Take a volunteer trip to Africa

By MADISON J. GRAY

updated 5:05 p.m. ET Dec. 29, 2006

ACCRA, Ghana - The morning sunlight seemed to dance across the West African plains beneath the airplane and I was filled with excitement, but also fear. This was the beginning of a monthlong sojourn that not only opened my eyes, but changed my life. Much more than an adventure, this journey also gave me a re-education, a doorway into history, and a chance to see what I was made of.

I had recently started a career as a freelance writer, and I found myself with not only the time, but the eagerness for an experience that I couldn't get in a newsroom. I decided to take a volunteer vacation - in which travelers sign up with non-governmental organizations for short-term volunteer opportunities. I chose Cross-Cultural Solutions, a New Rochelle, N.Y.-based group, for a trip to Ghana. Each year the organization sends 2,000 volunteers from around the world to programs in Brazil, China, Costa Rica, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Peru, Russia, Tanzania, and Thailand.

After talking with organization officials, I learned I had to raise the $2,500 required by CCS, then purchase plane tickets, obtain a visa, and get the proper vaccinations and medications.

CCS has set up a system for online, tax-deductible donations, so I e-mailed everyone I knew. No one was immune from my begging campaign. Amazingly, I raised most of the funds in less than four weeks. The only thing left to do was get on the plane.

"We don't tend to call it a 'vacation' because it's really a cultural experience," said Kam Santos, a CCS spokeswoman. "When people think about a vacation, they think about things that are light. But this is a personal-enrichment type of program and there's nothing light about it."

That truth hit home on the evening of my arrival as I walked with two other volunteers around the capital city of Accra, in an area filled with thousands of people who are poor and homeless. Suddenly my own frustrations with life seemed minuscule. I had seen poverty in America, and even known hunger myself, but this was unlike anything I'd witnessed firsthand or seen on television.

But by no means was this the norm in Accra, or anywhere else, for the rest of my visit. The next day, our group set out for the CCS base in Woe, in the country's Volta Region, where I spent most of my time. It is a village populated by farmers and fishermen who are mainly Ewe (pronounced "eh-weh") by tribal ethnicity. Most people get around by taking minivans called "tro-tros." Yams, rice and cassava are diet staples, and everyone speaks the Anlo-Ewe dialect.

The first things most people notice on trips like this are differences in culture and language, and I picked up a few phrases of Ewe as I went along.

But I was surprised to learn how race is viewed here. I am African-American, and most locals considered me a brother returning home. Yet, although they never called me "yevu," which means "white foreigner" (instead preferring "rasta," because of my dreadlocks), some did think of me as white - not because of my skin, but because I was from the developed West.

"We are black, but we also see ourselves as Ewe people," one local explained. "How you see yourself is just as important" as skin color.

One night, I stayed up with some friends and watched the Ghana Television broadcast of "Roots." I had seen the miniseries nearly 30 years ago, but for the shocked Ghanaians, it was the first time. The friends I was with that night did not fully know, until watching the show, the brutal history of the slave trade. Now we understood our kinship.

"This is why so many of us want to come here," I told them. "We want to see the part of us that was taken away so long ago."

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