls.
And because of that, because they reserve their damns for only the big things, the important things, people give a damn about them in return. It's okay to have a job that is simply the means to your living, because your purpose in life is not found in that. Be a light and pursue what makes you come alive outside of your nine to five. Finding meaning in our culture and workplace isn’t easy, but it is probably among the most important things we can do. Relate your own purpose to your job. See the big picture. Being honest with how you feel about your culture can be difficult, but it’s important. After Ghana, my life has not changed. I’m not some liberal white person looking for more cultured friends because I’ve lived abroad. After Ghana, I’ve realized the disappointment of my own culture and the entitled comfortably of it all. If you find that you’re making changes in your life, you need to ask yourself whether those changes are for the approval of others or in order to facilitate a more spiritual or cultural awareness. Christianity doesn’t make us better, smarter, righter or happier than anyone else. When all else fails, serve. Be happy in your uncertainty. You don’t get a cookie for reducing it. So enjoy the ride.