On the Road Again

Ghana Log #1

I can't tell you why moving this time around freaked me out so much. Maybe it was because I was going farther from home than ever before. Maybe it was that I was going to a new place with an actual job to do. Or, yet still, I knew that spending two months in west Africa would be the greatest challenge I ever had.

The night before I left I started coming down with a cold. This is pretty typical of my nerves taking over. The same thing happened to me the day I moved to London and Chicago (for some reason, I was spared this when going to SF and NYC) so I tried to not let it bother me.

To make things worse, I have a feeling that the bugs in my apartment know when I'm nervous. (If you know anything about this phenomenon, please write in the comment section below).

Let me tell you a quick story...

On a hot September night last summer, I nervously prepared for my first day of class at NYU. I ironed my clothes, set my automatic coffee maker, and programmed my alarm clock for three hours before I would have to walk 15 minutes to NYU.

When I woke up the next morning I felt really odd. I couldn't stop scratching my skin, and I could barely open my eyes.

I had been ferociously attacked by a swarm of bugs in the night.

I had bites all over my face and hands, one huge welt on my cheek, another on my nose, and my eyelids (evidently bitten) were near swollen shut.

I went to my first day of class looking like I had been up all night getting my ass kicked.

Back to the present...

Complete with a now very swollen throat, I was awakened around 4 a.m. by a mosquito flying around my face. Now ever since that first day of class, my roommate Nathan and I had gone through great pains to protect ourselves from the merciless bug farm known as "Avenue B Community Garden." But, as if those heartless scum could tell I had a big day coming up, they struck again.

I woke up Friday morning with over 20 bug bites (I counted) and my left eye horribly swollen. To say the least, I was disappointed. I had spent the last month and a half almost exclusively getting ready for Ghana. I was working out four times a week, setting up freelance gigs, getting shots and visas, etc. This is not the way I wanted to arrive in west Africa.

Regardless, I managed to finish packing and get to the airport. It was my job to find the NYU Journalism in Ghana students and make sure they got on the plane. The only problems were one student temporarily not getting her boarding pass (credit card problem) and three students not showing up at the last minute (one student was so late that we didn't see her getting on the plane and thought she missed it).

Luckily, all the students were really cool and it calmed my nerves. Still, I didn't sleep the whole 11-hour flight. I stayed up blowing my nose, watching the in-flight movies, and daydreaming about Ghana.

I thought hard about all the new things I would see, all the friends I would make, and hoping our apartments were near the beach.