“How was your day?” my roommates asked when I arrived home one day this week. As usual, it was hard to come up with an answer.

I had spent the day at Anane Memorial International School, the primary school in Nima the group visited our first week here. This time I went by myself to observe classes and I even taught a lesson on rhyming. “What rhymes with sky?” I asked. “Snake!” offered one girl. They eventually got the hang of it, and together we wrote a poem. “Clap for him,” instructed the teacher, also named Catherine, whenever someone answered a question correctly. Clap, clap, clapclapclap, clap, went their rhythmic applause.

At lunch Catherine served me a bowl of banku (a dough of fermented cornmeal) with okra stew and a large hunk of beef skin. It was generous to give me such a big meal, especially in light of our conversation about the school’s trouble with paying teachers’ salaries, and it tasted good as long as I ignored the meat. (I’m a vegetarian.) But the heat plus the sheer quantity of food made me give up about a quarter of the way through. I returned a mostly full bowl to the kitchen, begging forgiveness for my small stomach.

I then made the mistake of asking for the washroom.

Catherine led me to an area behind one of the classes. A wall was erected around a small slab of concrete, and a pipe served as a drain at one end of the slab. I looked back at Catherine for confirmation I was in the right place.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

I nodded. I cursed my need to pee. I stepped over a pile of waste and tried to do my business as quickly as possible.

Two boys then led me through a maze of alleys. We stepped over gutters where garbage mixes with rain, human waste and cooking water. The heat, the smells and the narrow passageways seemed to press down on me. I struggled to keep the banku down.

I hopped on a trotro and minutes later alighted in Osu, one of the swankier neighborhoods in town. I was meeting a friend, and she suggested Frankie’s, an overpriced café and gelato joint on the main drag. It’s also an easy landmark to find in an unfamiliar place. I bought a Sprite to settle my stomach, took a seat on one of the stools and waited.

Obrunis strolled by carrying recent purchases and enormous backpacks. Hip Ghanaians sporting designer clothes and faux-hawks bought big boxes of Frankie’s pastries. Hawkers tried to sell me pineapples and woven bracelets.

I struggled to identify and address a mishmash of feelings: guilt for wasting an entire meal at the school, relief upon escaping the open gutters of Nima, distaste for the consumerist tourist mecca of Osu, anger at my own privilege and delicate sensibilities.

In Accra, I’m constantly grasping for some sort of balance. My days are never “fine”; they’re always a mix of really good and really bad. I ping pong between emotions, swing from contentment to physical discomfort and navigate my way between abject poverty and opulence. This is a land of contrasts, and my internal state mirrors its tumult.

-Catherine Ryan