Reflections on Ghana

I just spent this past semester studying abroad in Ghana. Now that I'm back, I'm trying to figure out how to answer the million dollar question: "So, how was it?"

I sincerely wish I could answer that question in a sentence, or even in an hour, but I have no idea where to begin. Should talk about the food, or the friends I made, or what it was like to constantly stick out? Or what about the day I accidentally crossed a border incorrectly and spent seven hours negotiating in another language with authorities? Or the time I sat on a camel that refused to go anywhere?

Before I left, people kept telling me how studying abroad was going to change my life. I think I, too, was expecting to suddenly have a new perspective on U.S.-African relations and understand how so many others around the world live. And while I had many memorable experiences, I've been having trouble figuring out how to talk about the ways I have been changed.

While I was there, I read Somebody's Heart is Burning, a travel memoir by Tanya Shaffer, who spent a year volunteering in Ghana and traveling through other West African countries. I loved the book because many of Schaffer's experiences so closely matched my own and because she put into words the thoughts I found myself unable to articulate on so many occasions. A particular section that has stuck with me is Schaffer's account of her journey up the Niger River. She befriended a man who had no shoes, while she herself had two pairs of boots on the journey. The man kept asking for one of the pairs, and though she wrestled with her decision for some time, she ultimately chose not to grant his wish. She later reflected on the exchange:

It struck me, then, that the only changes we humans are capable of are small ones. You can beat yourself up for years, wishing you could be kinder, happier, more decisive and secure. And then one day you realize you've made a slight shift, moved your inner lens a fraction of an inch to this side or that. Not a whole new self, a remade identity, just a little change in perspective. A loosening, really, an out-breath, a drop of acceptance in the salty ocean of the soul. You haven't solved everything, maybe you haven't solved anything, but if you're lucky, that small shift will be the difference between holding your life in grace and simply holding on.