My decision to participate in the Media in Ghana program was somewhat arbitrary, made to satisfy an internship requirement in my program, yet it has made a long-lasting impact. It veered my life and career in new and unexpected directions. I arrived in Ghana for the last term of my bachelor’s degree, planning to enter the Peace Corps and be sent to Eastern Europe once I finished. My internship at the Ghanaian Times was wonderful and difficult, both full of growth and cultural clashes. During my time in the field, my favorite experience was covering the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s independence. Members of the media got to be in a parade with a front-row view of the festivities. The celebration was large and loud and full of dancing, and it was an opportunity for me to learn about Ghana’s darker history and to celebrate Ghana’s growth. I will never forget the vibrant joy that spread through the air that day. In contrast, my least favorite experience was wandering the University of Ghana Legon campus looking for the Math Department, where I was supposed to cover an event. I spent over an hour looking for the building, and everyone I asked for help had no idea where I was trying to go. I simply couldn’t understand it. Eventually, I realized that individuals were unfamiliar with the word “math” and asked for directions to the “maths” department, a pronunciation influenced by Ghana’s British colonial heritage. Once I grasped my mistake, I found the math department in five minutes.
The most difficult experience I had in Ghana ultimately turned out to be an experience that changed my life. One day, I was sent by my boss to learn about government initiatives to eradicate guinea worm. A few weeks later, after the Media in Ghana program had completed I spent a week on my own with two goals. The first was to travel to Northern Ghana to see Mole National Park and the second was to conduct interviews with students and teachers about the educational system for my final paper. In a small community outside of the northern city of Tamale, I met a group of women making lotion. They showed me around their houses and told me about their lives, sharing that they were Muslim and all married to the same man. They lived in simple and small but clean and well-cared-for structures. One woman brought me into her home and introduced me to her daughter, who was about eight years old. Her daughter had guinea worm in her foot. She got infected after drinking dirty water near the house, water the community still relied on. Since the young girl could not walk to school on her foot, she had stopped attending school. Her mother told me that they had visited a nearby clinic, but the clinic told her to take her daughter to a hospital. Since the family did not have the money to pay for transportation and medical costs—which, if I remember correctly, would have cost about $40 total—a young girl’s future was put in jeopardy. After I said goodbye to the community members, I left. The next day I found myself watching wild elephants, warthogs, and monkeys in Mole National Park, but my mind kept wandering back to the young girl I had left behind. I kept wishing I had given her $40 or done something more for her. On that day, and for many days after, that young girl stayed on my mind.
I decided to go back to Ghana and volunteer. I saved money through working multiple jobs for a year and then returned to Ghana with the goal of volunteering with smaller and more local educational initiatives. I worked with two small educational non-profits in Accra. The first organized scholarships for students to attend secondary school, and the second served children in a rural area on the outskirts of Accra by offering after-school learning programs and a library. I found a small apartment in the same neighborhood where I had lived during the Media in Ghana Program, near many of the friends I had previously made. One day, a woman I had met the year before saw me in the street and came to say hello. After catching up for a while, she told me excitedly “I saw you in the magazine.” “Oh no, it wasn’t me!” I responded, certain that I had not been pictured in any magazine. She swore that it was, told me she had saved the magazine for me, and promised to bring it to me. A few days later, she returned with the magazine. In it was a full-page advertisement for Wli falls with a picture of myself and the entire 2007 Media in Ghana group in front of it. We had visited the waterfall on a group trip, and when we took a photo in front of the waterfalls, apparently so did someone else.
When I left Ghana a year later, I accepted an AmeriCorps position in Maine to coordinate educational programs for Somali refugee youth. After serving for a year in Ghana and then serving for a second year in Maine, I had become aware of my passion for development and that I wanted to be more skilled to better serve those I worked with. I went back to school and got a master’s degree in International Development. Fast forward several years, and I am now one year away from completing a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Development Studies from the University of Melbourne in Australia. This path I am now on has been greatly influenced by the experiences and altercations I had in Ghana. While I have moved away from journalism as a career, I still consider the ability to write one of my most important skills.
One of the other students in my Ph.D. program comes from Ghana and was a student on the campus where I had classes while I participated in the Media in Ghana program. We speculate sometimes whether we ever walked by each other. Next week, we are having a Ghanaian lunch together complete with banku, okra stew, and jollof rice. While I haven’t gone back to Ghana in about seven years, we often talk about Ghana’s current events and culture together, and I continue to learn about Ghanaian culture through his eyes. While I hope to return to Ghana one day, I am not sure if I will ever get that opportunity. Yet, whether I return or not, Ghana to me is a second home because I owe much of who I am as a person to my time in Ghana. The people I met shaped me in new and beautiful ways. I will never forget the impoverished family I lived next to who brought me homemade dinners on occasion, saying “You must be lonely without your family” or the neighborhood children who would come over to my house regularly to watch television with me. Even now, I still have a picture of them in my office.
In Ghana, there is an expression that I love: When you are a stranger, you are a friend—and when you are a friend, you are family. My experience in Ghana taught me about the importance of building community through acceptance and serving those around you—and that lesson, more than any other, still drives me each and every day.