POST BY LISA CARMACK: NEW YEAR

This is the New Year (a little late but hey, I’m working with a different time system). Apparently 2014 is the year of condensing the past years accomplishment into short, digestible nuggets that are only a little bit longer than tweets. How social media of us.

A impossible as it is to capture the significance of a year, for 2013 I want to put in my two bits. This year has been transformative and unreal in a lot of ways. I learned a lot about myself this year, as vague and pretentious as that sounds. I learned that I’m the type of person that can change my circumstances; for good and for bad. I took a lot of risks. I made some bad decisions. But from the fallout I made my way across the world and found within myself an insatiable student of my environment.

I spent Christmas with my Ghana family (some pictured above); the beautiful, silly, tenacious, passionate, and food-crazed Sylvesters. My friend Priscilla (who is my Ghana sister) invited me to stay for a while and I was deliriously happy to find that her mother has her own restaurant. This meant home-cooked gourmet Ghanaian food every day of my visit. I was able to cook and play as well as laze around and watch movies after a difficult semester. It was the perfect holiday break.

I’ve been working really hard on being useful at the campus radio station, Radio Univers, which functions as an independent arm of the Communications Department. I’ve participated in a few on air conversations as the token American, but I’m working on putting together my own stories as the foreign student correspondent (a heavily ignored population of students). My peers at the station have these grand ideas that I’m an expert, so I’m trying hard to live up to their expectations.

I’m helping them put together an orientation package for new radio volunteers. I might even give a seminar on journalistic ethics (Thanks Don Menn!)

I’ve also started to get involved with a land rights issue involving a local tribe that I’ve grown to love. A foreign company is trying to force them off their tribal lands to build a resort. I’ll post more about this later, but it’s been a furious and emotional battle.

My boyfriend, Ryan, is now abroad with me. How lucky does a person get? He left his home campus in Santa Cruz and became the first ever Electrical Engineering major to study at the University of Ghana with the University of California program. Mostly humanities majors make their way out here to Ghana, but he’s taking a few physics classes “for fun” and taking in all the foods and places I throw at him. I’m loving sharing everything I’ve built here with him.

My sister was also able to make her way out here! We all traveled to the Northern Region of Ghana with the California students and saw elephants, warthogs, tropical birds, savannahs, a famous mosque, the bustling marketplaces in Kumasi and a gorgeous waterfall.

I’m running out of time in the computer lab, but I’m so happy here and even happier to have another semester to spend time on the projects and people here that I’ve grown to love.
All my best from abroad <3

For the full post by Lisa, visit http://lisawriteshome.tumblr.com/