Think of the worst airport traveling experience you've ever had. Maybe delayed flights? Missed flights? Troubles with security? Lost luggage? Take that experience, multiply it by ten in terms of stress levels, put yourself in a developing country, and take away internet access, with minimal phone access, and there you have what happened to us on Saturday as we tried to depart for our European fall break to Istanbul, Nice, and Barcelona.
Let's backtrack: in September, the three of us set about planning our week off, since we are here for 15 weeks, work for 14 weeks, and get a one week break. We also have to leave the country at some point during our stay in Ghana in order to reactivate our visas. Since our immediate neighbors of Togo, Cote d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso don't offer particularly appealing destinations, we settled on flying somewhere farther from here. A search of flight prices showed us that flying into Nice and out of Barcelona through Istanbul would be our cheapest option, so our Euro trip was born. One week of hot showers, gelato, cheese, reliable electricity, paved roads, and cool weather awaited us, and we eagerly anticipated the break it would provide from what is admittedly sometimes a mentally exhausting way of life in Dodowa. Therefore, when we arrived at the Accra airport on Saturday afternoon, we couldn't wait to get on the plane for what would surely be a great trip. Well, that didn't happen. Erin and I were informed that our tickets had been refunded, so we didn't have seats on the plane, while Hannah still did. Basically, since we had bought our tickets online in Ghana with a credit card, they don't trust that since there are a lot of problems with fraud. Hannah had had someone at home buy her ticket, which was why it wasn't cancelled. Our main objection to this whole thing was that they didn't TELL us that this refund had been made, so we showed up with invalid confirmation numbers and papers marked "E-ticket" that were no good. Our argument that we hadn't been informed and therefore couldn't be held accountable for the fact that we showed up expecting to get on a flight that they sad we couldn't be on. The Turkish airlines representative then informed us that we could still get on our original flight, but that it would cost double of what we originally paid. No me gusta. After some tearful conversations with our parents, Erin and I both reluctantly agreed to pay for the ticket. Problem solved, right? Wrong. We're still in a cash economy, remember? So the fact that we both want to pay for the new tickets with credit cards, because we could never withdraw that much cash at once, posed a huge problem. For four long hours, we waited at the airline office and argued with the representatives, as they unhelpfully gave us random phone numbers to call and sent us to the internet cafe in the airport to try and fix the problem ourselves. My calls to the airline office in Istanbul did nothing, and since the internet in the airport was not working, all of our efforts were futile, and as our take-off time drew nearer, it began to sink in that we weren't going. For the first time that I have been in Ghana, I truly, truly wanted to go home. All of the small frustrations of living in a developing country suddenly boiled to the surface, and I legitimately cried for the first time in seven weeks. I pictured us heading to Togo for our week off to re-activate our visas instead of to Europe, which, to three girls alone in the Accra airport with all of our plans cancelled, seemed a depressing prospect. We all love living in Ghana, especially because we are actually LIVING in Ghana. It's the three of us, in a house in a rural village, and that's it. No big school group of twenty students who have weekends nicely planned or have classes to take at the university. If we travel, we're on our own. When we go to work, we're on our own. We eat dinner with our host family five nights a week. We have gotten to know many of the fruit sellers, seamstresses, research center employees, and random strangers that introduce themselves on the street. I'm proud to feel like we are a part of the community, instead of being isolated and removed from everyone. Our program is so unique in that aspect, and even the Dodowa site itself is unique within the international health program, since I feel so integrated into the community and that we at least share some of the hardships that our neighbors share. When Auntie Esther's family doesn't have water running, neither do we. If the power goes out at the research center, it also goes out at our house. Laundry day comes around if we're lucky enough to have the water on that week and enough buckets to soak and rinse. The idea of having air conditioning or running showers is laughable. My point is not to say "our lives are so hard, feel bad for us". My point is that through all of those little hardships or inconveniences, it still is the best abroad experience that I could have asked for, to truly live in a different country, not just happen to be in a different country and live like we do at home. However, we're only human, and after seven weeks, we understandably needed a break. So this is why our cancelled travel plans seemed so devastating at the time.
We still needed to leave the country somehow to reactivate our visas, so we needed a new plan, and fast. Credit Erin for making sure we re-planned our week after dinner on the same night, so that we had new tickets booked for just Barcelona by the time we went to bed. We stayed in Accra, woke up at 1:30 AM on Monday morning, and flew out to Barcelona through Casablanca, arriving in Spain by Monday afternoon. We have been enjoying hot, running showers, gelato, fresh berries, cheese, nightly shopping sprees, and the some delicious Spanish tapas. Can you tell our happiness is directly correlated to food? Pictures to follow!
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