By: Peyton Brooks

Not a moment has passed during our introduction week to Ghana that I haven’t been covered in a thin layer of sweat. The humidity makes the air feel thick as we walk through the streets of Accra. It has been an action-packed series of events, so I will lay out a highlight reel of moments during week one.

 

African Auntie Anxiety

In Eugene, access is a luxury that not many people can afford. I remember calling salon after salon during my high school years and repeatedly getting rejected by a nervous receptionist who said “sorry, we don’t do urban hair here.” In Ghana, however, it’s a whole new ball game. The streets are lined with salons, advertising the immense variety of braids that they can do: box braids, twists, locs, cornrows, knotless, passion twists, etc. This type of access is completely foreign to me, which led to a nearly palpable excitement radiating from me when I finally found the time to make an appointment. After the recommendation of a few other UO students in the area, I went to Sireen Hair Salon in North Legon.

The journey to the salon was an experience within itself. Calling an uber in an environment that only recently introduced addresses isn’t the easiest of challenges. It took about 40 to 50 minutes to reach a destination that was supposed to take 19 minutes. For context, there wasn’t any traffic and the road was straight. So the uber that started at 20 Cedes quickly turned into around 40 Cedes. I originally brought 400 cedes because the girls who recommended it paid 315 cedes. I finally found the location and had the best hair washing experience of all time. I sat in the chair for about four hours and had five women braiding my hair at one time. When it was finally finished, auntie said it was 400 cedis and my heart stopped beating. My palms got sweaty, my breathing was short, and my eyes started filling with tears. I am not good with anxiety, and in that moment – my anxiety was through the roof. Immediately I called the group for an SOS “please help, I need someone to come rescue me” call. By the grace of God, Sam and Laura came to my rescue with 50 cedis in tow to pay my metaphorical bail, since I couldn’t leave the salon.

I breathed a sigh of relief the moment I saw them, said a heartfelt apology to the aunties, and never felt more excited to be home.

The Anani Memorial International School

I would like to preface this by recognizing that my positionality places my thoughts regarding this school to be heavily influenced by my traditional American upbringing. Visiting the school was jarring, to say the least. I grew up going to areas in the United States that would be considered very impoverished communities, but nothing compares to what the group saw on Thursday, July 7, 2022. The streets were bustling with street hawking, moving from place to place, cattle in pens or being placed on top of cars, and long lines of traffic that would have broken nearly every driving law in the US. We walked through narrow back alleys and occasionally needed to step over deep gutters filled with various forms of waste; human and animal alike. Eventually, we reached the entrance of the school and were greeted with a compound-like structure where cracks sprouted from a poorly laid foundation up the purple and white cement walls. Little eyes peered through the barred windows of classrooms, looking at the older children dancing for us as a welcome. I could talk all day about those kids. The children were the most lovely children and our group had a blast dancing with all of them. One girl was a 12-year-old named Gloria who I connected to extremely fast. We talked about her goals and what life is like. Thanks to Sam, Gloria and I were able to get polaroids with each other. She got one and I got one and we put our names on it to remember the day. Leaving was terrible because she hugged me so tight I could feel her fingertip press into my back in an effort to keep us there a little bit longer. She looked me in the eyes and said “I wish I could go with you” and broke my heart because, at that moment, there was nothing that I wanted to do more than take her back to Oregon and show her all the places I was talking to her about.

Eventually, our group left with the headmaster who said “It’s nice to see them smile once and a while” and twisted the knife that had already been placed in my heart. Once arriving at the bus, Liz mentioned her conversation with the kids when she asked the question, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” and the response was “a restaurant.”

The ability to go to the school and see what 80% of Ghanian people live like was important to me. It checks my privileges at light speed, to the point that going to a really nice restaurant afterward left me a bit hollow. If I take anything away from this program, outside of my internship, it will be that moment. The moment I realized just how lucky I was to be given the opportunity to pursue my goals and aspirations without having to worry about where my next meal is coming from or if I am going to get ill from the food I eat

This week was packed with a lot of culture shock moments and anxiety, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. When people say “it’s time to get real-world experience,” this city is the most real-world experience anyone could have. So many people in the world don’t have the ability to be university educated because of where they live. Those real and human stories are the reason I chose to tell stories in the first place, and Ghana has done an excellent job of reminding me of that.