I’m a woman on the brink of insanity with itchiness. It’s a painful, prickling itchy. I have heat rash across my back, my neck and ears, just like this time last year, but worse. It feels like the chicken pox, or a bee sting, or the reaction I get to insecticide-treated malaria nets. I want to scratch my skin off. I can’t touch my face as it hurts, as though my fingers have tiny razors in their tips and microscopic glass shavings have embedded themselves in my lips, forehead and nose.

By the way, what is it with treating nets with insecticide? I cannot imagine the person who thought of that ever slept in an insecticide treated net in hot rooms with no fan and no cooling breeze. I understand the point of insecticide, killing mosquitoes on contact, but I know few people who actually use them because they make you very uncomfortable. When you sleep under treated nets the insecticide rubs off on your skin, making it swell and itch just like a bee sting or the chicken pox.

Like I feel now. As though I rubbed my back all over an insecticide treated for hours, or a swarm of bees stung me. I want to scratch my skin off.

This comes as I receive an email from a reader of This is Ghana which made me worry about how I’ll make peace with all this life when I return home.

We’d corresponded on and off and I wrote to her that adjusting to life at “home” can often prove more challenging than adapting to a foreign culture like Ghana. Returning home is “reverse culture shock” I said.

She replied:  Going back home was very difficult…just being shocked at how we live in Australia- how much we have, how much we waste, and how much we take for granted without being appreciative or even realising that not everyone in the world is as privilleged as we are.

This has been my fear for the better part of my time living and traveling abroad for the past five years. Back after Japan, when I struggled for months to re-adjust after one year on the island of Shikoku, it was just cultural and I was young. Now it’s much more than that.

I struggled with affluence before I experienced life in a poverty-stricken country. I knew something was very messed up with the wholesale brainwash of Christmas gift-giving years before I arrived in Ghana.

Now, it’s simply not negotiable. I could not participate in a ritual of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on un-needed gifts when I have friendships and count family among the world’s poorest who can’t afford to pay their school fees or get medical treatment. I can’t accept that part of my culture.

And there are aspects of this culture I won’t ever accept, like female genital mutilation or even the dog market or not questioning authority, but I have adapted for the most part. I have no idea how I’ll adapt back, though, to affluence, knowing what I know now.

We’re setting up our own project here in Bolgatanga working with a group of inspiring women who also happen to be, statistically, the poorest in Ghana which makes them among the poorest on planet Earth.

They don’t have water on tap, put it that way. They don’t have access to reliable medical services. They are not employed, traditionally. They subsist by growing what they can to supply the family’s needs in the rainy season and living off that for the other eight months of the year, by carrying bowls of soup on their heads in bowls to sell to whomever feels like soup, by carrying water for others, sometimes, and by making kenkey or pito and selling it from their compound or on their heads, too. Their children’s teachers don’t turn up to teach if they don’t feel like it. They will eat the same meal, day in, day out, forever—no exaggeration. Can you imagine eating potatoes and tomato stew every day for the rest of your life? That is actually life for most of the villagers where we live.

Godwin and I visit the women almost daily to check on how they’re going. When Godwin visited the home of one of the younger women some weeks ago, he returned home to me with a frightening, although typical, story.

Her son, a toddler, was sick. He screamed and writhed in pain when he peed. It became so bad that he refused to pee, which made it worse. This started 12 months ago. She took him to the doctor, here, before we began working with her, at the central public hospital.

If you read my post about Xtraordinary people you will have a sense of doctors here in Ghana: I know best. You’re ignorant. Most Ghanaians, particularly less educated people, never question doctors or authority. Most people do not have access to any information. These women cannot afford internet or encyclopedias or even magazines. Information comes from television, which is not very useful, and radio, which is OK if you understand English or don’t mind sermons, but that’s about it. You rely on folklore which is helpful for some ailments like malaria, but it has its shortcomings.

The doctor told her that the boy needed an operation but that the surgeon had retired and there was no doctor to perform the operation. So he prescribed pain killers and sent her home.

I could have pretended that I’d not heard the story.

But I got online, because I did know. I checked through all the possible problems. It might have been serious, but it also might have been an infection, easily treated.

I said to Godwin that we should visit our friend, the smart pharmacist. We explained the symptoms to our friend. He sighed over the treatment she met in hospital. He went away and mixed a bottle of liquid to treat a urinary tract infection for the young boy. It cost us a whopping 8 Cedis ($6). It is whopping if you only scrape 8 Cedis together over two weeks, which is about what she would manage.

We took the bottle of medicine and gave her the very explicit instructions on how to administer it. A week later we visited to see how they were. The boy could pee without screaming. He was laughing and playing in the dirt with the other children. She looked like a different person, relaxed.

