Author: Sacharja Cunningham

I will admit that in entering Ghana, I did have the romanticized expectation of a homecoming experience as an African American. Now, I don’t underestimate how places can change just as much as people do. In many ways, my experience was not a return. In my opinion, such an experience is no longer possible considering the centuries of different histories shaping Africans, African Americans, and Africa itself. I compare these experiences to my returns— or lack thereof—to New York City over the past 6 years from a boarding high school and now college. I have seen and experienced the effects of gentrification and how displacement remains an issue for African Americans. These experiences compound on one another and the latter made the homecoming sentiments of the former stronger.

From transitioning into Ghana, to transitioning back to the states and now having returned to Hamilton, the last few months have been filled with changes. Not only had I changed, but the lives of friends and family had changed too. I had to catch up on important updates with loved ones, which quickly became a huge part of my winter break and my social re-entry.

Overall, I knew that I have gone through and continue to go through a lot emotionally and physically because of the demanding work of traveling then adjusting to various environments. In accepting this, I began thinking of ways to make time to process all of my experiences in the best way.

After making the decision to not study abroad during the spring semester and return to Hamilton, I did affirm the importance of incorporating creative expression to my semester. Specifically, knowing my passions for reading, writing, and videography, I wanted to open academic and creative outlets for me to constructively process my thoughts as well as experiences over this past year using those mediums. My current semester includes courses about African-American literature, Caribbean literature, advanced videography, in addition to philosophy and social movements. All of these courses allow me to delve deeper into my identity, creativity, and knowledge about many of the concepts I have been thinking about recently.

Along with my courses, talking with other people who have been abroad continues to help me understand the experience. This constant mental revisiting of Ghana shows how knowing the meaning of the semester will not necessarily take place during or even months afterward. Additionally, the programming that I am doing with the Off-Campus Study office serves as a way to actively and effectively understand how I am transitioning back to everything from being in the United States to Hamilton routines. So, both in my course work and on-campus employment, I have my re-entry experience built into my weekly routines. Through blog writing and talking about my semester away, I found that if I was not deliberately unpacking my experience, I would be confused as to why I had the semester I did. So, my transitioning needed to be planned because it wouldn’t happen naturally or easily.  

In high school, my track coaches would always advise me to listen to my body during the season and act accordingly based on what I heard. The intensity of workouts required that I know when I needed to rest and recover to avoid injury. My health became increasingly central to me during that time and in college. The control I gained over my healthy body made track along with the supplemental best practices of eating right and sleeping enough all parts of my lifestyle. To me, this self-care directly contrasted the stress of living in a country that has multiple ways of targeting and oppressing my body. Then, to build on these experiences, my sophomore year courses at Hamilton highlighted the marginalized body in academic and larger societal spaces. During the summer before going to Ghana, I had done research about how marginalized students can best become aware of their bodies in different contexts. So, my body was at the forefront of my mind as I prepared to study abroad.

The physicality of the semester surprised me and caused a range of feelings from enjoyment to discomfort. I will forever be grateful for the days the sun blessed my melanin. Ghana’s black soap and Shea butter exfoliated and moisturized my skin respectively as the climate did not dry out my scalp under my full head of hair. The exercise I got from walking around the University of Ghana’s campus and its scenery faithfully improved my mood. I listened to this and appreciated what I heard. I also listened to my stomach and learned that I have a sensitive and stubborn digestive system. Additionally, my sleeping patterns did not ever fully adjust to the different time zone. Though these were just two challenges, they were fundamental and reoccurring to the point that they affected other areas of the semester at times. I did manage to listen to my body and be flexible in finding food while also getting as much sleep as possible. In the end, these challenges proved valuable in teaching me what traveling demanded of my body.

Studying abroad is work, and certainly physical work. This is also the case with being a student in the states, but the self-care best practices I do at Hamilton are different than the ones Ghana required. After returning from Ghana, my next multi-destination program would have required that I adjust to a new diet in 3 places.  In the final month of my fall semester abroad and the first week back in the states, I listened to my body in a way that I never had to before. Ultimately, I made the decision to not study abroad during the spring semester. Putting my health first definitely did come with the sacrifice of not experiencing the opportunities of my spring semester program. However, it came with knowledge that studying abroad truly affects the body in multiple ways and, so, it was important for me to listen to my body and act accordingly.

