The importance of Place

Part 2 – Ghana, West Africa

If Saskatchewan gave her fundamentals, West Africa complicated everything.

At twenty-one she encountered the wider world for the first time. She lied about having a secure medical posting, borrowed money, and left alone—open, curious, and thrilled by the unknown. She was also naïve.

The important thing is that she did not arrive in Ghana empty. She arrived with Prairie logic: an insular but loving upbringing, a belief that authority figures usually meant well, and the assumption that if you worked hard, stayed polite, and used your intelligence, life would generally cooperate.

Ghana dismantled that. Gently at first.

She arrived a bright-eyed fourth-year medical student who believed competence meant doing things properly. Ghana taught her that medicine often means making decisions inside constraints you did not choose.

In Jirapa, the system was thin. The clinicians were the system. It required creativity, judgment, and the gritty acceptance that not everything was possible. It changed what urgent meant. What available meant. She watched people die knowing they would not have, had they been born somewhere else.

In Ghana, her casual decision to become a doctor hardened into a commitment.

She expected jungle and found desert.

She understood life-threatening cold intimately; life-threatening heat was new. So was food scarcity—not starvation, but the slow grinding realization that the body keeps score. Going to bed hungry made her more emotional.

She arrived without contacts, without a roadmap, and without anyone who could rescue her if things became wierd. She had to learn quickly—in the “I need to get from here to there and I don’t even know the rules” way.

It pushed her away from certainty and toward alertness, where learning became a form of survival.

She relied on goodwill. Rode atop produce lorries. Endured bone-shaking buses. Learned to read people when language and culture offered few clues.

Most strangers were decent. People helped because they could, because they were curious, because they were amused, or because they could see how out of her depth she was.

Kindness exists, but it is not a contract.

She had good instincts and some practice riding the line between wild and self-protective. That helped. But at twenty-one intuition is still under construction. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Some of what happened in Ghana could have ended badly, and she will not sand it down for comfort.

She found herself on a secluded beach at night with a young man who wanted sex. Befriended by a self-confessed murderer. Alone in a house with a would-be rapist.

She emerged physically unharmed. Lucky, yes. Also alert. Also, at times, frozen and functioning anyway. Also learning in real time.

She learned that friendliness can be read as availability. Politeness can be read as permission. A boundary can be treated as negotiation.

Some encounters are sweet and genuine. Some are transactional. Some are predatory. Often you do not know which they are until they are on your lap.

Living through a coup changed her understanding of movement.

Suddenly travel was not about an itinerary. It was about whether roads were safe, whether borders were open, whether flights existed, whether the rumor you had just heard was true.

And where had the peanut sellers gone?

She managed to leave the country when planes were not flying. It was not heroic. It was timing, careful listening, accepting help at the right moment—and luck. Don’t skip that part.

When she returned home, she told her family and the medical department that Ghana had been an incredible learning experience.

That was true.

Not because it was easy.

Because it cracked her open.