Flying home

Ahhh...flying home. I had a wonderful flight home. The 11 queues I waited in at the airport were less than enjoyable and quite pointless, but eventually led to the plane and a seat next to a woman named Susan. Susan does consulting for national disaster relief agencies by facilitating their meetings. Before that, she did educational policy work, focusing on bringing experiential learning into the school system. She married a Ghanaian man who she met on a trip over here, and has been married for 2 years now. She has two kids, presumably from a previous marriage, aged 21 and 24, so I place her age about at my parent's.

We had the most positive and rewarding conversation on Ghana and the culture. While I left Ghana being overwhelmed by the culture of begging, she leaves longing for the Ghanaian culture. She, like me, is very intellectual and approached discussions of Ghanaian life from a similiar position as I did. She's experienced the same culture of begging, even in the middle upper class in Ghana and hates it equally as much.

She, though, has seen this richness to the culture and this wonderful view of the world. Her husband, which by all her quotes, seems incredibly intelligent, thoughtful, and profound, tells her why Ghanaians, for instance, feed each other, when they're married (every 2nd or 3rd bite of food, they feed to their mates) and why they at such hot spice (cleansing properties). She connects back their beliefs, which they've developed overtime, to science that the West is just now discovering.

She told me about an article she'd just read about the cleansing properties of spices...the Ghanaians eat the spices until they sweat...keeping inline with this article. She was lost in wonder at the depth and the richness of the culture. She talked about how healthy the Ghanaians are. Healthy? I said. Yes, healthy. They are ravaged by he diseases of malaria and HIV, but they look far healthier than Americans. They take meticulous care of their skin. Their bodies are in great shape. They eat all natural products. They have excellent posture (especially the women who carry between 5 and 50 pounds on their heads most days). I had no idea, but I do believe she's right. Most Ghanaians do have good health.

She explained why the beach is the public shitting grounds: for us, we view the beach as recreation. Ghanaians lives are filled with recreation. The beach, to them, is a place to commune with nature, and what better time to do that then pooping? As odd as that sounds, the Ghanaian approach to bodily functions is wonderfully freeing. From the frankness of the language for the bathroom ("I need to urinate", "toilet") to the public urination everywhere by men and women, to the uncovered breast feeding, Ghanaians are not hindered by the paranoia and the uptightness we are in America.

And the lack of psychological problems deeply impressed her. She talked of the lack of isolation in Ghana: everyone is so connected. You can't be alone. And here, in the states, whenever she comes back, she's always taken back by the isolation which pervades this nation. Even in rural Ghana, people aren't isolated. They are very communal. In America, rural America is often the peak of isolation as you're physically miles from the next person or family. And, in America, we see a great deal more psychoses.

Perhaps because of this conversation, one of the first feelings being back in America was isolation. I walked into the dingy bathroom, under the glare of the yellow/greenish tinged fluorescent, and open up the stall to a solitary toilet. I was overcome with a deep sense of isolation...I felt like I was in an art movie which depicts the bleakness of the modern world.

And here, I sit, alone, in my house in Baltimore. I've gone 9 hours without seeing another person. Even traveling by myself in Ghana, I didn't go 9 minutes without seeing another person and I especially didn't got 9 hours without interaction. It is here, in America, that I feel isolated, not traveling by myself. I'm okay though, but I miss feeling connected. Even when I was with the Ghanaians all day, I was connected. Naturally, I more connected when I was with Americans or Europeans as we shared a common culture and language, but nonetheless, I was connected in Ghana.