co incidents.

one of my friends recently told me he admired how i clearly communicate my thoughts in my blog posts. i'm not sure my thoughts are always that clear. on the contrary, i feel like i babble on and on incoherently most of the time, which is why i made a label for my posts called "nonsensical verbiage." which is what i feel is about to happen as i start this post...


i'll begin with a favorite anecdote my parents love to tell of my childhood. they packed up our chevy suburban, complete with car topper and three small children, and headed out of beckley, west virginia, bound for mississippi. the journey was 12 hours long, the road was hard, but hey there ain't no rest for the weary. anyhow as the story goes, we got to the stop light at the bottom of the hill about a mile from our house and my little 4 year old self squealed out from the back seat, "are we THERE yet?"


sometimes i live my life like that. am i there yet? is it time? when will i arrive at point x?


when i first got to ghana, i didn't fall in love with the place. i still don't think i have. the city of accra is not beautiful or charming. it's dirty. and the way it operates boggles my mind; i don't know how it holds itself together... from my naive outsider's perspective, there is hardly any infrastructure or structure to begin with. everyone just kind of does their own thing but at the same time looks out for each other more than any average joe in america would ever consider doing. it's like when you put water in a bucket and spin it around and the water doesn't fall out because of the physics of it all-- accra is like that. it's spinning around, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, but nothing ever goes terribly wrong.
so these are my thoughts five weeks into my time here in accra.


this week i realized that i could see myself staying here for a long time. for the first time ever, i wasn't opposed to putting down roots. i had stopped asking, "are we there yet?" without even knowing it. i'm not sure what brought this change. perhaps it was tuesday, when i listened to country music while it rained, and my worlds collided in a burst of nostalgia. or perhaps it was that evening when i went on a run through a residential area and could have easily convinced myself i was running on yellowbrick road at my uncle's house in mississippi. the red clay, the old men gardening, the kids getting home from school, the humid heavy air-- my second burst of nostalgia.
but none of this was the bad kind of nostalgia. have you ever read up on nostalgia? it can bring feelings of joy or sadness. this nostalgia was pure joy. joy that i can appreciate the past, the good ol' days, at the same time as i enjoy this new adventure. my story is being written, the pages are being filled up faster than i can comprehend. day by day they fill, creating a chapter of life unique specifically to this place and this time.


wednesday i went to Mokola Market, the largest outdoor market in west africa. FREAKING HUGE and CRAZY place. you can buy everything from soap to cow skin from a cow killed 2 days ago to cloth to pots and pans to alcohol to clothespins to straws from Subway to meat pies to prada knock-off purses. i'd seen it featured in the episode of Amazing Race when the cast went to ghana and made fools of themselves, but this was my first time experiencing the place in the flesh. (actually, and sadly, come to think of it, that episode of Amazing Race was the only thing i'd really seen about ghana upon arrival here 5 weeks ago. it all came about because hannah young made me watch it while hanging out at her apartment before i left in december. we made fun of the show as the cast members tried to sell sunglasses in the market and got laughed at and ripped off by locals haha.)


ok so back to the point:


who- me and a friend
what- buying sunglasses
when- wednesday
where- mokola market
why- to explore
how- arrived by tro-tro, traveled on foot


did you catch that? buying sunglasses. i was with my friend harrison and he bought sunglasses. and i was like, man, this is crazy. hannah and i were JUST watching this a coupla months ago. and it just happened. at that moment i couldn't get over the coincidence of it all. but really, is anything coincidence? 


i told hannah about it later (hi hannah, i know you're reading this and i love you) and she sent me this quote by her favorite theologian, Frederick Buechner:

...People laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know. Who can say what it is that's going on? But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this:

"You've turned up in the right place at the right time. You're doing fine. Don't ever think that you've been forgotten."

so stop asking if you're there yet. and i'll do the same. let's look around us and find beauty in the mundane. in the unexpected. know that you have a purpose wherever you are; embrace it. similarly to what sarah mchaney said in her XA blogpost, doubt is normal-- and more than that, it is the questioning that makes us grow. but it's what we do with it that matters.