SOJC Students Tour Historic Ghana Sites by Professor Elizabeth Bohls, Department of English, University of Oregon “There was a deep heaviness inside these places you could not shake.” -Melina Mallari, Media Studies major I sat on the terrace of Elmina Castle on the coast of Ghana, West Africa, looking out over the Gulf of Guinea. Read More …
The room is full of laughter, pizza, and hugs. You can hear Liz Sgro scream joyfully with every new person entering the room. Brady struggles to find the restaurant, joking that he can find his way around Ghana, but not Eugene. — Earlier this week, we had a Media in Ghana reunion at the pizza Read More …
Preface “This thing on?” says Liz Sgro as she comes from off-screen to sit in a suburban home staple, an Ikea-bought brown faux leather chair in the middle of a room. You see it’s a pretty casual yet well-furnished house with an open layout and a pool underneath some slightly overgrown shrubbery on the other Read More …
By: Stephen Ssenkaaba The doors to the 3rd Floor, East Slip apartment in East Legon are now closed to us. Our rooms are empty, the desolate furniture, now stairs up the pristine white walls at both the “girls” and “boys” side- perhaps wondering, just like we did a few weeks ago, how everything happened so Read More …
Here are some of the people I met in Ghana who made my experience so great. I mentioned many of them in my Thank You Note, but I’ve included a couple more here. This is Laura and me with “Bofrot Adwoa” (whose real name I’ve just discovered is Regina), including her entire family (pictured from Read More …
By: Melina Mallari As I sit on my third (and thankfully last) plane heading home, I’m overcome with bittersweetness. I’ve spent the last 5 weeks making connections abroad and building friendships from back home, exploring a new and unfamiliar world, navigating stressful situations and hardships, and doing meaningful work to benefit a community––and amidst it Read More …
By: Jake Moore During the last week of my internship, I didn’t have very much work. I was forced to take Tuesday off in order to make progress on some assignments. Thursday was Founders day and as a result, the newsroom would be closed Wednesday and Thursday; Wednesday because the paper doesn’t publish on holidays. Read More …
By: Stephen Ssenkaaba This is the end. Five weeks, all gone in a split second. It is difficult to come to terms with how everything has come and gone by so fast. As I head out of Ghana, I leave with a full and grateful heart. I can’t promise that I will return sooner or Read More …
By: Michael Walsh This weekend popped off with a bottle of bubbly at the pedicure place we all went to first thing this Saturday morning. It was complimentary, and they even took card. We crushed some Burger King and watched the sun set over Accra before bolting home to get ready. Read More …
By: Liz Sgro For this week’s blog post, I am sharing a piece I wrote for my internship. My boss handed me the final task of writing a PR feature article about the company. For someone who has only been here for 4 weeks, it was a daunting task. But over the last few days, Read More …
By: Peyton Brooks KOTOKA INT’L AIRPORT, ACCRA, Ghana — Thirty-six days in the blink of an eye. Thirty-six days of adventure, learning, community, inspiration, and creativity. Thirty-six days of “has someone called the bolt yet?” Thirty-six days of squeaky bunk beds and 3 a.m. giggles. Thirty-six days of the ‘Bradford Summer Sweepstakes’ (those who get Read More …
By: Liz Sgro I feel like it was yesterday. Leslie had prefaced the announcement of my internship placement by saying how excited she was for me and this pairing. “It’s a really cool opportunity” she would say. She didn’t say that for anyone else so it must be an awesome company I thought. My stomach Read More …
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 Read More …
By: Jake Moore About two weeks ago I traveled to a hotel on the coast with a coworker. We were covering an event organized by the government backed social security company in Ghana called the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT). It was a conference with muslim leadership from all over Ghana and – Read More …
By: Laura Gattis Dear Accra, Madaase. Thank you. Thank you for the way you enveloped me this summer, took me in and treated me as your own. Thank you for every smile, handshake-finger snap combo I couldn’t master, every mispronounced Twi word you took in stride. When I first decided to move here for the Read More …