You Look Happy. What's Your Secret?

I was walking past the Balme library trying not to die on the roundabout (amazing for cars, kinda like death in a circle for pedestrians), and a Ghanaian guy and his friend, total strangers, stop me and say, "You look so happy! What's your secret?" I grin even wider than I was, turn to them and reply, "I'm in Ghana. That's my secret." And today at that moment, it was true. I have moments here that are isolated, moments that are lonely or scary or painful or boring, but most of the time I really enjoy myself trying to find new ways to fit an obruni peg into obibini life. And there are moments that are just there, where I am totally at peace and in the perfect place at the perfect time and able to take a moment to enjoy it.

Last night I went with Mikaela, Steve, John and Sirena to Desperado's, which is a restaurant/bar up at the Vandal City of Commonwealth. The only food they serve there is banku, but it is delicious. The girl behind the counter remembered me, so she brought our food out to us specially, setting out plates of spicy pepper sauce, shito, and chopped onions, pieces of grilled fish (that would be pretty much the WHOLE fish, no head but everything else including bones, fins, skin, etc), and fist-sized balls of banku, a thick paste made from fermented corn. It tastes like sourdough bread a little. We washed our right hands, holding them over a bowl in the center of the table and pouring water from a pitcher provided for the purpose. Eating hand appropriately clean, we unwrapped the banku and I set about de-boning my fish, first taking off the fins, then peeling off the top half of the flesh and pulling out the bones. Everything ready, I dug in, pinching of pieces of banku and dipping them in pepper sauce, alternating the sour-spicy with rich grilled fish and sips of bitter Star beer. We ate slowly, chatting about nonsense and looking out to see the glittering lights of Accra and the campus visible between the trees and spread out beneath us. I felt like royalty.

No wonder the commonwealth boys feel like they are the colonial masters of the school: they look down every day from their palace or temple on the hill and survey their underlings or something. Seriously, they have the most incredible view. It is second only to the view from the very top of Volta hall, where I found myself with Mikaela and Steve and another girl from our program named Elliot. None of the Volta girls go on the roof, so its kind of become the unofficial obruni hangout place, where everyone goes to smoke cigarettes and relax and just look out. From the top (its four or five stories) you can see even further than you can from Desperado's, almost to the mountains to the east, and down the coast to the west. And last night the weather was perfect. It was only a little cloudy, and five stories up you get a nice breeze. You can only ever see a few stars with the heavy orange-gold glow of urbanization, but the clock tower above Balme Library lights up, and the carpet of lights, with an old-fashioned clock ace floating in a purple-black haze, is like a museum diorama of the moon in a sea of adoring stars. I go up on the roof to think, to cool down, to call my family and friends (it is the only place in Volta with more than ten to fifteen seconds of reliable reception), to cry, to just be. In the dark you cant see how dirty the corrugated tin roof is, nor all the trash accumulated in the corners, or the puddles of stagnant water. At night it is a magic carpet, a paradise, an island. And when several of us are there together it feels like a tired, overworked secret clubhouse, reached up an extra flight of stairs and through a peeling blue door with a very high step. An empty desk sits at the top of the stairs, an abandoned sentry's post. The lock on the door doesn't work anymore. The walls are high enough that you would have to jump to fall off. Even thinking about it brings me peace.

There are times during the day that I really need that peace, someplace in my mind that is in Ghana but not really part of this world, something that doesn't remind me of the color of my skin and the cadence of my speech and the entire cultural package I carry around with me like an invisible hermit-crab's shell. Today I was walking back to Volta from Arabic class, which is held at a new but drafty lecture hall next to Tingi-Tingi, about a ten-minute walk from my residence hall. I was walking with the TA, the class captain, and another student named Abdul Bassit, who was my first friend in the class. They all started chatting in a polyglot of Arabic (both of the students have a background in it, being Muslim, and Saleh studied it for years), Twi, and pidgin English. I had just finished lecture feeling good about being on top of my reading, and had a little chat with my study-buddy Fareed, and I was definitely feeling a part of the group. Then they all started talking and joking in this language I couldn't follow, and all of a sudden I missed home, where I would be able to understand any joking, where I would not be instantly and accidentally excluded so completely. And it really got me thinking.

Saleh had said something in class about needing exchange students (directed toward Quentin the Belgian from Canada and myself, seated in the front row) because we foster cross-cultural understanding, yes, but also because Ghana specifically and Africa in general have many problems, and having people who have been here and seen them provides a greater chance of them being solved. I jokingly said that I would love to help, that I had five Ghana cedis in my bag and if he would tell me how to spend them I would gladly put them to the best use. Some students laughed and two boys asked if I could just give it to them, but most of the murmurings were of lack of comprehension at my joke, or just plain not understanding. And Saleh told the class that even if most of them couldn't understand me, that was exactly what he was talking about.

Walking through the grass, with stormclouds hovering tentatively on the horizon and bright sun on my shoulders, I realized something that really should have occured to me much sooner. As much trouble as I have trying to understand people here, THEY HAVE THE SAME PROBLEM WITH ME. I felt like a little bit of an idiot, and a little bit selfish. I must really be the center of my own world for it to take three months to realize that. Like I said a couple of paragraphs ago, I have good days and I have bad days, fun days and days I want to cry. But, as frustrating as it can sometimes be to stand out, to have no one get my jokes, to have to sit in the front and in order to get half the sense out of some lectures, to have to memorize and regurgitate instead of studying and analyzing, it never crossed my mind that when I ask a question in class the professor might have to listen as hard to me as I do to them, or that maybe when I get excited about something I talk maybe way too fast for Ghanaians to understand. Yeah I have to repete myself to be heard, but I didnt realize until I was floating over the green grass and the red dust in a little bubble of not-home after Saleh's words that this is just as hard for the people who see me as so exotic, different, foreign. And yet I still manage to have amazing Ghanaian friends, people I will remember my whole life, people I will miss as much as I miss my 'family' from Santa Cruz right now. Because however shallow they are, however alien, I am putting down roots here. This is becoming my home in a way that America will never be because I will never have to work for that home. It comes naturally to me after twenty-two years. But Ghana, and whatever place I have here on any given day, I earned through my own sweat and tears, to be cliche. But it is true. I have found and continue to find new depths of my own personality, new ways to react to strange situations both horrible and wonderful. And when I leave here, I will leave a part of my soul here waiting for the next time I come back. And come back I will. So what is the secret to today's happiness? Even though I dont always fit into this place, even when I feel isolated or lonely, I do have a place here, and maybe I always will. I am happy because I am in Ghana, which may just be the most rewarding thing I have ever done. It is certainly the most challenging.