Writing Home

As I’m sitting with my feet covered in dust, I am in love with the energy of Ghana. I have searched high and low for mailing stationery on campus, but have weirdly come across none. I wanted to write home to my sponsors and investors who have supported me so much in me moving to the African continent. I’ve come to Ghana on an impulse, chasing a dream I didn’t know existed. But as I’m learning more what it means to put myself and my love for design in a developing country, I’m learning more about what it means to see the big challenges and little triumphs of the everyday.

I would write home about the hike to Boti Falls and my fear of heights getting the best of me as I walked alongside a cliff of Mushroom Rock. I would describe the first time I ate a mango slice, and later an entire mango, and later one mango per day for several days straight. I would write about seeing my two amazing friends tag alongside two genuine, Ghanaian fishermen on a fishing assignment, and see them return soaked and cold, laughing hysterically about how they were literally and contentedly lost at sea. I would write about the sensation when I felt the warm, foamy ocean water of the gold coast, and how I stargazed and walked along the beach in contemplation. About the women I see walking or sitting, heavy boxes filled with leaf-wrapped corn paste balanced on their heads — or loads of plantains, or pans full of groundnuts — and, nearly always, a baby strapped to their back with a length of colored cloth. About the discovery of street sewers that run along the edges of the streets right where a curb should be, and crisscrossed the open-air marketplaces like cording, and if you aren’t attentive, you could stumble into one. About the feeling at the market when you walk through tiny alleyways of creative women selling fabric, and listening to why different patterns mean different things. About the elation when talking about design and our love for creativity and inventiveness, because we’re so luckily close, yet distant worlds apart. About the panic when a huge cargo truck hastily traverses through the red dirt market aisles, and women yell “aya!”, shuffling for shelter of the shop overhangs, as to not get run over. About the sense of shaking a chief’s hand in the center of a dancing village, hugging a queen mother, or clapping with village children as they cheered on a group of drumming men for the community’s elders. About the cold chills I felt in the pews of an interdenominational church, as the men drummed and the women sang praises to Christ in their native tongue, then danced for an hour straight. About the feeling your heart gets when its beats match the beating of the wooden drums in the church About how I am feeling God in the churches with the highest steeples singing upwards, and in the lowest whispers of the slow, Sunday markets.

I would write home about last weekend’s adventure to an outdoor bar. Trapped in this taxi, en route to the Purple Pub, arranged by my serendipitous comrades, I sat in the lap of a fellow obrune with my right side feeling the wind in effort to to make room for everyone in the vehicle. Hawkers stood by the standstill traffic to sell water, newspapers, fruit, bread, mints, toilet paper, hangars, and pre-paid cellphone minutes, yelling in Twi. Quickly interlacing through the Saturday night Accra, we drove to the pub to drink and laugh the night away. I would write about the homesickness, the feeling of joy in seeing my boyfriend for the first time over a video call, and the bittersweet feeling afterwards when you know that you’re both very independent and appreciate growing apart, but miss each other considerably. I would write about how, to a small extent the person who I was before I traveled no longer exists—how it slowly starts creeping up on me as I experience my life and the lives of my international brothers and sisters. About how Ghanaians’ views on work and leisure and quality of life and food and public transportation and art and architecture and tradition, and oh goodness, everything— it all starts to permeate into your brain and it takes over. The story I thought I would encounter before I had arrived to Ghana — the glimmer of an idea, really — was that there was something in store for me here. But there is so much more.