There are many reasons I keep traveling. It’s not always easy. It can be expensive. And it’s a health hazard for sure (take a look at the long list of shots on my vaccine card and you’ll know what I mean). Nonetheless, the good always seems to outweigh the bad and I keep on packing up my bags.

The men in my family love to play poker. Home games, casino tables, for them the rewards of a successful card gamble easily erase the memory of past tumbles. Maybe traveling, to be trite, is my kind of gambling.

For me, the payoffs are many. Eating a fruit that just days before I didn’t know existed is a long term cure for the memory of a rotten case of traveler’s stomach (a more polite term for a much worse condition).

A local laughing with pleasure at my stilted attempt to try out her language eases the earlier sting of having my naivety as a foreigner used against me.

Seeing the things people create, the colors they love to use, the stories they want to tell distracts me and erases (maybe too quickly) the affliction of sitting and wondering why yesterday I got to fly halfway across the world while others had trouble making it through the day.

After a difficult introduction to one of the largest slums in Accra it was an art gallery that helped me balance conflicting feelings of sadness and happiness, helplessness and hope.

On an air conditioned bus sitting comfortably in cushioned seats, we slowly tooled our way through the red, dusty roads of Agbogbloshie. Upon opening the windows (so that we could avoid that pesky glare from the glass as we snapped away with our Nikons and Canons) we found that the slums are not something you just see. The slums force you to smell what life is like there. To feel how tight and hot it is. To suddenly long for the fresh bottled water on the seat next to you.

Some people smiled and waved as we drove by. Others were visibly angered by us, slapping the bus and shooing us off, smiles replaced by expressions that were difficult to read. I don’t mean difficult to understand. No, they were difficult because you understood exactly what they were saying.

To see is one thing, but to feel it, to be surrounded by it is quite another. Once you’ve opened that window, you can no longer pretend you don’t know it’s there. It looked just as I’d expected. But it felt much more intense.

Luckily (and I am sincere in saying this) I will have the opportunity to spend more time in Agbogbloshie. When I do I am certain I will come to see and smell and feel many things there – both good and bad. But on this day Agbogbloshie left me grappling for answers that do not exist.

What felt like an eternity in this new area of the city was really only about fifteen minutes. Quickly we were back on the main roads of Accra with sturdy buildings and open spaces filling our windows. We pulled up to a large terracotta colored structure and I gradually found a mental reprieve.

The Artists Alliance Gallery sits on the sea. It welcomes you into a cool, quiet space and gives you room to think and feel. To make thinking and feeling an easier task if fills its many rooms with the loveliest artwork. A sculptural piece made from scrap metals and old headlights suggests a Ghanaian woman in traditional dress; another depicts people in kente cloth clambering skyward. Threaded designs that are twisted and woven (not embroidered exactly, the thread is laid in close together rows that bend into various shapes) fill whole walls with color and texture. There are contemporary paintings of old things from Ghana and new things from Ghana, antique pieces of pottery and old coins, coffins shaped like fish and tennis shoes, and the list goes on.

Seeing such wonderful Ghanaian creations – the beauty the artists have seen around them, interpreted, and made into beauty anew –  brought a sense of hope and joy.

No, that sounds too broad. It’s not hope in the sense that I think this art can or will change the conditions of what I saw before, but hopefulness in knowing that people have the capacity to find beauty in many places. Hopefulness in knowing that there is a lot of beauty in Agbogbloshie – in its people, in their resourcefulness, in the things they create – and joy in knowing I will have the chance to go and see it.