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Each student has a unique and individual experience on their Experiment program. The following essay is a single glimpse into a program from one student's perspective.

 

Sasha Engelmann -- Ghana (GHS)

As an Experimenter to Ghana this past summer, I was given the opportunity to live and breathe a way of life vastly different from the one I left behind in the United States. Looking back at myself before I left for Ghana, I can honestly say that my expectations for the trip were surpassed and that I now see myself as a more rounded and intellectually mature person. What I hope to express in this essay is not only the knowledge I gained about another culture but also the depth to which my perspective on the world has hanged.

My plane arrived to JFK embarrassingly late due to excessive weather delays and brake problems. When I finally found my group after juggling my baggage through countless elevators, I was exhausted, nervous, and intimidated by the number of introductions I had yet to make. The first person I met was my group leader Allison, who was singing my name and wiggling two fingers next to each of her eyes. My trepidation lifted as I copied her gesture and joined in the ice-breaker game that the group had been playing on the floor of the airport. Within minutes I had learned everyone’s name along with their made-up hand signs and was talking to a fellow Experimenter who happened to live in my home city.

From the moment that I joined the rest of the group at JFK, we all became inseparable friends and peers in the difficult transition to another country. I don’t think anyone could have predicted how much we ended up needing each other, both in the initial stages of encountering Ghanaian culture and throughout our stay. In our orientation in Accra, we built a foundation in basic knowledge of Twi and discussed practices, sights, and other aspects of Ghana that marked our first impressions. We became incredibly cohesive as a group, and this translated into one of the biggest factors in our ability to absorb the environment around us. By pooling our ideas and experiences we gained a broader sense of Ghana than we would have alone.

One of the main reasons why I chose the program in Ghana was that it offered the chance to do volunteer work in a rural village. For me and many others in the group, the community service portion of the trip was the most fun and also the most challenging. Living and working among the people of Gomoa Achianse gave me more contact with Ghanaian culture than at any other part of our travels. I was amazed by the open generosity and candid nature of the children at the school where we worked; at all times they begged to hold our hands and accompanied us wherever we went. I was fortunate enough to be able to lead the project of painting a mural on the wall of one of the school buildings. While I stood on a playground slide to draw a map of the world on the wall, I remember how small children would cluster around the bottom of the slide and ask me about the parts of the world that I was drawing. It amazed them when they saw how far we had traveled to get to their town. At no other time in my life had I felt such a strong sense of purpose than when I was painting at the school.

On our last day working in the village, the teachers asked us to watch a performance by the school children. As we sat in chairs, drinking Fanta soda that they had given us, the children marched in formation, dressed entirely in black and carrying wooden carvings shaped like guns. This display had the biggest impression on me in terms of changing my view on world relations. It suddenly hit me that we were in a part of the world where the sanctified rights and freedoms guaranteed by law and esteemed so highly in the United States no longer applied, at least to the degree that I was familiar with. That children were performing trials with "guns," just as trained soldiers would, seemed at the time alarmingly incongruous and frightening.

The two week homestay in Takoradi further widened my understanding of how Ghanaian people view themselves in relation to the rest of the world. I became very close with my host siblings, and through them encountered many other young people in the city. Takoradi, though still only a third the size of Accra, was large enough to have both traditional and Western influences. My host brother and sister, Francis and Rosemary, would take part in the making of Fufu on Sundays, but they also spent much of their time watching the latest music videos by American artists on television. I was surprised by how fervent they were in their desire to someday travel to the United States and maybe live there. I got the feeling that America had a kind of overpowering presence in Ghana; every young person I met was fascinated by anything I had to say about people in Los Angeles. Nigerian soap operas put aside, my family coveted the latest bootleg DVDs of "Harry Potter" or "Catwoman." It seemed very unfair to me that one nation could exercise such a dominating presence on another.

Another issue that I encountered in Takoradi had to do with image and race. While talking to the young vendors in my host mother’s shop, one mentioned that she wished that her skin was lighter like mine. She then asked me if I knew of any creams, shots or other treatment that could lighten dark skin. When I told her that I thought her skin was beautiful as it was, she smiled and shook her head. This was not an isolated incident. At home, my young host sister Stacey asked me if I would cut off some of my hair and give it to her. Although she seemed to mean it in a half-joking way, I was slightly taken aback. She later explained that she had always wanted straight hair. Surprised as I was at the time, I later realized that images of black women with natural-looking hair were very rare both in advertising and on television in Ghana. I couldn't help but wonder if this was yet another effect of a world heavily ruled by wealthy, Western countries.

The stay with my host family was nevertheless one of the most fun parts of the trip. I was glad to have such an amazing opportunity to really get to know my host brothers and sisters, and parting was extremely hard. In the remaining five days we had in Ghana, we packed in a fast stream of sightseeing and travel. Though I will always remember the slave castles on the coast and Kakum National Park, there was little time to reflect on the experience as a whole. We spent one entire day driving in our purple bus, from Kumasi to Akosombo. The long bus rides gave us some quality group time together as a group.

One experience in Cape Coast stands out to me as the moment when I really felt connected to Ghana. I was relaxing with a few girls from the group on some rocks next to the Cape Coast Castle. A small boy named Ebenezer had been following us ever since we left a local bookstore, where he had pleaded to me for money to buy oranges from him. While we were sitting, he went to stand on the edge of the sea cliff, still balancing the wooden vending box on his head, in which one orange remained. I could see the sky through the glass panes on the box as he stood there, and the orange afternoon sun lit up half of his body. He was wearing only a long, ripped shirt, probably a hand-me-down from an older sibling. Suddenly, he turned and looked at me straight in the eyes, and the sun lit up his entire face. He was so serious, and also, I thought, worried. My first reaction was to lift up my film camera, but the second I did I regretted it.

Who was I to think that I could capture the emotion on his face in a snapshot? The stark white castle walls and deep turquoise sea that surrounded him were numbingly beautiful, enough to gloss over the nature of his poverty. This contrast between land and human are what Ghana is to me–a place that is both gorgeous and home to much desperation and need. One of my biggest fears is that I will someday forget the feeling that was in that glance.

What I hope I took from my experience was a much better sense of humanity and international relations. I definitely learned volumes about Ghana and the African continent, but I also feel that through meeting many different people from around the US I gained more knowledge about my own country. I made many lifelong friends both in the EIL group and in Ghana. What I saw in Ghana reaffirmed my belief in environmental science, which I plan to study in college. It is my dream to someday return to Africa, if not Ghana itself, to study further cultural relationships, and apply my skills in helping people and communities.