Guest post: Don’t be afraid of the satchel water

Note: I asked Christopher Wink, my predecessor as opinion editor at The Temple News and one of the guiding forces in my path through journalism at Temple, to share some insight he gained during his stay in Ghana a few summers ago. Without further ado, here are his thoughts.

Don’t be afraid of the satchel water.

Pretty quickly on in the urbanized sprawl of greater Accra in coastal Ghana, you just might notice that the kids buy plastic bags of water, a corner of which they bite off to chug the contents. If no one convinces you otherwise, you just might stick to the bottled variety.

Don’t be afraid of the satchel water — that much I learned.

I spent a portion of summer 2005 studying at the University of Ghana in East Legon outside of the capital city of Accra. It wasn’t long enough to fully familiarize myself with even the university, set aside the city, the country or the region and Hell if I have even a taste of the continent, as one of the great lessons from travel should be that cultural learning comes from decades not days in a place. I did, however, pick up that the satchel water was refreshing, cheap and unique.

Stephen arrived late last month and asked that I give something from my experience. If I have any lesson to impart, it is to walk on the dirt paths of Ghana holding a thoughtful mix of curiosity and pride. Be interested in what is new, but don’t be too quick to cast aside what is your own. There are a lot of dark corners and yet dead pain that shouldn’t be ignored because of the assuredly existent culture that remains. You’ll be fascinated, and rightly so, but you can’t dance without your feet on the floor.

You need to remember, so much has been lost there.

Regional languages like Asante, Ewe and Ga are dying in the hands of the children far from the movement and motives of Kwame Nkrumah — the nation’s great leader whose blood is on our own hands. With a textbook and an hour, you may likely learn more about the race dilemmas, statistics, cultural histories and socioeconomic challenges facing the relatively stable African country of 23 million than most people you meet there will know.

The nuance is what you’ll miss, the examples. Yes, the lede.

Many of the teens and 20-somethings I met during my time in Ghana had a strange mix of hatred for American diplomacy and obsession with American culture. The global idolatry for President Obama will likely carry that further. Ghanaians, of course, are mostly warm, hospitable and interested. Ask questions of their lives and most will happily oblige with answers. Most children will touch, and the teens will talk and the older they get they more they may stare.

Like anyone adventuring anywhere, I hope you can be a good journalist. Ask questions and learn and, yes, do share, but respect yourself and your roots. Be excited and open, but careful in a place that, while safer than many of the country’s struggling neighbors and continent-mates, still suffers poverty and quiet desperation in the United States. There is plenty of Western influence and people with money and comforts, but there are also many more who have neither and will do a lot of things to change that.

Ghana’s landscape is deceiving. This small swath of sub-Saharan West Africa doesn’t have the vistas or the big-game animals or the cavernous plains our collective Western image has of the African continent. You’ll call it beautiful because it’s new, but it isn’t exactly beautiful. The country’s coasts are mostly haunting — the last sights for millions of would-become slaves 150 years ago — and the bush is thick and daunting. Even the mountains of Aburri and beyond are mist-filled and foreboding.

All of that I found after my first e-mail home four years ago, which shows my wild-eyed enthusiasm. I learned a lot during my stay and my studies — mostly about how little I knew and continue to know. You will too.

Combine what you see and what you can learn.

I hope you read Ayi Kwei Armah and even Chinua Achebe and all about the West African aesthetic and why Ghana really has nothing to do with the Ghanaian empire. Take your pictures, and your video. Talk to anyone you can, without losing the skepticism and guardedness I’d expect out of even the youngest aspiring journalist. Write. I came home and wrote essays that I thought were wise and profound. Of course, they aren’t, but I hope you’ll do the same.

The strange thing about any extended travel, particularly to locations seen as unique for a young man from Lancaster, is how it’ll be tied to you through the eyes of others. So take risks, and explore and run yourself ragged to see and learn and experience all you can. Start with the satchel water.

Christopher Wink is a Philadelphia-based travel writer and freelance journalist, who helped launch Technically Philly, a news site that covers technology and innovation in the Delaware Valley. He and Stephen crossed paths in the hallowed reaches of Room 243, the newsroom of The Temple News, the student newspaper of Temple University.