Sunday 18 August 2013

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm Moving to Ghana

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: (especially for all the Ghana-based readers out there) I'm moving to Ghana this year! It'll be for a year, or at least that's the time I've managed to buy from my parents, so in about just over a year from today they'll be asking me that foolish question "what are you doing with your life?" to which I must have a good response lest I release the truly authoritarian African Parent within each of them that they have so far managed (successfully) to suppress in their attempt to assimilate into British culture.

Am I excited? Hells yeah! Ghana is my home. It's where I might not feel comfortable but I definitely feel happy. I'm not excited to go just because it's now a fashionable place for the African diaspora, I've always wanted to head out there. I even told my mum that had I been bringing myself up I might have sent me to school out there. Yeh, big words.. which UK born young person would ever regret not getting sent?!!!?!?!

I've spent the past year trying to set up work experience and internships at a number of places. One of them with GRA. No not the Ghana Revenue Authority, but the Ghana Rugby Association. So I get to do something exciting, something I love, in a place that I love. This isn't going to find myself... I know who/what I am, I'm not lost, all roads have led to Africa for over a decade now. This is me going to sow the seeds for a happy existence, not getting trapped in the first graduate job I came across. Many people have advised me to work here for maybe 5-10 years and then eventually move my life over to Africa when I'm more stable. But all I hear when they say that is that I should put my life on pause and live some sort of Groundhog Day in the UK until I give up on thinking there is any alternative to life than the one they taught you at school.

Little tip for people: going travelling for a year isn't putting your life on hold if all you want to do in your life is travel. Working for a year or two or ten in one job, to have 1 year of travelling somewhere down your life track is putting your life on hold. Start as you mean to go along.

Last time I used this blog to speak about a long-term adventure was almost three years ago. Back then I was going to Singapore, a country I had visited once before and admired but knew very little about. This time round I'm heading to Ghana, a country I have visited 3 times before, sometimes get frustrated about and probably know too much about to make this truly exciting. What I do know is that I've only visited 4 out of 10 regions in Ghana and I hear there is so much more to be discovered in the other 6.

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