If someone were to ask me the most important year of my life thus far, I would respond without hesitation, “my year in Ghana!”
I am completing my Masters in International Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University. Regardless of the fact that I’m entering my second year in this programme, regardless of the fact that I am constantly learning more about development issues, regardless of the fact that it has been over two years since I waved good-bye to the Kotoka Airport, I continue to draw back to my TIG experience to make sense of what I am presently learning.
When I first left Canadian soil I was excited to finally learn all there was to know about the study of and work within international development. Probably my most beneficial lesson was realizing that, the more time I spent in Ghana, the more there was to learn about the country, the culture, the people. Every time I moved – from Accra to Tamale (for school) and from Tamale to Bolgatanga (for my internship), I was met with a new language, a new culture, a host of new development challenges. When you begin to put faces, stories, and circumstances to mere statistics you read about in textbooks, a certain change takes place in your own life. I realized that development isn’t about finding the perfect solution for all circumstances, but understanding that no one solution will fit all circumstances. It was my personal idealism that brought me to Ghana, but with realism I am now much more capable of contributing to development initiatives.
I remember the first time I entered a tro-tro. Tro-tros are basically big vans full of people in an effort to transport as many passengers as possible in the most efficient manner imaginable. For someone, such as myself, who was used to the traditional Canadian bus system, the tro-tro presented a number of challenges: there are no schedules, no available route maps, no tokens to purchase for quick cash exchanges. At first, I longed for the comfort of knowing when the bus would come, where it would go, and all matters in between. Today, post-Ghana, when I’m standing at the bus stop for 20 minutes with 10 other people waiting for the same bus I think, “if I were in Ghana, a tro-tro would have been here by now!”
You see, when all I knew was the Canadian bus system, I saw the Ghanaian system as flawed (even, shamefully to say, as an inefficient structure characteristic of developing countries). Now I realize that there is always more than one way of doing something.
Living in a different culture forces you to learn different ways of doing things. Each day was a challenge yet, the longer I lived in the country, the more exciting those challenges became. Eating food, finding the washroom, drinking water, shaking hands, purchasing clothes, standing in a line, getting a taxi…each was a lesson to be learned.
My year in Ghana will always be special to me. It was the year I realized who I was and who I wanted to become. I challenge all of you to do the same.