Is this Africa?

I was musing on that catchy three-letter acronym the other day. TIA, as it goes. This Is Africa, from the movie Blood Diamond which I finally saw a few days ago. TIA. Kind of cool, pretty original, sort of like a secret code word for people in the know. TIA. It's rather convenient too. TIA is the new grand theory of everything here in this strange and gaping continent.

"What the hell. Did the power just go out?"

"Yeah. You know, TIA."

...

"I had the craziest taxi driver today. He drove backward, in the opposite direction, on a highway. Then we drove into a gutter and got stuck there for like half a minute."

"Oh my god, horrible. TIA."

...

"I'm going to miss the people here when I go back to New York. Everyone here is so friendly, and they come up to you and want to hear about your life. Back home, there are people everywhere and yet of the millions of people on the streets and the subways, not a single one gives me eye contact."

"But for now, TIA. I'll miss it too."

...

This is Africa? And I suppose it is, in a literal sense. But is it really? Sometimes I think it's such a lazy thing to say, haphazardly tossed about when the parched and barren surface of this great continent seems impenetrable and wholly incomprehensible. This is Africa. But we knew that already. TIA doesn't tell us anything we did not know before.

During my first two weeks here in Ghana, our group had back to back group activities, field trips, and lectures. But starting last week, the scheduled group activities dwindled, and I found myself with more time to get out and explore the city on my own.

I've had some lovely and terrible experiences, and in the process I've met some memoriable people. And the more I converse and the more I meander around without any game plan or schedule or definitive agenda, the more vivid and diversified this vast continent becomes for me. Is it possible to capture the whole of Africa, or even all of Ghana or Accra in three letters? With each passing day here, I'm convinced this kind of simplification is impossible.

I'll admit it. When I first arrived here, what first met my eye was a sea of dark faces, all the same and tired and sad, a particular one prominent now, and now imperceptable, now blending into the larger nebulous whole of this continent. Yes, I was touched. Yes, I was awed and inspired and moved, but in the way the photo spreads in National Geographic and TIME magazine awe and inspire and move. Information to be processed, filed, and retreived one day for two-minute conversations over dinner and booze.

Maybe it's still this way for me some days, when thirteen-year old taxi drivers go nuts and can't read maps and spend 90 minutes weaving around the same streets in Adabraka at night, back and forth back and forth and no one goes anywhere. Then I'm just convinced this really is Africa, where everyone's just crazy and "borderline mentally retarded" (that was not an original quote, by the way) and no one understands anything of how the world should be.

Yes, in truth, I still have those days. Yesterday, for one.

But it's getting to be less and less this way for me, and it's about time too. As I get to know this place, it's not so much that the whole expanse of the Dark Continent clarifies and brightens. It's rather that pockets of the nebula suddenly jump out to me, and make themselves known in ways I had never expected. And juxtaposed against this burst of unexpected clarity, the adjacent regions of cloudiness become even more perplexing, and so this city and its people seem at once more comprehensible and more complicated than they were to me before.

A side note: compared to the other bloggers in our NYU group, my ramblings are incredibly and disappointingly vague. Is that because this is a publicly viewed thing? Or is that because my thinking just generally needs some fine tuning? Perhaps I'm not cut out to be a journalist and I should go back to my ivory tower.

There wasn't a point to this entry. But that's all for now.