As I sit here in my hotel room at the Highgate Hotel in Accra it's hard to believe that I left for Ghana nearly 24 hours ago. When I got to Minneapolis Airport and checked my bag, the computer systems unexpectedly shut down. The gate agent assured me that my back would make it efficiently to Accra, but he wasn't sure if I'd be able to get on the plane. Ha! After much good-natured toe tapping and keyboard slapping, I finally got a boarding pass and headed for security. Met up with Eric (from Grand Rapids) and Sara (from Stillwater) at gate. The rest of the trip was thankfully uneventful. We met the rest of the cohort at Dulles. Although we just met 2 weeks ago, it was like a class reunion. I really have so much respect and esteem for this group of colleagues! I find it so frustrating that teachers and public education in general so often get trashed when we rarely hear about the amazing and impressive people that this profession attracts- What a resourceful, imaginative, inquisitive bunch!
On the long flight overseas I was seated next to the most fascinating Ghanaian man. I'm embarassed that I never asked his name, so he'll remain incognito for the purposes of this blog. He grew up in Accra but his parents sent him to boarding school in Cape Coast. He then went to Sweden to study medicine and he's now a surgeon living in central Michigan with his multinational wife and two small children. What a life he's led. We discussed everything from public education to parenting to birth control to Republican presidential nominees to family values. I finally had to tell him I needed to sleep so that I wouldn't be a zombie today. I learned more about Ghana from him in 2 hours than from books and web sites over the past 4 months.
We got to the hotel around 4, checked in, unpacked bags and met up in th lobby to go to (guess where!) the mall.. Ugh! Can you imagine getting to a new, exciting location and immediately going to the mall? Well, that's what we did. We needed to stock up on bottled water and I wanted to get a sim card for my phone so that I could call home without costing me a load. We accomplished all of that, returned to hotel and had a lovely "welcome" dinner in the hotel restaurant. Everyone was really exhausted so we all retired to our rooms early, but I'm really keyed up and don't know that I'll be able to sleep any time soon. Maybe I should pop a couple melatonin and pull out my Nook.
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