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Showing posts from May, 2014

Reflections From Last Semester....By Lisa Carmack

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Being here has challenged parts of me that I didn’t know existed and helped my humanity and understanding of the world flourish. I hope to remain a student in this way as long as I live.   I look West across the Atlantic from my perch in Ghana where it all seems so clear. Where I am still a person of privilege. Where as I follow my Nigerian-American friend to do her errands in parts of the Accra that few foreigners go, she puts on a persona of being local, using the accent given to her by her mother to speak to the cab driver. As children run to me, I smile and say hi while she passes into a shop unnoticed. I feel a discomfort that settles in the pit of my stomach. I heard a radio show years ago about a white woman who joined the Peace Corps, settling into life at an African village. I don’t remember where. She had looked at herself in the mirror after a while and found her face bland and without character. She detailed her acclimation process, as she found...

This Nomadic Life...By Brennan Lagman

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Its 4:30am in Accra. I lay in bed, unable to sleep. The Malaria medication I’m on has filled my head with vivid dreams for the past few nights. Voices and faces of friends from my past 'lives' escape me. People who were once my world and who are now but a part of times and places I was but no longer am a part of, or so it seems. As I dig my face into my pillow, begging for its spongy softness to carry me off back to that distant land of slumber, thoughts of my colourful past come rushing back to me. The past few days, I have been sicker than a dog. The words “Home-Sick” have tantalizingly dripped off the edge of my tongue, yet never fully realized themselves in the air of a room. I begin to question: Where is home?              When I returned from the hospital, I felt so at home in my dorm room; the familiarity of this place where I lay my head to rest. It’s a familiar feeling. One I have felt many times, in ma...