There are a few things that I’ve been trying to avoid for quite some time, like retrieving the lost items that have accumulated under my bed, weighing myself, saying goodbyes, and packing. And writing this particular blog post.

I have now successfully rescued three ink pens, one notebook, and one Kleenex packet from the filth underneath my bed. I weighed myself and found that I have neither gained nor lost weight. I’ve had to say some difficult goodbyes, one of which was my roommate, whose presence in our room I am missing already. I’m almost finished packing, and I might even still be able to zip my suitcase tomorrow. And now I am forced to write this entry, which I’ve been dreading because the task is so daunting.

I’ve had this entry on my mind since posting the last one, trying to think of how to express my current feelings, reflect on the whole semester, and convey all the cultural tidbits that I haven’t written about yet. All that on top of an obsession with not wanting to forget a single thing. I was paralyzed.

Right now I feel pretty similar to the way I felt immediately prior to leaving home for Ghana. A mixture of sadness and excitement paired with an inability to focus on anything at all. My attention is divided between travel practicalities, looking ahead to being home, and executing my Ghana “lasts.” Over the course of the semester my friends and I have displayed a wide range of Ghana-leaving coping mechanisms. First we wanted to see Ghana—to travel everywhere and do everything possible. We also wanted to understand Ghana—every cultural nuance and sociological pattern. We eventually gave up on trying to see and understand everything and by now, at the very very end, our attempts have gotten more desperate. A common tendency is towards buying Ghana—frantically shopping for last-minute gifts with the unspoken desire to have every type of Ghanaian craft represented. We’re also trying to eat Ghana—I’m trying to eat enough red-red and pineapple to make up for its future absence in my diet. And we’re also trying to photograph Ghana—nothing is too ordinary to take a picture of.

My biggest regret this semester has been not developing lasting friendships with the Ghanaian students. I don’t know why this aspect of my experience has been such a failure, but at a certain point I sort of gave up on the idea. Our program met and made friends with each other before any Ghanaian students moved into our hostel. I had an American roommate. Ghanaian girls are often shy and it’s difficult to tell if boys are actually interested in being just friends. I always felt like time was not on my side in this regard and remembered my own reluctance to befriend the exchange students at Hendrix because the relationship would be so fleeting.

I also regret not getting involved in volunteering. A lot of people have and they’ve had good experiences. I went to a few different places but had a hard time finding a niche and was overwhelmed by the disorganization and chaos. Later I think I just got lazy and selfish with my time.

I really value the travelling I’ve been able to do. Backpacking in the Volta region and stumbling through Togo and Benin are two of my favorite memories. I think I’ve learned to strike a balance between careful planning and flexibility when things go wrong.

I also appreciate the cohesion of our ISEP group. In orientation, when Theresa used the term “ISEP family” I wondered how much that would really be true. Many people have developed really strong friendships, but none to the exclusion of anyone else. We all look out for each other. If there’s someone we haven’t seen in a few days we notice and ask their friends what they’ve been up to.

I am really looking forward to going home to see all the people that I miss. I’m excited to eat my favorite foods that are not readily available in Ghana and I can’t wait for hot showers, warm covers, and freshly baked Christmas cookies. I’m practically giddy about ice cubes, being able to drink tap water, and not having to wear bug spray every night.

But there are so many things that I will miss about my life here: the beach, fresh pineapple, red-red, the bean lady, Adelaide the porter, the night market, plantains, Coke in bottles, outdoor courtyards, big Star beers for around a dollar, fan-choco, drinking water out of bags, tro-tros, the sounds of the street vendors and tro-tro drivers (Circ-Kanish-Circ-Kanish-Circ-Kanish, Pyuawata, ahple-ahple-ahple, Nice plantain), the general tendency towards helping out poor foreigners, the wild bush that is present even on our relatively well-maintained campus, the grand sunsets, the four o’clock respite from the heat of the day, the cheerful and catchy reggae/hip-hop music that is played everywhere, lizards, markets, buying water out of a bowl on someone’s head…

I think what I’ve learned from this semester will be more clear to me after I’ve been home for a while, but I’ll take a stab at it now anyway. I’ve gotten a sense of how most of the world lives. The girls and women selling water and rice with the potential for the tiniest of profit margins represent a huge chunk of the world’s population. The American lifestyle—a backyard, a car, hot water from the tap, and air-conditioning for every room—is not normal. Now I really understand why Ghana is called a “developing country”—it seems as if the entire country is under construction.

I’m sure there’s more…I want to write more, but I’ve totally lost my ability to concentrate. I hope to do some reverse culture shock reflections once I get home to conclude, and look out for pictures too as soon as I’m back in fast internet-land. I leave for a night flight to London tomorrow night, then on to Chicago, and then to St. Louis on Monday afternoon. See you soon and thanks for reading!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Yesterday I had my last two exams and then our whole group was treated to Thanksgiving dinner at our program director’s house. Since I don’t have any more adventures in my known, immediate future, and I don’t have any more tests that I should be studying for, I thought it might be time for a little update.

After just over a week of studying—ranging from reluctantly going over notes and readings to frantically trying to memorize political parties and regime changes in Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Ghana—I am finished being a student at the University of Ghana! Previous to my exam-cramming I had not cracked a book for any of my classes, so my time spent actually learning things was relatively short. More for my sake than yours, I’m going to reflect on my academic experience here, in the order that I completed the courses.