My academics are tightly linked to my personal self and at times they are one in the same. In the months leading up to my semester in Ghana, I was reminded that my experiences and learning took place in Trump America during the Black Lives Matter era. Therefore, studying abroad in Ghana was, in many ways, supposed to be an escape from multiple problems I dealt with in the states. Though this was naive to a certain extent, I believe my willingness to overlook my somewhat illogical plan for leaving shows the severity of those issues. In my intellectual and physical search for some solace, James Baldwin has been particularly relatable because of his experiences as an expatriate. He’s voiced these sentiments throughout many of his essays including one titled “The New Lost Generation.” While reading it, I continued to grapple with the inescapability of the Americanness that comes with my blackness, and the inseparability of my blackness to meaningfulness beyond America’s borders.

The following quote from Baldwin’s essay perfectly describes how I felt sometimes in Ghana because of both my studies and my identity: “Once, in short, one found oneself divested of all the things that one had fled from, one wondered how people, meaning, above all, oneself, could possibly do without them.” I saw this paradox that characterizes my feelings and thoughts both in Ghana and, now, back in the United States. Race has become crucial to understanding the way I walk through the world. Though this is thankfully not the sum of my identity, it is a uniquely important aspect of me and my life. Unfortunately, race, racism, and fighting racial injustice is necessary to understanding me, but it is not sufficient. Therefore, I did want to travel to Ghana to find other ways of seeing myself that America cannot provide. While that did happen, I found myself conflicted because of the heightened emphasis on my nationality and, specifically, the blurring of Americanness and whiteness.  

In confronting these feelings, I found that my solace isn’t an escape, but any moment when I have my racial identity and the resulting experiences in my life validated by others. In some instances, I was grateful to have that happen with Ghanaians. When it didn’t happen, I was disappointed and disheartened. Both situations required that I deliberately immerse myself into Ghana and my African American identity in Ghana. As Carolyn North in Hamilton’s Off-Campus Study office frames it, studying abroad is not a semester off, but a semester on. I was meant to find a better understanding of all of these ideas rather than leave them.

The United States continues to be a place that drives people, particularly black people, from the nation over 56 years after Baldwin wrote the essay I mentioned above. In leaving, returning, and now enduring, I would not apologize nor regret seeking a way out. I believe that doing so honored my awareness of America’s grave issues and my aspirations to help change the U.S. as I made my way back into it.

While in Ghana, I used a range of practices to help myself acclimate to a new environment. From hours of discussion with fellow students on my program, to going for a run, to listening to music, knowing exactly what cleared my mind and left me refreshed helped me give my best self throughout the semester. Note-taking, blogging, reading, and writing in general proved especially beneficial to reflect on my experiences and comprehend their significance to the best of my ability. In addition to its personal benefits, documenting my semester served as a way to help future students by providing information that would better prepare them for studying in Ghana. Lastly, writing notes and blogs would have a range of audiences including my friends, family, and anyone who frequents the Hamilton website. Overall, writing enabled me to manage the different but connected ways studying abroad held meaning from the most personal to the most global.  

The process of writing became a way to do the work of critically analyzing my abroad experience and not only reflecting on what happened, but why things happened. Many times, understanding my experience needed the careful and lengthy process writing about it created. While I definitely tried to document my semester by taking pictures and videos, writing about my experiences captured them in a different way that pictures and videos cannot. For example, my posts on social media were mainly superficial while my blogs were on websites made for sharing experiences in more depth. It also tested my willingness to and success in accomplishing one of my main goals for studying abroad: understanding myself better in a new environment.

Before arriving in Ghana, I knew I would need to deliberately and thoroughly be introspective to consider how my identity and the national climate I was leaving would affect my study abroad experience. Then, while in Ghana, I would continue to do this carefully, giving this process the time it deserved due to its complexity. I kept in mind my own ignorance as an American who has only studied the continent in an intellectual setting and not through experiential learning. I also kept in mind my writing’s impact on the various audiences that would access my blog posts in addition to the global perceptions, misconceptions, and prejudices about not only Ghana, but Africa. Thus, as I revised my blogs, I was able to contemplate many perspectives about my experience and not just my own. Writing gave me a necessary degree of control to write responsibly and honestly, respecting the truth of my experience while realizing the reasons for it and their implications in various contexts.

Whether formally or informally, writing can make the difference of traveling abroad. It’s not just about how much you take from your travels, but how much of your travels you can translate into larger constructive conversations about global as well as intercultural fluency. With that in mind, writing about my semester has been as important as residing abroad.

