On June 9 at about 7:30 PM I hit my one-year mark in Ghana. That's one full calendar year. 12 months. 365 days. Nearly 4% of my life. Since Peace Corps is technically a 27-month commitment (although easily reducible to 26 for the well-behaved), I won't hit the halfway point until some day in July. Nonetheless, it's all down hill from here, hopefully the coasting and not the depressing kind of downhill.

 

Last week I was sick for a few days with what I could only assume was malaria, typhoid fever, or some other tropical disease. People here get malaria all the time, or at least they assume they have it (use more blood tonic – it cleans "dirty blood"). And a friend's neighbor recently claimed to have typhoid. These things happen. Turns out, I had a mild cold and I was cured in two days, but that doesn't change the fact that it could have been dengue fever or sleeping sickness, among others.

 

But, in a little over a year, or about 432 days, I plan on being back in the US and won't have to consult a book titled "Where There Is No Doctor" every time I sneeze (that I know that number has more to do with the fact that I have a lot of free time in a computer lab than anything else, and I almost never sneeze here). And I'm quite certain that won't be the only thing that changes once I get back to the US.

 

But I'll go and Ghana will stay. Though it and everyone I know here will continue to exist, it will only survive somewhere in the back of mind. (It's fun to think about how far in the back it will go.) But leaving is still a long way away. A lot could happen between now and then. I could even sign up for a third year…

 

 

Addendum #1: For the first time, I heard a Ghanaian make fun of Bush. It was great. A morning show on one of the country's big radio stations had a segment of stupid Bush quotes. After the segment, the host moved on to a news item about a man being suffocated to death by elephant poop. This show is a keeper.

 

Addendum #2: The rainy season is in full effect, and it's one of the best things that's happened since I got here. It's now normally cloudy, and it's rarely unbearably hot. And, true to the name, it rains several times a week, sometimes multiple times in a single day. This wonderfulness should last until August or September, and then it's back to hellish unless some side-effect of global climate change kicks in to make it somehow different.

 

Addendum #3: Another term is nearly finished. I think there will only be 4 more weeks of teaching followed by exams. The coming break is 6 weeks long. 6 weeks!