Twi: This class ended a very long time ago. A month ago maybe. Our professor was really entertaining and we learned how to bargain, buy things, and ask directions in Twi, one of the more common dialects in Ghana. Unlike every other class, he gave us more than one test, but the final was still worth something like 50% or so. His tests were pretty easy.

Drumming: Drumming once a week for two hours was too much at a time but not often enough. I never remembered anything from week to week and some weeks I skipped. The teacher talked about the final in a vague, “I’ll tell you later” kind of way. Then one week he didn’t show up to class. Then I went to Togo and Monday morning when I woke up I found out that our drumming final was scheduled for…that morning. Apparently the teacher called one of the girls in the class on Thursday and told her to tell everyone else. So I went and tried to learn the different parts to the song and forgot a huge chunk of it when it was my turn. Oops. So drumming was somewhat of a fiasco. I guess I was not in fact born to be amazing at African drumming. Bummer.

Identity and Conflict in African Politics: I was really excited about this class because it shared some themes from my Comparative Genocides class that I took last semester but it was a huge letdown. The professor’s accent was nearly incomprehensible, even to many of the Ghanaian students (apparently his accent is common to people who speak Ewe as their first language, and is difficult for non-Ewe people to understand). He devoted about a month of class time talking about the Liberian crisis. He used one class period to talk about Cote d’Ivoire, and in one class period he rushed through the second half of Cote d’Ivoire, Sudan, Rwanda, and Ghana. He spent the first three lectures reading his notes slowly so we would write word for word different scholars’ definitions of conflict and identity. After that he offered no analysis of any kind: his lectures consisted of a summary of the various conflicts that we could have read anywhere. I did my best to study, and I think !
 I could
have done pretty well if it was multiple choice, but it wasn’t. All the coupes and parties and ethnic groups were hard to remember—I should have studied more.

Social Work: Working With Individuals: This class was ok. I was really excited about it, but it just sort of lost its appeal at some point. It’s pretty dry material, really, learning about interview and assessment techniques. The professor always used Ghanaian case studies for examples and referenced Ghana’s laws and organizations so I got to learn some interesting things I wouldn’t have known otherwise. The class made my friend realize that she definitely didn’t want to do social work but it didn’t really have a profound effect one me either way. This professor gave us two small assignments during the year, so the final exam was “only” worth 70% of our grade. She told us ahead of time what topics to focus on, so we knew what to study. The test consisted of 20 multiple choice questions and one essay. The essay was fine, but the multiple choice questions were terrible. Multiple choice is usually my favorite kind of test, but her questions were just bad. Like, I !
 could
have written a paragraph about the topic the question was about, but I could not select the right answer from her choices. And each question was worth such a huge portion of our grade because there were only twenty of them!

Art History of Ghana: I have mixed feelings about this class. I still love the professor because he’s so cute and funny, but I was disappointed because we didn’t really learn all that much and he didn’t bring in any art for us to look at. Just some black and white transparencies. The exam was just like the old exam that was on file in the library—oh yeah, you can go to the library and look at the past exams for most classes. I was relieved that it was so easy because I had another one right after it.

Politics of Ghana From Colonialism to Independence: I didn’t actually learn that much in this class because I missed it a lot and didn’t do the readings so it was hard to catch on during class. At least two different times the professor cancelled class and rescheduled it for a Saturday. I boycotted/ could not make myself give up my travel plans to sit in a hot classroom on a Saturday morning. So I spent the few days before the test reading all about Britain’s actions with the former Gold Coast and the development of nationalism. It was actually pretty interesting. This was my favorite final that I took. It was essays: one mandatory, multi-section question, and then you picked any two of five choices. I thought it was a really fair test in that it wasn’t trying to trick you. If you studied you would do well.

On the whole, my classes were disappointing. I didn’t learn very much from them and they made me really appreciate Hendrix for the small classes, emphasis on critical thinking, high expectations, and professor involvement. Exams are set up a lot differently than I am used to. They take almost a month. Exams are scheduled 7 days a week and there are three exam periods each day. The exam schedule was published a few weeks before the start of exams. They don’t publish the exam locations until a few days ahead of time. An exam venue might contain one or two or three different classes taking an exam. All you are allowed to bring to the exam is your ID and a pen. If you brought your notes you have to leave them outside the door. Once you go inside you have to find the desk that has your student ID number written on it in chalk. The exam proctors are called “Invigilators,” which Microsoft Word is recognizing as a real word but I had never heard of. In some of my tests we we!
 re given
preview time to read the test questions and take notes. The Invigilators were really strict and made people turn out their pockets sometimes. You had to sign two different forms and fill out and sign the front of the exam book. It was all very strange and bureaucratic.

After my two exams Thursday a bus picked us up to go to our program director’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was nice to be with everyone and not have to pay for anything. Theresa really pulled out all the stops for us. The food was amazing, especially so after three months of oats, beans, and rice. She’s from the South so the dinner included some things I wasn’t used to seeing at Thanksgiving but am definitely interested in incorporating next year—collard greens, macaroni and cheese, and potatoes au gratin. We all ate way too much, and then we ate dessert. Everything was so good!

Most of us made phone calls home after dinner. The connection was terrible and I didn’t have very many minutes on my phone, but it was really nice just to hear people’s voices. I can’t wait to see everyone at Christmas!