Ghana

By the time I walked back into the Ghanaian airport I didn’t care that the security guards were gripping massive AK-47s, I didn’t care that ISIS had recently attacked the Ivory Coast, and I definitely didn’t care for my “magical mission trip” to Africa anymore. My friend turned to me and summed up the trip in one perfect sentence, “Well, Africa wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

I was hoping that when I returned from two weeks in Africa that I would have the Hallmark-moment story. The kind where I went to help them, but they taught me to love again. The kind where I could return ready to start a small business of bracelet making and use the proceeds to make an inspirational video of the trip with a Coldplay song in the background.

It seemed as though a trip to Africa had been building my whole life. Even when I was little, my parents would remind me of the starving children in Africa who wanted my reject green beans. Their faces were plastered on every church bulletin board I had ever seen. They had all my Zuzu pets and Polly Pockets from my ninth birthday that my mom had shipped there. Going to Africa to help the children was like a pilgrimage to Mecca for do-gooder white people.

I come from about the most opposite culture from Ghana, West Africa. I’m surrounded by privileged, upper class, white kids, from a school where our 8% of diversity comes from a kid who was adopted from India and drives a Mercedes. Our school offered us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to a developing country and grace them with a soccer field so we could offer them a sense of community and self-worth. As a result we would become enlightened and globally minded individuals who had cute African children in our Facebook profile pictures and a wealth of inspiring stories we could write into Ivy League college application essays. How could I pass on that?

I was expecting the trip to attract other students who wanted to go to a drastically different culture, who wanted to meet new people, who wanted to learn new things and hear new stories, which I realize is a lot to ask. I quickly found that such was not the the goal of my peers. At the first meeting, one of the girls on our trip asked if she could eat only Pop-Tarts for the entirety of the trip, one said she couldn’t be in a hot climate for extended periods of time, and two others announced that they did not “do” manual labor. Then we ironically munched on mini, pink cupcakes with heart sprinkles while talking about the poverty we were going to experience.

After 13 hours of attempting to sleep upright, some mystery KLM “chicken” and a bus ride that almost impelled a reappearance of said “chicken”, we arrived in Okurase. Here we were going to build them the glorious soccer field. Our first stop on the tour of the village we walked right onto a soccer field. We looked about. The field had goalposts, store bought nets, grass, and lines- it looked identical to our school's soccer field, just in Ghana. The Ghanaians were not as pitiful as I had always been taught. The kids of the village came around dinner time and asked one of my group leaders for food. She was distraught about the starving children, but our guide explained to her that they’d actually already eaten dinner, now they were just eating because they were bored. I had never identified with them more.

Traveling with my group was similar to going to social events with a parent at the age of thirteen, utterly mortifying. One time I was machetting the ground to loosen the soil, while a local man planted grass along the field. All the while, my groupmates were standing around, taking an undeserved break from the zero work they had accomplished that day, talking about how they needed to get manicures as soon as they returned home and mourning over their lack of social media presence. During every meal, the woman who had prepared it would sit by the food and face us as we all ate. It was here that I learned Ghana is not known for its cuisine. One day for lunch we had fish that had been cooked to the point where it made jerky look tender. This entree was accompanied by a side of banku, which is a fermented wheat paste. Everyone in our group tried a few bites and then threw it away in front of the cook. I was so embarrassed for them that I sat there for an hour trying to dry swallow banku and fish while she watched, unblinking.

When I returned from my escapade everyone seemed surprised to see me alive and breathing. Everyone wanted to know, “How was Ghana?” I always gave them the answer they wanted, “It was amazing, such a great experience!” I didn’t give them my real answer because most Americans wouldn’t want to hear it. We pity the wrong culture. There are slideshows of African children eating dirt, and we sit in the audience crushing candies. We act as though our mere presence in Africa will save them; like whatever work our blister free hands can accomplish in two weeks will make or break these people's lives, but really they were just fine before we came. Africans don’t sit around waiting for us to decide to give up one spring break and build them a soccer field.