Last Spring in my Education Studies class, we discussed the distinction between receiving an education and claiming one. That discussion gave language to the mindset I had entered college with. It has also gotten me through difficult and triumphant times both at Hamilton and at the University of Ghana, maintaining my clarity of my vision in two notably different academic systems.

Generally, there have been many adjustments to the academics and education here in Ghana. I have needed to adjust to using WhatsApp communication as opposed to email correspondence in addition to relying on teacher’s assistants and course representatives in classes. This required a particularly proactive approach in classes to make sure that I am updated with information. Many classes have a midterm assessment that counts for 30% of one’s grade and a final that counts for 70%. With fewer opportunities to check for my understanding and with examinations counting for much more of my grade than I am used to, I felt a lot of pressure and anxiety to do well on these exams.

When picking my classes at the beginning of the semester, I practiced the same careful and deliberate choosing I did at Hamilton, keeping my academic strengths, areas of growth, limits, and goals in mind. While I did expect to challenge myself, I also reminded myself that taking on too many challenges in a new environment would mean setting myself up for failure. Consequently, most of my classes resembled the more-seminar based classes that I was used to.

However, I took the only education course I could find named Educational Psychology, which consisted of an unfamiliar lecture-based style, rigorous note taking, and a large class size. Practices such as sitting in the first row of the lecture hall and making sure to ask questions as often as I could helped me make the transition and stay focused in this new setting. The midterm also caught me off guard with a short and strict time constraint. Afterward, I did not do so well on timed pop quizzes and found it difficult to study for acumulative final.

Contemplating and experiencing all of this made me realize how the control I had over my education definitely shifted, but nonetheless, should not have been completely lost. In a lot of ways, attending an institution with different approaches to teaching and learning is a risk and can be stressful. My adaptability has been tested just as much as my grasp of the knowledge in my classes. Considering the fact that my academic performance does not only impact my future but my family’s future, I was scared at multiple points throughout the semester. Deciding to study abroad was and is a form of claiming an education due to the active work required to remain grounded, determined, and successful. My academic challenges here did not set me back, but did clarify how I should proceed. Through my endeavors, I seek to embody Kwame Nkrumah’s famous words: “Backward never. Forward ever.”

As a millennial, I guess I fit the stereotype of someone who is always on his phone. I’m frequently scrolling through Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, and spending hours on FaceTime. Contacting people back home has become one of the most important things to me. I have realized that my need to remain so invested in my life in the states stems from the particular challenges my loved ones have been facing recently as well as the currently hostile social and political context of the U.S. Daily, I watch as updates range from the most interpersonal of news to global current events. As a result, my feelings and my focus have been split as I try to remain up to date about people’s lives back home while gaining as much as I can through my study abroad experience.

I reflect on my reasons for studying abroad and the preparation process that spanned several months. I had a more individualistic mindset and pictured my presence in Ghana rather than my absence in the states and what that would mean to various people I loved. Now, I grapple with feeling powerless since I am unable to provide the direct emotional and physical support that usually characterizes my relationships with so many people around me back home. Since I was unwilling to sacrifice this opportunity, constantly communicating with people and having an electronic presence have become my way of reaching a compromise. I manage to still achieve an emotional closeness through seeing and hearing people on my phone despite a lack of physical closeness. Of course I make an effort to be present during my time in Ghana. However, I also recognize that I must try my best to ensure the easiest reentry back into the states and lives of loved ones.

Contrary to the judgmental tone many have when commenting on my generation’s preoccupation with our phones, being on mine so much during the day functions as a self-care practice. Journaling about my daily experiences, writing poetry, debriefing about my day to others over the phone, and messaging friends have become calming and often necessary escapes that I have made a regular part of my daily routine. These coping mechanisms allow me to maintain a source of familiarity and solitude as I continue to navigate an environment that is no longer new to me, but still different in many ways to what I am used to.

I would say that I have not found a balance between feeling here and there. Rather, I would describe my feelings as more fluid. The push and pull factors that motivated me to go abroad moved as the Atlantic Ocean. These feelings came in waves as I considered the benefits of traveling with the cost of leaving people, things, and places that I hold dear behind. Now, similar push and pull factors make me feel like I need to return home as I acknowledge the benefits and disadvantages of doing so.