Akwaaba to my Journey page! Akwaaba (ah-kwah-bah) means “Welcome” in Fante, the main local language in Cape Coast, Ghana. That’s where I'll be living this semester!
I’m from Powder Springs, Georgia. That’s about a thousand miles from New York City, and it’s about 5,600 miles from Cape Coast! You might wonder how I ended up so far away, and I’d love to tell you the story.
When my mom was around my age, she moved all by herself to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Like Ghana, Ethiopia is in Africa, but it’s in East Africa instead of West Africa! My mom went in order to work as a special education teacher, and while she was there, she helped a lot of kids to learn when they might not have been able to without her help. She told me many wonderful stories when I was little about her life in Africa. She traveled from country to country by car, spent one Christmas on a white sand beach in Kenya, learned to speak Ethiopia’s language (Amharic) and once held (and was bitten by) a tiny baby monkey.
As I’m sure you can imagine that all of her stories made me want to visit Africa myself someday! The opportunity came last year. I go to a college in Georgia called Kennesaw State University, and KSU has a partnership with the University of Cape Coast.
