Scattered thoughts.

Sorry it has taken me a week to collect my thoughts about Ghana. I want to share the little snippets I think you will enjoy:

The typical greeting is: "Hello, You're welcome" and the response is "Yoo" or "Yoooooooo" and then they giggle because we know how to respond.

The city we are in (Ho) is primarily Christian, so the names of shops are:
God is Good Hair Salon
Emmanuel Auto Parts
Thy God mini Mart
End Times Hair Salon

We are eating at our hotel, so I don't know if we are getting the full authentic experience of Ghanain food. But we are eating rice, chicken, and tilapia. The interesting dishes are spinach stew and steamed bread. The most delicious foods I have had so far are mashed yams, sweet bread and pineapple. all fruit for that matter.

The patterns of clothes are beautiful, and today was market day, so we pushed through the crowded streets full of dizzying colors and smells. Carts overflowed with fruit and fish.

Adventures thus far:

We visited a village to de-worm their goats and I handled some goats to squirt the medicine into their mouths. I talked to the goats to try to settle them down. I would have passed out stickers for all my good patients.

African dance and drum classes are absolutely amazing. My body pours with sweat and my hands throb with pain, but it is so satisfying. Last night, the Kekeli Kids performed for us and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time until Victor pulled me up and made me dance.

Victor is our Ewe language teacher. He is stubborn and really arrogant, and moves really fast in class, but it is great! (He is not a sweet and gentle Harshji, but no one could replace Harshji)

Today we went to a primary school and Sunshine (that is her nickname) Emily and I read books to the 4th and 5th graders and did a project with them where we cut out words from newspapers and made sentences and poems. Some of the best sentences:
"Golden Immortality"
"Ghanains have the power"
and
"Beware of the Elephants"

That's all for now! All my love!

Ellen

Rated PG

PG for Post-Grad. Obviously.

About a month ago, my mom told me that she wishes she wrote down her thoughts and feelings during her transition from college to the real world. A journal, or something, but she was not telling me that I had to do it....

One of the greatest realizations of post-graduation is that I can read. for fun. I immediately devoured The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and needed more pages to turn. My bookshelf contains picture books, Harry Potter, Calvin and Hobbes, and a wrinkled torn copy of the anthology of 50 Essays we read selections from junior year in AP Comp. Reading these essays always felt like a chore, we never contextualized the authors (unless they were Martin Luther King Jr. or Thomas Jefferson). All I remember is that we read "A Modest Proposal" and discussed its irony every week. Or at least it felt like it. I resented this book, but I held unto it, thinking one day I would read "A Modest Proposal" again for laughs, or maybe when I was old enough to turn it into a drinking game...

This anthology caught my eye and I pulled it off my shelf I scanned the back only to find that it is contains essays of astounding relevance. I took a personal essay writing class last semester and now understand persona, self-deprecation as a means of gaining trust, and finding the objective correlative. I did not enjoy the essays as a 16-year-old but now have 6 more years of life experience to reflect on when reading about certain themes from specific authors. My 16-year-old annotations are pathetically entertaining "Ohhhh" and "YAY" and "good choice." I also identified every single simile. I circled unfamiliar words, but now reading over them again, I can check off the words that I now know the meaning of. abhor, dais, botulism, stupor. 

Most of the essays I find most meaningful now are the ones we never touched in AP Comp. Not surprising that they are from minority voices. I am now trying to figure out how I would make these essays fit into the curriculum of a high school history class.

Maya Angelou "Graduation" -relevant considering the most recent event of my life, and also interesting to compare the commencement address Angelou heard to the one I heard.

Gloria Anzaldua "How to Tame a Wild Tongue" -I had gloria anzaldua in my hand at age 16. I don't know if I would have understood a queer chicana poet at that time. Fortunately, now I find her inspiring and even the cadence of her name invigorates me.

James Baldwin "Notes of a Native Son"-read it in class, got even more out of it a second time.

Linda Hogan "Dwellings" -Hogan wrote "The Woman Who Watches Over the World," my favorite book from Intro WGS about the history of suffering in her native Chickasaw tribe.

Those are my recommendations for now, but other authors included are many that I have read this past semester: Judith Ortiz Cofer, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Richard Rodriguez, Scott Russel Sanders, David Sedaris, and Thoreau. Other authors that now resonate with me are N. Scott Momaday, whose autobiography I read sophomore year, Zora Neale Hurston, Sojourner Truth, Alice Walker and Leslie Marmon Silko, my mom's newest feminist find.

Now I know at least 28 of the 50 authors of which I probably only knew 8 when I was 16. College clearly taught me something.  
 