It looks like he had an infection that could have been treated with a simple bottle of medicine for US$6. He’s still OK today.

Life here is cheap. You’re on your own. You cannot depend on authorities and services to support you when you need them. There is no dentist in the Upper East Region at all. Teeth are yellow, rotten and decaying.

This is my challenge. I get emails from home complaining about water shortages or businesses not going as well as expected or taxes rising or the dog eating the meal left out on the BBQ table or how hard life is in this economy or hospital waiting lists.

Honestly, I don’t know what to write back. Some of these emails come from people who spent time in Ghana and should know better than to complain about life in a country where you get three meals a day and are privileged enough to have waiting lists for doctors that will eventually treat you.

How do you relate to people complaining about water shortages in a nation with water on tap when you have worked and lived and talked and laughed and cried and danced with people who don’t complain about carrying bowls and buckets of water in the hot sun for hundreds of metres over hot dirt? Who will probably never have piped water to their mud-brick and thatch compounds? Who don’t complain about eating the same meal of wobbly maize porridge and runny soup every day of their lives? Who don’t complain about hand washing all their clothes? Who graciously shake your hands and greet you and laugh with you even though they are doubled over with arthritis, have gone blind in both eyes from cataracts and sleep on bug-bitten bare pieces of foam and have no social security or form of government support and no living family to support them?

I really want to know. How do you shut up in the face of that, knowing what you know? How do you smile and play along and empathise with your well-to-do western friends and family who just don’t know how lucky they are?

This is my fear. How to integrate. How to pretend. How not to go mad. How not to lose a lot of friends. How to reconcile the two? I now know how fortunate I am. I now know how unfortunate much of the world’s inhabitants are to have been born at a disadvantage—it wasn’t their fault. I now know there is no going back. And I fear that I might forget this one day. And start complaining about water shortages in a house with fifteen taps and water flowing out of all of them 365 days a year.

I don’t know how war veterans assimilate to their old life. It’s no wonder that so many become homeless, messed up. How much harder must it be dealing with, as I read somewhere, arguments about squeezing the toothpaste from the middle or the end of the tube after fighting a war in a poverty-stricken country like Afghanistan?

Having a tap in your house is a luxury here in far northern Ghana. We have three. Although now we really have two after Godwin’s brother broke one the other day and we stuffed thin tree branch in the hole to stop the water from pouring out and now the branch is sprouting shoots out of our sink. We’re growing a tree in our sink. It kind of looks bonsai, if you squint really hard and pretend bonsais are long and thin.

Anyway, how many taps do you have in your house? What happens when you turn them on? Does water come out? Every day of the year? Do you have a choice of hot and cold water? Can you take showers inside your house, under a roof?

Malawi bore hole

Where I live, this life, most people get water from a bore hole some distance from where they live. We are lucky, actually, to have a bore hole. Many do not. Children as little as three spend hours carrying buckets of heavy water on their heads from the bore hole to the home to cater for all their washing needs: themselves, the dishes and the clothes. Of course, washing is done by hand. We do all our washing by hand, in buckets. It’s quite meditative. I enjoy it when I’m not itching like hell. It’s where I get many of my writing ideas, by the way. I always wash with a pencil and paper somewhere high off the ground beside me.

How do you relate to someone complaining about water shortages when, in fact, they have water on tap 365 days a year? I tried writing about it, these very things I’m writing here. I gave up about four years ago when the message didn’t seem to sink in.

If the situation were in reverse, it would be like me, if I were in some uber universe, writing to friends in Sydney about how annoying it is that we only have a 100 MB per second internet connection and how there is a shortage on the world’s best organic coffee and we can only get enough for three weeks supply and that our hospital only has seven full-time ER surgeons, not ten, like the one in the next state, and we only received the latest Apple iWhatsadoozit thingamajig last week… You’d be like, what the f*ck? That’s how it is when I receive emails seemingly complaining about the good life. Or, the better life. It’s all relative.

If Ghanaian women in this village complained about carrying buckets in water from the bore hole daily, and only eating TZ for life, Congolese women who are routinely raped and terrorized by marauding soldiers would probably say what the f*ck to these women too.

Here, sometimes water comes out of the tap, sometimes it doesn’t. There are no warnings. There is just no water. In fact, about every second day I turn the tap on and nothing happens. Even we visit the bore hole from time to time. Today, nothing happened. I needed to “wash down” a lot to reduce the severity of the itch so Godwin walked to the closest water source and brought water in buckets so I could soak myself every few hours. (I’m editing this the next day—no water today either.)

