Back when I was an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I had the privilege of receiving a scholarship that afforded me three summers abroad. Felt like a big deal then and, to be fair, it still feels like it today…because poor. The first summer sent me into the beautiful city of Accra, Ghana. Weeks that I will never forget alongside a dozen or so other students being young, dumb, and utterly open to all that felt even the slightest bit reckless.
It was my first significant travel moment. Certainly my first international one. For a kid who spent the entirety of his younger years latched to his mother and father, a little college life hadn’t brought me entirely out of my shell. I missed them, they missed me. I bought a little burner phone when I arrived in Accra to stay in touch. But it was the streets that were calling. We bounced from city to city between days of class, offsetting host family life in Accra with rich historical exploration and excursions. And lots of food.
We anchored one weekend trip in Cape Coast, capital of the Central Region, for a few days’ stay to be split between volunteerism and the visiting of Elmina Castle, a key depot in the transatlantic slave trade. I should also mention that, at the time, Ghana was in the midst of a years long rationing of electricity. Meaning that there were frequent periods without power. Perhaps easy to plan around with adequate preparation but sometimes it led to moments of obvious inconvenience. For me, that also meant moments of poor decision making. So much so that one special evening I thought it’d be a great idea to enjoy some seafood salad concoction at our hotel’s restaurant, quasi-refrigerated for who knows how long. I literally ate it, in all its lukewarmness, while sitting in a blackout period. Choices.
Fast forward to the next morning when we boarded our transportation to volunteer at a nearby school. I’m immediately feeling that something is, well, off. I pushed through as best as I could but nothing I could find in anyone’s over the counter reserve was helping quell the rapture in my stomach. The closer we got to our destination, the worse it got.
Once arrived, I found myself to an outdoor bathroom - a simple gravel and cinderblock structure of sorts. Maybe I just needed one really good up chuck and I’d be fine. I’d sporadically think about that seafood salad and the precarious situation it and my lapse of judgement put me in. I thought about it most when I was puking all over that little cinderblock structure. I thought about it when I woke up after having passed out in the gravel for some uncomfortable amount of time. I thought about it a little more when I had to crawl my way like a horror movie survivor across a schoolyard to the nearest classroom. It crossed my mind again as they loaded me into a taxi to the local hospital where I somehow lost one of my shoes. Like a seafood salad Cinderella.
At the hospital, where they admitted me for severe food poisoning and dehydration, I was told repeatedly that I was the only American in the whole place. The nurses would come hang out and talk. The other patients in the ward would cop for supplies that required cash when I had none on me. Folks were kind. I was grateful. At some point, I reached into the pile of dirty clothes by my hospital bed and realized I did have my burner phone. I thought I should call and update my parents who surely heard from someone in my program by that point.
I rang them. I told them I was just calling to check in and that everything was going okay at the hospital. I hoped to be out the next day. My mother slammed into the middle of my update like a boulder to a simple cinderblock and gravel bathroom: What do you mean hospital? What do you mean overnight stay? Where is your phone charger? Where was I at exactly?
I calmed her as best I could with as much reasonable but incomplete information as I had. I felt she’d be okay and that she trusted I’d reach back out. Sure enough though, my phone would soon die. I settled into my bed, hooked up to an IV with nonstop fluids. I’d wake up later that night, feeling a bit better, and decide to venture to the bathroom down the hall where I’d faint again. The drama of it all. Somehow I woke back up in bed. As I said, the staff was kind.
Soon enough, I felt the sun shining in. Heard the shuffle of shoes walking back and forth. Voices turned from morning murmurs into full throated conversations. I, never one to deny myself extra sleep, dozed off and on. My sleep would soon be interrupted by the presence of a body standing right over me. Even with my eyes closed and half asleep, I knew someone was there. Slowly, I opened my eyes and there was a Ghanaian man who I had never seen before. He smiled calmly and in the softest of tones said, “Your mother sent me” and handed me a brand new phone charger.
I was stunned. How, in a matter of hours, did my mother in rural North Carolina find a proxy to do the work of Halle Berry in a missing child action film? Well, it turns out that she called someone at church, who knew someone, who knew someone, who connected her to Sammie (our new friend), who drove hours from Accra to Cape Coast to simply do a good deed for a stranger he would likely never meet. From that moment on, I’ve never doubted the possibilities of kindness in others or the fury of a Black mother who can’t track her son down or live without the ability to dial him on the phone whenever she so pleases.
I tell this story often as a sentimental grounding for myself, especially as I write this first post amidst what feels like one of the toughest seasons of my life. A season that has now found me taking care and looking after. Pushing the limits of what I think I’m capable of - to solve for comfort, to solve for time. Now widowed, in her 70s, and saddled with a set of circumstances that require far more fight than frivolity, the roles have reversed and my mother can’t be the one going the extra mile…or 5,000 miles.
So, I’m stumbling my way through this season. This burgeoning normal is slowly chipping away at the cozy normal I’ve grown so comfortable inside of. Our normal now looks a lot like medical appointments. Like annoying each other as we do the mundane chores of bathing, dressing, and transferring. Like me realizing I have to cook something edible enough to keep us both alive. And then do it again the next day and the next day. Or trying to talk about my late father without us both bursting into tears or cursing because he’s not here to help.
There are days where this kind of normal feels fine and for those days I’m thankful. It’s on those good days that I can close my eyes a little, slide back in my seat, and imagine a little of bit of that delicious recklessness of the before times that would, say, lead a boy to a lukewarm seafood salad. Then there are other days where just it feels like I’m Halle Berry racing the clock to deliver a phone charger to her missing son on another continent. On those days, I just say: Fuck.