REFLECTIONS
‘My Ashesi’
It has been two years now. Did I say two? Well, almost. Still, it is long enough to say I have gotten so used to the Ghanaian culture that I’ve started adopting some of their habits. I’ve learnt a little bit of the ‘Twi’ language which has made it easy for me to navigate through life in this foreign land,especially when I am out of school. One of my greatest accomplishments has been getting comfortable with going to and from town by myself. I remember always having to drag my roomie along each time I needed to go out. Her being too exhausted to leave campus meant I had to wait until she was ready so that I could leave with her.
Leaving my small country of Lesotho in the deep parts of Southern Africa all the way to West Africa was a dream. While I never thought it would be for school, I have always dreamed of flying to Ghana, probably because my family and I were so fond of watching Nigerian and Ghanaian movies that my curiosity to see who ‘these people’ were greatly grew intense. I was fascinated by their physical expression of everything they said, their accent, their music-oh their music!-, and basically everything else about them. Anyway, that’s a story for another day.
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Coming to Ashesi University and being the only Mosotho initially seemed scary. Everybody but me seemed to have someone from their country and I wondered how I would cope being all by myself in a place full of completely different people from how I used to live. However, all that wasn’t as bad as I reckoned it would be;in fact, it wasn’t bad at all. I found myself getting along with several people from diverse backgrounds, thank God for my easy adaptability and open-mindedness. Of course, it did get lonely sometimes. I missed home and I hated walking with my Ghanaian or Zimbabwean friends only for them to suddenly switch to their local dialect. Don’t get me wrong, I did not blame them at all, it was habitual for them and I doubt they ever did it intentionally.
Anyway, Ashesi quickly became home for me, (at least until…). I never felt isolated because the warmth of the people around made me feel welcome. From the staff, faculty and students, you could immediately recognize that this is a place of compassion and genuine acceptance. The bridge program was great and so was our orientation. Basically life was good for me until…until academics got intense, until I realized what everybody meant when they said Ashesi was ‘hard’. Until I started struggling with my health, until I was admitted in different hospitals because of my spine, until I was slowly losing my confidence and self-esteem. Until I was engulfed in the claws of extreme fatigue and agony!
Life wasn’t rosy anymore and I suddenly became suicidal (yep, I did). How would I attain my degree if I was already struggling this way with my freshman year? How on earth was I going to make my mother proud when I was struggling so much to cope with the intense academic curriculum in Ashesi? How was I going to explain to the MasterCard foundation that offered a fully-funded scholarship because I was ‘smart’, that I was going to fail? You see, I was already predicting my fate. I did not see myself getting any further than first year. That is the problem of perceiving that everything would always go my way. There were numerous questions in my head that were left unanswered.
I remember walking into Rosemary’s office(the officer of Diversity and international students affairs) screaming I wanted to go back back home. I remember crying in Aunty Dee’s office(our university counselor) because I was so tired of life and everything it presented before me. Not only was I finding it hard to fit into this atmosphere of such brilliant students and wondering how I even made it here in the first place, but I was also battling a disease in my spine and I was slowly dying. I despised everything and everybody else. Above all, I despised myself more. I questioned God, I wondered why He would bring me to this foreign land only to suffer. But hey, God never does that and now I know it.
This will be an awfully long read if I dive into every detail but anyway, if I made it this far it means I survived. My freshman first semester passed and despite all the pain, the support I received from the school helped me make it through the first and second semester. I later realized that all I needed was to adjust to the academic curriculum and maybe apply an extra effort and smarter way of learning. I needed to embrace this new challenge that I was faced with and be open to learn new things no matter how complex. I needed to make good use of the resources and people around me instead of wallowing in mediocrity and self-pity. The worst thing is how everybody looked at me like I had it all figured out when I knew I was dying inside. This made it even harder to cry!
Here I am in my sophomore year, almost getting passed the first semester. I have never been this optimistic about life and my academics. I have figured my way around things and while I do not have the panacea to claim that circumstances are perfect, I do however see an enormous change in the way things are. My intention is to make my stay in this place worthwhile, putting God above everything and knowing that He who brought me here has plans to prosper me not to harm me. Everybody has different university experiences but in case our smiles deceive you into thinking we have it all figured out, this piece aims to prove that it isn't like that. Let the drive to succeed push you to keep going, ask for help, trust me there are people around who wish to see you succeed and all you have to do is make use of them. You’ll make it, I know you will.
