Sunday, November 8, 2009

The Weekend

Sundays are alive with the dichotomy between the bustling, fancifully dressed church-goers, and the emptiness left by the absence of those students who travel home for the weekends. Nothing is open here on Sundays and as a result even less gets done than at the normal pace that Ghana functions. It's called "Ghanaian time" and being here on the weekend after traveling for so many makes me realize how efficient I am on the weekends. Spanning hundreds of kilometers and seeing West Africa is an easy trade off for sitting around my room avoiding the hellish heat of Accra.

The sun just passed it's peak and as it continues its job of bringing daylight to the rest of the world, it becomes much easier to move about campus. I attempt to go out and buy a wireless card for my computer to skype with Jaci, but just as Alex and my brunch at Coffee Q was stopped before it could start due to the Sunday closures, I was unsuccessful in my afternoon stroll. I came back to the Internet cafe downstairs from my room and luckily had enough signal to download 2 megabytes of lecture slides over a ten minute time period. It's still too hot to really do much else so i go up to my room in an attempt to study for my Interim Assessment on Tuesday.

It's not too necessary though, to study that is, since my teacher didn't show up to over half of the scheduled lectures. In class we'd wait, and each time Joe and I would leave earlier and earlier until the probability of having class dropped lower than that of torrential downpours during the middle of the day. That's just Ghana time i guess, and while at first I got frustrated by it, now I've gotten quite used to it. I actually think it's relaxed me quite a bit. By having to deal with this lack of organization, I think i've become less stressed and I hope it comes with me back to America. I like not stressing about finals, but then again exams back in America will be more challenging and I'm still not sure how my stress free lifestyle here will affect how I perform on them until I actually take them. I do however think that it'll be good for me to keep my newfound cool as best I can when I get back to America, because as someone wise once said, "worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere."

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