Speckles of red dirt glow and pirouette through the glass blinds. It’s 4am, and the rooster’s crowing. I switch and roll sides in bed for the first fifteen minutes, and decide to sit up. I’m in the village of Adenkrebi, where untraversable rocky hills climb to the mountainside cliffs and overlook Accra, the capital city. The air is stale and damp—different than in the city. I slip into a long skirt for the day. The house is still dark and incredibly quiet, but Ataaba, the house help, will wake in an hour. I curl up downstairs, open a window, and read and sketch design for four hours. It’s in those dark, alone morning hours that I felt most creative, most comfortable, and most available to sketch those interface or print designs out of my mind. Between the hours of 4am-8am, my mind doesn’t need permission to get the creativity to collect and work itself into conducive ideas that are actually sustainable. At surface level, some of my design projects are going pretty successfully, while others are way in over my head, and I’ve realized will take close to a year and a half (huge deadline estimation fail). The most fun part about this is trying things at which I will most likely fail, and figuring out how to succeed at the design. I found ideas for projects that had a “happiness quotient”—ideas with an ecological footprint—ideas that could actually produce happiness with time and effort. So many people are left untouched by machine-like visuals out there—and in those morning hours I studied and designed for a more human approach. I worked on my independent projects, aiming for less conventional, alternative design solutions. My host father, Daniel, wakes up at 6am and I’m welcome to some tea and a banana while we quietly discuss design, culture, and the recent crapshoot of American politics. By 8:30am, breakfast is ready and I sip another mug of morning tea, happily being surrounded by my fellow expats. (By the way, I wanted to kill rooster every morning. Like I told my friends, it's like a tiny screaming dinosaur, and I don't know why God created them.)

So, the word “expat” comes from the Latin ex (“out of” or “without”) and patria (“fatherland”, “homeland”). Thus, an expatriate is someone that lives outside of their native land, for any number of reason, either temporarily or permanently. This term is still never enough to express the huge emotional burden that comes with moving away from our motherlands to a different country, full of unknown traditions and cultures. While staying in Adenkrebi, and even more so in this hostel that I now call home, I’ve been surrounded by expats. In this constantly changing whirlwind I call life, I’m new to living around this certain species set of humans. They are adventurous, brave, self-starters, and thrill seekers that hit the ground running at new opportunities here. They love to travel the world, chase crazy dreams, and enjoy the different flavors and experiences that can only be achieved by living internationally. These humans are my international companions and comrades, my brothers and sisters in adventurous crime. They relate in my homesickness, share funny faces after trying a new food, and know the collective feeling of racing to the finish line where our undergraduate diplomas will stand waiting, only to race more for our Masters.

I know this trip to West Africa is the first time, but hopefully not the last. In Adenkrebi, the stars were brighter and hearts were warmer. I helped in community chores such as as making kenke (and happily eating it), taste testing palm nut soup, and learning how to make a mud home. The last night I was there, I walked up to a cliff overlooking Accra, where I sat and watched the blinking lights of the international flights descend into the dusty, hazy city air, filled with bright lights and tall skyscrapers. Stars draped over the city like a blanket. Late evening dust particles floated in front of the dazzling cityscape, reminding me of my flights here, in a plane filled with other internationals. These were flights with hundreds of people traveling around the globe in thousands of planes that trace a mesh of travel paths on countless radar screens. Flights with people who watch the runway lights streak past until they become blur and before they know it, they’re airborne, flying away from the sun that’s just about to rise in the eastern sky, stonewashed in hessonite. Flights where people meet each other in their weariness to be home, and flights where people confide in each other’s restlessness, and perhaps even stay in touch. Flights with people who peeked down at the glittering circuitry below, 5,700 outstretched miles away from everything they know. Flights with people who have come for weddings, vacations, educational commitments, and to carefully, painfully bury the bodies of their loved ones who worked so hard to give them everything. Flights with anxious expats just like me: unaware of the beautiful, unexpected, and shocking things Ghana brings.

I’m down to only 52 days left here. My goals for Ghana are the same as before I left, and I’m still handling them well:

wake up
know that God is Lord over all
know that no matter what, He is good
know that He is within me, I will not fall
be smart
be kind
kick butt
repeat

In the chaos of this final semester of college, I’ve compared myself to other expats in the way that I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to the local languages, understanding what’s going on, or even my plans post-graduation (job vs. grad school, apartment vs. condo, specializing in app design vs. print design). This goes without saying, and has been a huge mistake of mine to force myself to know what I’m doing at all times (hello internal locus of control). I find myself praying to God constantly while I’m here because I often find myself in a state of confusion (finding directions, looking for notice boards, walking miles to get information because nothing is posted online), and I know I can go to Him in any condition because He has no conditions, always light for my silly heart. Thrown into a new environment, it’s completely natural to search for a horizon line. We’re humans, we like signposts, we want to know if we’re going the right way. As an expat, of course it’s tempting to look around and ask, “Am I doing this right?” Everything is new, everything is foreign, you’re alone and you can’t understand most of it. I'm loving life in Ghana because it's so simple, yet so complicated. The problem with comparison: within a given country, one expat can look entirely different from another. And don’t worry if homesickness creates stress and temporary, situational depression—it’s a real thing and it’s okay. I think I stared at my hostel wall, wide-eyed while eating my dinner rice for two weeks straight. You have to bumble around and find your own way.

So, because I'm over halfway done with my stay here in Ghana, I've decided that the things I'm looking most forward to when I get back are:

Hazelnut lattes + Grand Rapids craft beer
My Steve Madden heeled cognac leather ankle boots (can I get an amen, ladies)
Pumpkin pie
My tortoiseshell reading glasses (forgot to pack my eyesight)
Driving my Volkswagen while rapping to music
Wearing black jeans
The Walking Dead
Hot showers

However, one of the things I'm going to miss most about Ghana is the nightlife. More recently, I slipped in a taxi and squished into a backseat with 3 others, to an exciting adventure of unwinding from the week. Cafe in the day and a bar at night, we were en route to Starbite. There was live reggae music, drunk karaoke (my absolute favorite to watch), and professionally-dressed Ghanaian women and men were there to celebrate the end of a business week. I watched friends do shots for the first time that apparently tasted like gasoline, and I laughed until I cried. The bartender from the counter held his face in his hands and laughed. It’s moments like these that keep me in love with living abroad—being adventurous and up for anything. The other day we watched Ghana play against Mozambique in soccer (we won by the way), this weekend we went paragliding, and next weekend we’ll be traveling to the eastern, mountainous region of Volta. After that I’ll only have 43 more days here, full of expat adventures and 4ams.

As for minor prayer requests, Ghana's neighboring West African countries have been under attack by extremists. Though Ghana is incredibly safe and has had a remarkably peaceful culture and history, pray for blind violence to be replaced with peace in our surrounding countries, and that Ghana would remain safe in the midst of hurt emotions and angry lives.

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Life So Far: 4am