"I was smitten for life."
When I was really sick with malaria (or whatever tropical disease it was) I had a lot of time to think. I couldn't do much for about 3 days so I read a lot and wrote a lot. I thought a lot about what the trip meant to me- so far I had been in Ghana for just over 7 weeks. This doesn't sound long at all in retrospect.
I realized a lot about myself while I was there. I did not want to walk away from my experience and go back to Canada and fall back into the exact same patterns I was in before I left. Yes, I will still care about stupid insignificant things, but they don't matter as much as they did before.
I learned that by trying to escape myself I have truly become more of who I am. I was joking around with Femke and Saskia about how I thought that Ghana would teach me to relax, to go with the flow of life, and help me to get over all of my fears. Indeed I have conquered many of these fears such as: African toilets (dear God did I find some horrible ones), peeing in public (a whole village saw me once), working in areas with terrifying diseases, foreign foods, lack of running water and electricity, open sewers and a completely different culture. I've learned that I'm still a huge hypochondriac and germaphobe and I still get stressed out about things - but I'm okay with that. I've learned how to be alone, and yet being alone made me realize how many people cared about me. The random emails or messages or blog posts from friends and family made me feel like I was really cared about, and like I was doing something important with my life.
I feel like I contributed something real in Ghana. I was afraid that I would go and simply get stuck doing something uninteresting and pointless and I got the complete opposite. Granted, I didn't speak enough Twi to do the presentations alone and I didn't do any medical procedures that brought people back to life. But you think, well I taught a group of men on Valentine's Day how to use condoms to protect themselves and their partners. I met some commercial sex workers who may have had their questions about HIV answered and put their minds at ease. I may have encouraged a pregnant woman to get tested for HIV and changed the life of her baby. I got to have fun with a little boy with HIV and show him that he is still a little boy even though he is sick. I think that everyone should do something like this at some point in their lives. I am so fortunate to be able to have the time and resources to volunteer because I know that everyone does not. I just think that if you are able to go abroad and face your personal demons and help another culture then you can re-evaluate whether you have been doing the right thing or the wrong thing all the years of your life. I'm not saying I'm less materialistic or capitalist or selfish- I'm just saying that it put all of these things into perspective and I was able to think about which things were actually important.
It's not so much that I'm leaving my heart in Africa , as it is that I will take a piece of it with me always. Not in some exotified, mythologized way, but as a true memory of a time in my life where I felt truly happy. It wasn't that I woke up every moning in luxury to some amazing sunrise - it was that whenever I felt bad there was always something right around the corner that made me so utterly happy.
I re-read Stephen Lewis' "Race Against Time" again while I was sick and it made me cry. The first place he ever visited in Africa was Accra, Ghana. He was supposed to stay for 7 days and he stayed for a year. I can see how he fell in love with it. So many of his experiences have paralleled the things I've seen- in the HIV clinic, in the schools, and in my travels, though obviously not to the same extreme. "I was smitten for life," said Lewis. This is exactly how I feel. His writing encompasses so many stories and ideas that I wonder how he managed to compact so many experiences into one book. But I've been thinking a lot and there will be more to come...
I realized a lot about myself while I was there. I did not want to walk away from my experience and go back to Canada and fall back into the exact same patterns I was in before I left. Yes, I will still care about stupid insignificant things, but they don't matter as much as they did before.
I learned that by trying to escape myself I have truly become more of who I am. I was joking around with Femke and Saskia about how I thought that Ghana would teach me to relax, to go with the flow of life, and help me to get over all of my fears. Indeed I have conquered many of these fears such as: African toilets (dear God did I find some horrible ones), peeing in public (a whole village saw me once), working in areas with terrifying diseases, foreign foods, lack of running water and electricity, open sewers and a completely different culture. I've learned that I'm still a huge hypochondriac and germaphobe and I still get stressed out about things - but I'm okay with that. I've learned how to be alone, and yet being alone made me realize how many people cared about me. The random emails or messages or blog posts from friends and family made me feel like I was really cared about, and like I was doing something important with my life.
I feel like I contributed something real in Ghana. I was afraid that I would go and simply get stuck doing something uninteresting and pointless and I got the complete opposite. Granted, I didn't speak enough Twi to do the presentations alone and I didn't do any medical procedures that brought people back to life. But you think, well I taught a group of men on Valentine's Day how to use condoms to protect themselves and their partners. I met some commercial sex workers who may have had their questions about HIV answered and put their minds at ease. I may have encouraged a pregnant woman to get tested for HIV and changed the life of her baby. I got to have fun with a little boy with HIV and show him that he is still a little boy even though he is sick. I think that everyone should do something like this at some point in their lives. I am so fortunate to be able to have the time and resources to volunteer because I know that everyone does not. I just think that if you are able to go abroad and face your personal demons and help another culture then you can re-evaluate whether you have been doing the right thing or the wrong thing all the years of your life. I'm not saying I'm less materialistic or capitalist or selfish- I'm just saying that it put all of these things into perspective and I was able to think about which things were actually important.
It's not so much that I'm leaving my heart in Africa , as it is that I will take a piece of it with me always. Not in some exotified, mythologized way, but as a true memory of a time in my life where I felt truly happy. It wasn't that I woke up every moning in luxury to some amazing sunrise - it was that whenever I felt bad there was always something right around the corner that made me so utterly happy.
I re-read Stephen Lewis' "Race Against Time" again while I was sick and it made me cry. The first place he ever visited in Africa was Accra, Ghana. He was supposed to stay for 7 days and he stayed for a year. I can see how he fell in love with it. So many of his experiences have paralleled the things I've seen- in the HIV clinic, in the schools, and in my travels, though obviously not to the same extreme. "I was smitten for life," said Lewis. This is exactly how I feel. His writing encompasses so many stories and ideas that I wonder how he managed to compact so many experiences into one book. But I've been thinking a lot and there will be more to come...
posted by Kate @ 11:47 AM
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