It is hard for me to sum up my experiences in the Trent-in-Ghana program, I have been struggling to write this for almost a year now. It was a wonderful, difficult, educational, exciting and at times boring eight months...it was full of contradictions, and perhaps it is precisely these contradictions that makes writing this so difficult. However, it is likely these same contradictions that made the eight months that I spent in Ghana so memorable.
My memories of Ghana are filled with bright colours, sounds of animals and children and a plethora of kindness. But above all, I remember the extent of human resiliency in Ghana. When I arrived the academic notions of under-development, poverty and disease buttressed my ideas of Africa. Being in Ghana taught me what studying it cannot - the astounding strengths of the Ghanaian people in the face of these obstacles. Most profoundly, it forced me to deeply examine my own values and preconceptions.
I cannot count the number of that times I asked myself - what am I doing here?. For me, this was the central contradiction, upon which many others were built. I felt the need to constantly justify my presence in a country that is so fraught with economic and social problems - who was I to take the realities of this country as a ‘learning experience’? The justification that I built for myself was to consider my learning in terms of greater awareness and as a catalyst for change. But just being in Ghana was at times, uncomfortable - for in being there I was flaunting the money that others so desperately needed, and the privilege that I had so effortlessly acquired. Although I lived with these feelings - I was not able to justify them
But, in retrospect, this discomfort and these contradictions are perhaps what makes studying abroad such an important and powerful experience. Although I was aware of economic and social inequities, living in Ghana I was forced to recognize and come to terms with my own social location and the role that I play - by virtue of skin colour, nationality and class - in perpetuating these inequities.
The Trent-in-Ghana experience will inevitably be unique for each person, but my advice for anyone who wishes to pursue it is to keep asking yourself ‘what am I doing here.’ There is no one answer, but I cannot overemphasize the importance of the question.