In which our hero realizes and thing or two

Everything leading up to that moment had been incredible.

We played with and were played on by the babies and kindergartners at the Osu Childrens' Home for the earlier half of the day, completely worn through by 2 yesterday afternoon. With 19 starry-eyed volunteers and 50 children to attend to (not including the other 200 in the Home, all between the ages of one week and 23 years), each of us generally had three eager children in rotation on our backs or around our necks, or some intricate combination of the two, perhaps one on each hip or sitting on each foot. One volunteer brought out her sack of American Halloween candy and chaos. We were stunned at the remarkable ability of the children to lay down and pass out for a nap in the middle of the screaming multitude. I had my own quiet time with a one-year-old youngster outside under a tree while he slept in my arms, bare belly and feet, purring into my shirt. After an authentic Ghanaian meal of ham sandwiches and french fries, we returned to the ship for a little R&R ourselves.

Several scuffles with malaria medication* later, we were back on the road from Tema port to capital city Accra, some 18 miles or 60 minute shuttle bus ride to scout out food and drink. We (Liz, our new found friend Renee, and myself) met up with a young fellow named Erik, who had offered to take us in and around Accra the previous day. We found a few drinking spots and a roadside stand that served the best white rice with hot sauce and fried chicken (a staple dish here) known to mankind. Erik lives by the Art Centre, a large wooden and tin roofed pavilion of stalls whose renters live directly behind it in lean-to's. Now four, we piled into a taxi and headed toward Pleasure Beach for weekly Reggae Night. There we met quite a few other SAS kids, volunteers with various NGOs and people from Accra and the surrounding areas out for anything to be had. A White Trap for sure, but enjoyable nonetheless. We danced, we sang, talked and laughed, everybody doing only exactly as he or she felt - nothing more and nothing less. Simultaneously all everybody could do was take everything for what it was, with mutual understanding lying in between.

All of this having been said, it sounds typical of what you'd expect of a short visit to Ghana, the descriptions of "daily life" and photographs of runny-nosed orphans or boys playing soccer by the sewage runoff but you can National Geographic-it all you please and it still only shows the glaring divide between my Ghana and theirs. To be honest I don't believe the two could ever be the same so long as we come to buy colorful mens' shirts to match our Moroccan leather belts and Spanish jeans, pop malaria medication and ask the Ghanaians if they have to take it too and fearfully pass around the bottles of Purell after every decision we make and flood internet cafes to update Facebook statuses. And yet with only four days what else could we really do?

To me this is "The Other Side of the Atlantic." Looking straight out to sea is looking at Antarctica. The same stars shine down on two different Africas, and though they truly are the same the roads that lead us there converge on so few points that it will be a very long time before they start to resemble one another at all, but meanwhile deserve to be loved for exactly what it is and what they are, with mutual understanding of what it is and who we are lying in between - nothing more and nothing less.

It was poised in this moment that my insides chose to inform me that I was about to be in very serious trouble.