Leaving for Ghana Tomorrow!

My bags aren't quite packed yet, but I'm getting there!  Twenty-four hours from now I'll be heading toward Ghana for a 10-day trip.

I'm there for multiple purposes, mainly delivering a paper on the tension between how Ghanaian textbooks and intellectuals treat its history and going to a variety of schools to maintain or establish links between them and schools in the Pacific Northwest, where I live.  But I also go for more personal reasons.

Ghana, as one person wrote of Africa more generally, makes me believe in God.  Happiness and suffering alike seem much closer to the surface there, and human relationships seem to count for more.

Westerners are treated like celebrities in Ghana, especially if they are white.  When I speak to students there, I try to emphasize how much I respect how hard they work and how considerate they are with each other.  Maybe it's hard to remember that when you are reading letters from students in the U.S. talking about their games and their pets and their vacations.  But Ghanaians have a lot of very impressive virtues that are hard to put a price tag on

Going to Ghana also reminds me of how bizarre my life is--the material goods, the solitude, the comfort.  Only a small sliver of people in the history of the world have lived the way I do, the way that most people in the West now live.  Of course that doesn't make our lives bad or wrong.  But it's exhilerating to realize how little I know about the human experience and prospect--and sobering to realize what incredible resources I have at my disposal and the responsibilities that come with those unmerited privileges.