Pre-Departure Training: Learning to Walk with Purpose

And so here it is – my seven days of intense learning are over. I fully intended to be updating this a couple of times during the week to describe what I was working on and what I was learning about myself and about development and about Ghana. I can’t quite explain how the time got away from me like it did, but I’ll go with: fourteen hours of class a day and living in a duplex with 25 other people can be kind of . . . all-consuming, distracting, invigorating.
168 hours of learning is difficult to express – and much harder to remember. I wrote a lot of things down, and I’m sure I’ll refer to it all throughout the summer, and bring things up as they apply to what I am learning in Ghana. For now though, I just have to say that
pre-dep was a challenge. On the first day, we were told that it was an expectation that we should step out of our comfort zone – and while I think the term has become a bit of a cliché, it’s hard to find another way to describe it.
Even as I was learning an immense amount each day, I became more and more aware of how little I really know. We learned a number of important words in different Ghanaian languages (Dagbani, Twi, and Gonja) and some of the more important customs (always waving, eating, passing the salt with your right hand, for example). The second actually caused quite a lot of discussion – the reason behind it is that you wipe with your left hand, so you never want to be touching food or other people with it – so you use the right instead. But consider this: what if you wipe with your right hand? Uhuh. For us right-handed people, that’s the natural tendency . . . so the wiping technique has to be switched too!
At any rate, now I’m at the end of the training, and I can see that I’m going to get things wrong – lots of things. And I’m going to feel stupid every time I make a mistake, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that they already think I’m a weird white person – so if I do something wrong, they’ll probably laugh at me, I’ll probably laugh at myself, and I’ll probably learn how to do it right.
Beyond all the general stuffing of my mind with information and the overwhelming of my being with a million emotions, this week was a lot (really a lot) of fun. I never would have expected 26 people to get along so well. There was not a spare inch of space in the building – I honed my shower down to 4 minutes every two days (this actually is not so hard – the difficult part is trying to get dressed in thirty seconds when you’re not quite dry yet and everything is sticking to you and your panties get all twisted inside your jeans and your hair is dripping all over your shirt) we moved clockwise only in the kitchen, we made a schedule for everything (computers, showers, the phone, the washing machine), and no-one killed or even mildly injured anyone else.
There were a number of moments that I wished I could freeze in time. All going for lunch in Kensington Market and then trying to simultaneously eat ice cream and play hackey-sack in the park with our formal work clothes on. Staying up till two in the morning playing the guitar and singing. Being (surprisingly) gently woken by the morning movements and noises of the house moving around me. Going out on our last night and singing the Backstreet Boys at the top of our lungs in the middle of the bar, then skipping home (on a funny note for all the Montrealers – apparently you need ID to get into a bar in Toronto . . . never even crossed my mind).