Ghana: Global Gateway Summer 2026 (A Day in the Life 2)
Program: UW Global Gateway in Ghana, Summer
Will C: Our Global Classroom
Studying abroad, stunning to many, includes studying. Tucked within the University of Ghana’s arboretum is CIEE Legon’s headquarters and the site of all of our traditional lectures. Beyond our lectures with UW faculty, guest speakers from all walks of life add depth to daily life in Ghana with expertise spanning music, culture, language, and more. Outside of traditional lectures, local tour guides and itinerary items handpicked by CIEE staff offer the learning experiences that define time spent abroad.
Within CIEE’s four walls, lectures from professors turned part-time chaperones Gay and Heinz provide the necessary historical backgrounds and how it contributes to today’s politics. Their backgrounds in African politics split between law and sociology provide two complimentary views that still push back on each other enough to push us to think critically. Their presence on the bus, at excursions, and during meals means our curious whims always have somewhere to go.
In two guest lectures, Professor Kofi Agyekum introduced us to the local language, Twi, through simple phrases, practice bargaining, and a focus on cohort participation. Our classroom’s laughter erupting from the odd comment was not isolated to one guest speaker. From the effects of tourism to domestic fiscal policy to public education, the breadth of classes means every student has a topic to look forward to and be curious about.
Most importantly, learning is not isolated to the classroom. Our trip to the Assin Manso Ancestral Slave River was guided by a tour guide who was certainly knowledgeable, as tour guides should be, but most importantly had the rhetoric and emphasis to keep us captivated. Even outside of an environment with learning as a focus, bus rides give us the opportunity to observe everything from the slums of Nima to embassy central downtown.
With varying levels of formality, every day in Ghana has provided us as many opportunities to learn as we care to seek out. As these opportunities become less and less formal, they become more captivating and specialized to give us the opportunity to learn what we’re interested in. Ghana has given me the opportunity to take the alleyways, the odd turns, and learn about the odd topics that I find most interesting.
Biftu O: Learning on Excursions
One of the most memorable places we’ve visited is the day we traveled from Accra to Cape Coast. On our drive to Cape Coast, we stopped at the Assin Manso Slave River site for our first visit. We began this excursion with a brief history lesson from our tour guide on slavery in Ghana. Our tour guide began this lesson by explaining the events leading up to the transatlantic slave trade in chronological order. He emphasized the importance of correcting common historical misconceptions about slavery in Ghana including slavery existing in Africa before Europeans and the Portuguese arrived in Ghana. Learning this history prior to walking along the river made this experience significantly more impactful. Once we had wrapped up our history lesson, we began walking down the path towards the river. The path to the river was relatively narrow and was surrounded by a gloomy forest. When we arrived at the river, we were able to dip our fingers in the river water that was used to bathe the enslaved people before they were prepared to be sold as property and carried the skeletons of those who were not sold and thrown in the river due to “serving no other purpose”.
After wrapping up this visit, we began our drive to Cape Coast to visit the Elmina Castle. Similar to our first visit, we had a tour guide who thoroughly explained the deep history behind this site as we visited different areas throughout the castle. The Elmina Castle was first used as trade settlement for people in the region and later transformed into one of the most important stops of the Atlantic slave trade. We began the tour in the dungeon of the castle where the enslaved people were chained up and held before boarding ships to be sent to countries that purchased the enslaved people. Both the visit to the Slave River and Elmina Castle were extremely heavy visits to experience, but were very informative and necessary.
These visits related to the course because they were both significant sites to the coastal slave trade and the country’s journey to independence and beyond. The feeling of walking the paths and seeing the remains of the castle slaves were treated so inhumane is something that will stick with me forever.