The Bowdoin Orient

This summer, I spent a week in Ghana watching Mexican telenovas that had been re-dubbed in English in the film studios of Accra.My favorite soap was “Forever Yours,” which played nightly at seven. Terrible things happened to the characters. There were miscarriages and disappearances and kidnappings and death. Often, when a child went missing or a woman contemplated suicide, my host grandma would sigh loudly, bemoaning the losses for these characters on the screen. Other times, she and her daughter Michelle would laugh loudly at the acting, glancing at me to let me in on the joke.  During commercial breaks, we watched news coverage of the Ebola epidemic, or six minute animated PSAs detailing the spread of cholera through a rural area outside Accra, Ghana’s capital city. In these ads, a man saved his village with clean water and salt.Once, we watched “Basketball Wives.” Another time, I walked into their house to find an episode of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” playing on their small TV. I settled into my spot on the leopard print couch. Michelle handed me a tray with plantains and rice.On the TV, one of the contractors borrowed the family’s surfboards and went down to the beach. He looked like a kid in his khakis and cap.I mushed the plantains on my plate, wondering what it was like to watch a Floridian McMansion be rebuilt by grown-ups pretending to be kids, while living behind a large gate on a potholed dusty street in the capital of a country where millions reside in shacks.I looked at the TV. “This is the worst of America,” I said, while simultaneously WhatsApping my buddy from my new Android (purchased in a shack) and texting my mom from my iPhone. “Why’s that?” said Michelle.“They’re going to have a surf room,” I said. “For their surfboards. A room. Just for that.”Michelle stared at me, then at TV (where the fat Floridians were gleefully jumping up and down in their too-small, too-colorful bathing suits), then back to me on her couch. “You play on your phones a lot,” she said finally. “Are you done with your food?”   In Ghana, I read “The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” a Ghanaian novel about an unnamed railroad clerk too stubborn to take bribes. Now back at Bowdoin, I am reading “Jane Eyre,” “The Great Gatsby” and “My Antonia.” I’m surprised by the seriousness with which Mr. Rochester and the railroad clerk conduct themselves. In contrast, Jim Burden, Jay Gatsby, and Nick Carraway seem like kids sneaking up to the grown-up table. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott recently suggested that adulthood is dead. “It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups,” he wrote in the September 11 issue of New York Times Magazine.I think Scott has a point. But, if American adulthood is dead, maybe it always has been. Henderson, Ishmael, Humbert and Holden are childish, angsty, and scared. They’re American in the best sense, bumbling and naïve and self-centered. Even Thoreau’s ‘deliberate living’ resembles my little brother’s plan to take a semester off from Williams to “be in the woods.”Now, as I sit in my king size bed in Chambo, cradling a box of Lucky Charms and re-watching “The Mindy Project,” I wonder why American adulthood appears to be dead, while Ghanaian adulthood seemed firmly intact. Sure, people in Ghana watched “Basketball Wives.” But there seemed to be a seriousness with which they did it.My first day in Ghana, the program director stood before me in slacks and a bright linen shirt. “If you have allergies in Africa,” he said, “you are dead by eleven.”Maybe this has something to do with it.In Chambo, Mindy’s theme song jingles. I root around in the cereal box, mining for rainbow marshmallows and turning all this over in my head. Maybe, I think, we as Americans are so comfortable that we’ve begun to resist safety—through wrecking balls and bad jokes and anacondas and rap; while Ghanaians—less safe—are forced to cling to the safety they do have, forcing them into the “adulthood” many of us have left behind.My phone rings. “You racked up a $400 phone bill during your one week abroad,” my mom says.“Childhood is a privilege,” I tell her.“Call Verizon,” she says.