By: Nate Wilson
When my alarm started blaring at 5:30 a.m. a few mornings ago, I couldn’t help but let out a groan, and neither could my roommate Jake who I had inadvertently woken up. I begrudgingly crawled out of bed, threw some relatively professional clothes on, and popped a malaria pill—I had to be on a bus headed to the Volta region in just under an hour. 
Once on the bus, I was greeted by my coworker Selorm and several other media personnel who were covering graduation at the University College of Agriculture and Environmental Studies (UCAES) in Bunso. Those graduating that day had completed a special competency-based training course in the oil palm value chain, which was designed to give young Ghanaians the skills to manage domestic resources instead of relying on the outside, extractive entities to do so—a purpose which I thought was admirable. The ceremony started at 10 a.m. and I, still only half awake, napped for almost all of the extremely bumpy bus ride.
When we eventually arrived at UCAES, I immediately fell in love with the campus. Nestled at the base of a hillside, it is lush and beautifully vibrant, just like the whole Volta Region. Rife with bamboo, blooming flowers, rhythmic birdsongs, and oil palm gardens, I kept thinking about how peaceful it must be to attend school there and how different it was to campuses in Accra, which are much busier and more hectic. 
Usually, at these types of events, I’m recording whoever is speaking and furiously scribbling down notes for the story I write afterward, but today, that was Selorm’s job. My only task was to capture what I saw with my camera, and once the ceremony started, I knew I was going to really enjoy myself.
Unlike American graduation ceremonies which are typically very formal and organized—and usually boring for that reason—this ceremony was alive with loudness and joy. It started with a procession of all the speakers and local chiefs who were accompanied by a group
of drummers dressed in traditional kente cloth that infused the crowd with energy. As they progressed through the speakers, there were pauses for the drummers to play again and people would get up from their seats to dance, moving their bodies however the drums told them to. At this ceremony, outbursts were invited, not frowned upon. Whether it was what people were wearing or the celebratory decorations, everything was bursting with color. Everyone there was present, completely transfixed at the moment and cheering on the accomplishments of their friends. That is was all graduations should look like.
After a few hours, everything started to wind down and Selorm and I got back onto the bus to start writing. Apart from a window shattering, the ride back was fairly uneventful, and we had pretty much finished the story. To cap off a successful day, we got some Mexican food, which I miss dearly, and I felt grateful to have witnessed such a wonderful celebration.