Easter + more

Happy Belated Easter! Another week has gone by here in Ghana, and has been fairly uneventful. I went to church with my friend Natalie. The church she's been attending joined up with a few other churches in the area for a big Easter extravaganza. I sat through FOUR AND A HALF HOURS of the service . . . and we weren't even there the whole time because our ride had picked us up a little bit late. It was . . . interesting, to say the least. The sermon was over an hour long, and the minister quoted over 15 scriptures (none of which were from the gospels and all were about first fruits & harvests . . . I think he just looked up "first fruit" and "harvest" in a concordance and spouted out what it said.) So it was quite different from what I'm used to. I had sort of expected that . . . that's what all of the church services I've been to here have been like, except for the Ash Wednesday Catholic service. I guess I was just hoping Easter would be a really big deal and that it would be more familiar to me.

Sunday afternoon was great fun. Pretty much the entire campus cleared out because everybody went home for the weekend, except for us oburuni. So after church my friends and I painted Easter eggs and then threw together the most fabulous Easter feast we could muster . . . chicken and jollof rice (quintessential Ghanaian meal), Jelly Belly jelly beans from somebody's Easter package, apple juice, and cheese that Natalie's mom sent from the U.S. (I will admit, I was a little skeptical about the cheese. But Natalie swears it doesn't need to be refrigerated until it's been opened, I haven't eaten real cheese in 3 months, and I figure I've eaten weirder things since I've been here so why not? And it was amazing.) And that was about it for the week. The rest was the same as usual - classes, internship, etc. Tomorrow and Sunday CIEE is taking us to the Volta Region in eastern Ghana. We're going to see Wli Falls (highest waterfall in West Africa) and a monkey sanctuary. Then next week I begin exams, so I need to start studying!

I find myself making comparisons to the U.S. too much. To some extent it's unavoidable, since life in the U.S. is the only other thing I know. But I also know I'm diminishing my own experiences when I set expectations. One of my American friends said something the other day that seems so obvious, but also is so easy to forget: "Reality is just different here." I like how she said that - not things are different or life is different. Reality is different. What is real, what I experience, how I feel, it's just not the same.

It's been funny to me the ways in which I have realized the truth in that statement. On Wednesday of this week I had a guest lecturer in one of my classes. She was an African American woman who has been in Ghana for several years working on community development. She briefly mentioned the challenge of overcoming her bias against police officers because she has often had to teach and interact with groups of them here. She did not elaborate on specific experiences as that wasn't the point of her talk, but I did hear her say that at home she doesn't trust police officers and here she has been able to overcome that. This struck me because as a white woman in the United States, I have confidence in the justice system and know I can turn to police officers and others when I need help, whereas somebody else may not be able to do that. But here, I actually feel more uncomfortable around and get more unwanted attention from police officers and security guards than I do average Ghanaian men.

I didn't really understand what "culture shock" was until I actually experienced it. I couldn't grasp why it would apparently be so hard to remember things like only eat with your right hand, always start conversations by asking somebody how their family is, etc. But that's only one teeny tiny part of culture shock. Culture shock means maybe not trusting the same people I can trust at home. It means always feeling like an outsider. It means getting laughed at even when I try my hardest to ask for something in Twi. And it means having to reexamine on a daily basis who I am, who I want to be, how others see me, and what my decisions mean for those around me.