Sylvia's Journal

I am sitting in the empty lobby of the Alisa hotel in Ghana, because the wireless signal is stronger here than in my room. Except for Cabul who arrived this morning from New York we seem to be the only guests and I wonder why hotels say that they are full when they are not. The place is decorated with large cloth red and green banners, Christmas lights, and, at the airport, soccer balls. The West African soccer tournament starts the 20^th and it might as well have been the Olympics. A Christmas movie is showing in back of me on a very large plasma TV.

In Amsterdam I met an old MSH colleague, Mary Taylor, at the gate for the flight to Ghana. We used to work together at the beginning of our first leadership project, nearly eight years ago. She is now with the Gates Foundation. She traveled light, with hand luggage only, so I lost track of her when we arrived in Ghana. I am not yet able to participate in the mad dash for passport control. I suspect that by the time she settled into her hotel room, I was still waiting for my luggage. I thought about my easy entry into Kenya only two months ago, in a wheelchair. I am now back with the ordinary people who have to stand in line a lot, and wait. The ending of an otherwise easy and comfortable trip was thus a bit more challenging. By the time I spotted my friend and colleague Mamadou waiting for me at the arrival hall I was limping heavily. He quickly got me into his car and left his son Moussa in charge of the heavy lifting of my many pieces of luggage.

We arrived at the wrong Alisa hotel where they did not recognize my name (but also had a room if I wanted it – so much for full hotels in Accra). An employee of the hotel drove us to the right Alisa Hotel in the Cantonment section of the capital. If there is a coup we should be either at exactly the right or exactly the wrong place. But Ghana is, for now, one of the more stable countries in the region. Not that this means a lot, as we can see from Ivory Coast a couple of years ago, or Kenya now. There are elections coming up in Ghana too.

I spent hours unpacking and settling into my small room while watching a movie. I think I watched more TV in those few hours than I have over the Christmas break. My unpacking was interrupted by a Skype video call from home. It is still so amazing to me that I can see into our living room on the other side of the Atlantic, seeing Axel stoking the fire. The internet connection was too slow for me to put my webcam on so I could not give then a tour of my room.