Relecting on the Past Semester in Between Finals

I finally managed to get a picture up on my profile! That is me with the monkey that bit me in Cote d'Ivoire (before it attacked me). I know by this time it is too late to even bother with more pictures since I will be returning home next weekend, but I just thought I would give you a small preview. I apologize once again for the delay in writing, but this week has been so hectic that I am surprised I have even found this short time to post. We are in the midst of final exams and writing our last papers, as well as other projects many of us are involved in like community service, internships, and documentary films. Yesterday I spent the entire day between rehearsal for our dance performance, which was last night, and writing a 10 page paper due today that was not even assigned to us until Monday afternoon. None of us understand how most of these professors expect us to commit so much time to each of their classes, especially when we are in our final days here and want to enjoy Ghana as much as we can before we leave, so forgive me if I sound frustrated at this time. Hopefully by the end of next week when all of my academic work is finished I will have more positive relfections on these classes and the professors. I will say that all of them have been great up until these finals when they suddenly got very strict, and that I enjoyed learning from them throughout the semester, especially the dance instructor who is a well-known choreographer throughout the entire continent of Africa. I hope to get a film of our performance last night from one of my friends, since I think it went very well and was so much fun that I will want to have a visual memory of it forever; plus I want to show it to those of you back home who are interested in seeing a contemporary African dance performance. Our associate director actually arrived too late last night and missed the performance, so she asked us all to reinact it tonight at our Farewell dinner that they are hosting for us at the restaurant where we ate on our first day here, called Headlines Hospitality. Unless we throw a going away party ourselves next week, this will probably be our last gathering of everyone in the program including the staff, which will be both sad and wonderful to celebrate one last time.

My other classes are pretty much over now, except for a 6 page paper I have to write for one of them due next week, and I have to say I enjoyed them but was a little disappointed with the way some of them were carried out. Especially the University of Ghana class- Black Diaspora. First of all, it took about 20 minutes to get there every week, which normally would not have bothered me except for the fact that we had to go there about 3 times the first couple weeks just to register in the class and I had to return another time to get my student ID that was only available on one particular day of the week. Then we had to go to a tutorial to discuss the readings from the lectures, which made sense, but NYU decided that for some reason we needed more credit for this course so they created another recitation that we all had to attend each week for two hours to discuss slavery issues and anything else in Ghana that has impacted us. It was fine at the beginning until we started receiving assigned readings and a presentation at the end that most of us did not have time to coordinate, though we were forced to somehow make time in our schedules. What was most disappointing about the course itself, though, was that the majority of our readings were photocopies from American high school textbooks rather than scholarly articles written in Ghana and we learned more about African Americans than the natives of Africa. Luckily our final was last week, so I never have to return to University of Ghana, although I am a bit nostaligic now since it is a beautiful campus and I spent so much time there this semester.
My Society, Culture, and Modernization class has been fairly easy compared to my others since our papers due every other week have been almost free-writing about certain topics he gives us without any strict guidelines. Our final paper due next week is on any topic of our choice, and I and another student have decided to write about our personal experiences in Ghana and how our views have changed since the beginning of the semester after traveling and meeting more people. It should be the least stressful of all my finals, especially since it will allow me to reflect on my time here in a more concise manner since I have not been able to really do that yet.
Unfortunately my dance class is not yet finished after our performance this week since we also have a written final next week on the differences between the different African dances. We have all agreed that this class has been a bit too demanding for a dance class, since we also had a short paper due a couple weeks ago and practically all of yesterday was devoted to rehearsing. Otherwise, I should have some time next week to do some of the last few things I want to like shop for gifts/souvenirs and spend time with my friends who I will not see nearly as often next year in New York.

Since this may be one of my last posts, I want to quickly mention my trip last weekend before I forget since it was one of my favorites. We went on a four-hour drive to a rural area where the largest waterfall in West Africa lies, called Wli Falls, and hiked through a forest filled with butterflies and wild fruits (pineapples and bananas, though none were ripe enough to pick) to reach the falls. It was beautiful and I took many pictures and even a short video so I can always look back on the experience. We all came in our bathing suits and waded into the water, which was just deep enough for us to swim around, then we swam under the falls themselves for an even more exhilirating experience. I cannot express how I felt standing under there screaming and laughing with my friends; we all agreed that it made us feel like small children again who were stress-free and without any worries at all except for maybe falling on the rocks. I only wish we could have stayed longer.

Okay, that's all for now, but I will hopefully write one more time next week before leaving Ghana to say my final farewells and give one last reflection on my experience here. Ciao for now!