Time to go.

I have not been geographically stationary since 2008.

On Thursday I leave for Ghana, I am accompanying an abroad program for 4 weeks. Peter (my advisor from Kenyon) is sending me with his wife's OSU class. We will be doing many site visits including schools, farms, and an orphanage. We will be taking dance, drum, and language classes and learning from local experts about Ghanaian culture and rural development.

If you are wondering where Ghana is, you can google it. Or, imagine you are tickling Africa under its chin and that is where Ghana is located on the continent. Ghana is a friendly, vibrant country with great music and art. I am not sure what to expect exactly, but I am ready to begin the adventure!

My cell-phone access will be non-existent and my Internet access will be sporadic. I will update here or on facebook.

Also, please excuse the cheesy song, but Maggie got it stuck in my head in April.

It's blog season

Well, it's that special time again. When I feel isolated and distant from familiar friends and places I felt most attached to and need to share my thoughts with those people and hope that they respond with some sort of validation so I know I am not forgotten.

I just left Kenyon College with degree in hand, marking my official status as an alumnus. More importantly, officially no longer a student. That is what is the most difficult to accept, I am no longer a student. I identified myself first and foremost as a (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) at Kenyon College [in Ohio] for the past four years. It was an efficient way to answer how old I am, where I currently live, what I am studying-if they had never heard of Kenyon, they didn't really care, and if they had heard of it, they knew it was some highfalutin subject that won't actually get me employed. But know I answer with the ambiguous "I graduated from Kenyon" which does not answer how old I am, or where I currently live, or if what I studied really has anything to do with my job. I can no longer claim the exclusive title of "Kenyon Student" that only 1600 young people have the honor of flaunting any given year. We had to leave to make room for the 18-year-olds bursting with delusions of grandeur of what they are going to accomplish as a Kenyon student. It's odd. Feeling so immediately separated from something that I was so immersed in two weeks ago.

The first piece of wisdom I ever received as an over-eager first-year from Peter Rutkoff: Learning does not end after college. Let's see if he's right!

start

its the start of a new year, a new semester, but I feel anything but new. Everything is so familiar, the place, the people, the smell, the feelings, the intonation of my steps on the sidewalk (ooooo feelings)...which is all wonderful, I would not give up my experiences of creating all this familiar, but this is what cabin fever must feel like. Getting stir-crazy. 18 weeks until graduation. I have so much to look forward to this year, and I feel like the things I am really counting down to are not happening until May (my 22nd birthday, graduation, moving to minneapolis) I need to decide if I want to throw myself into this semester and work hard and get involved in lots of things, make lists, stay busy to distract myself. Or enjoy it. Take the time to smell the flowers, relax and soak up my last semester. I guess that breaks down as have an active or passive semester. I have always had incredibly active semesters, but always find time to play my ukulele, laugh with friends, go for walks. I think the conclusion I am coming to is that I need to treat this semester just as I have ever other semester at this school, not drawing attention to everything being "the last" I think I can do that. So, let 2012 commence.

high school.

in my first weeks in my last year of college, I've been thinking about high school. My American Studies Honors project will require about 6 hours a week spent in a high school classroom. I visited the high school in which I will be volunteering for the first time on Thursday and the familiarity seems so distant...crowded hallways, slamming lockers, ringing bells. That really is the setting of teenage learning. My project is observing and intereacting in a 9th grade US history class and a 12th grade government class taught by the same (awesome) teacher. In the spring I will do more hands-on lesson planning and implement one of my own!

Joining me at Kenyon this year is another Petosegan, I his presence on campus is somehow making me flashback to PHS. I keep on thinking I see people from high school and I have this strange desire to yell "you're looking good" at everyone I see...and where is the giant blue stripe that makes the walls look less like a prison?

Oh, the places you'll go...

I am trying to make a good status to encapsulate my feelings about this year and how a year ago today was my first day in India. Now, I could spend the whole semester thinking a year ago today I was in: _______ [delhi, jaipur, at the taj, in the village, on a camel yadda yadda] or I could read my journal entry from that corresponding day...or not.

I am really overwhelmed by STUFF HAPPENING right now and I can't squeeze in processing the fact that I was in India a year ago. Honestly, it feels like longer. So much has happened...eeeeeeeee and now I have to come to terms with being a senior. in college. Wait! I have to terms with it and it is AWESOME. There is a lot to accomplish and being back in school mode after an amazing summer of city living and interning and independency is difficult. But I have great friends, tons of new people to meet, lots to learn and YPI to keep me motivated.