But it’s not all bad. Not having access to water, especially clean drinking water, is an abomination, please don’t get me wrong. But the community created around the bore hole, singing and telling jokes and splashing bore-water on themselves, is a joy.

Loneliness, the scourge of the therapy-dependent west, is not so common here. It’s impossible not to chat and talk and get held up and laugh at least once a day. Community therapy, you might say. I complain that doing anything in town takes forever, but that’s because I get side-lined everytime by a friend wanting a chat.

Analysing emotions is a luxury for those who no longer need to struggle to survive each day. There is no time to consider emotions when you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to feed your children tonight.

Some people need therapy, certainly, but I often muse that a whole bunch of society, the consumer-oriented, never-satisfied bunch, could grow and learn from a few months in Ghana or Cambodia or Laos or even parts of their own countries to get perspective, although I think Africa cops enough crap from the west without emotional crap too.

It’s about taking a good look around. Outside oneself. Doing something for another is an antidote to the blues. Sometimes I make popcorn for the kids in the compound we share since their parents neglect them. The kids cook for themselves, babysit themselves, eat the same food day in day out, and get little physical or emotional attention from any adults other than their teachers who no doubt beat them regularly. They love popcorn. I like giving them treats and pushing them around on their busted up toy car. I like to post positive comments on blogs where the blogger is making an effort. Gestures don’t have to be big, just has to be for someone else. Opening the door for someone or offering a chair or a seat on the bus or a compliment. Shocking?

I’m used to the unexpected, the shocking, the strange happening every day here. Unexpected life is normal. Children carrying babies on their back and bowls of bananas on their heads to sell for a few pesewas a day is now normal.

Stopping half-way through an 18 hour bus journey because the majority, male passengers, refuse to board the bus until the Chelsea game is over, holding everyone hostage and the bus driver actually agreeing, is normal. Ineptly managed hospitals are normal. Malaria every couple of months is normal.

Right now, I can hear a group of children walking past carrying buckets of water on their heads, no doubt enjoying the cool slip-slopping over the rim, to get to the compound about 50 metres from our home.

If you’re reading this in a developed country, do me a favour. Go and pour yourself a cup of water, now, yes you, now, and drink to your good fortune. Taps and running water = good fortune.

Please don’t write me emails complaining about the laundry or water shortages or your pet eating the steak you left on the table.

Do write me about difference you’re making in the world or asking how to make a difference. I’ll gladly reply.

Be grateful that you had steak to leave on the table and can afford to have a pet that you may actually want.

Because I’ll write back and tell you about the kid who couldn’t get simple access to meaningful health care, and the other kids who carry water on their heads daily and the other kids who toil in fields to help their parents and the parents who may never know a washing machine or piped water and, maybe you’ll gladly do the washing in your washing machine and feel appreciation for the water that flows from pipes to clean your clothes so you can sit and read the paper or catch up on emails or tweet your friends or write on someone’s Facebook wall while sipping a cup of fresh tea or coffee.

Just like I could have pretended I didn’t know the small boy was in pain, I can’t pretend that I don’t know that slightly more than half of the world suffers every day while slightly less than half the world lives in comparative luxury.

I don’t know how I’ll make peace with all this when I return to affluent, brash, flashy Sydney.

I still want to scratch my skin off. My ears are itchy. My scalp is itchy. I feel like getting drunk. Or taking sleeping pills. Or anything to numb the itchiness and sleep for a day or two.

I was complaining out loud and Godwin said simply, breaking out in laughter at how hilarious life is: “I had heat rash when I was a child. It was there until it stopped. We did not have powder. We couldn’t even afford to buy salt. Ah!”

Ah is the Ghanaian version of a verbal exclamation mark.

They often couldn’t afford salt when he was a kid.

And I was thinking that, maybe, since I just finished writing this post and now I’m rewriting it, that this post is really about appreciation.

I’ve learnt to appreciate a lot in the last five years, the simple things I once took for granted, like running water, three meals a day, access to information, my education, my friends and family, travel.

Perhaps this is God’s way of making me remember not to stop appreciating. That appreciation has no limits.

That, even though I’m itching like hell and would gladly swap this pain for a bout of malaria, I should appreciate that I have a back that I can feel.

That I can walk.

That I can afford to buy cream to rub into the itch, even though it doesn’t really work.

That I can afford to sit here and type and complain about being insanely itchy.

That I know where to get the information to help me.

That I had the good fortune to have the opportunity to know what I know, even the itch.

p.s. I wrote this yesterday.

Last night, when I crawled under the mosquito net hooked up to the mango tree and onto the bed which we sleep on outside, awaiting the midnight cool, because it’s too hot to sleep inside, I meditated on the itch. I gave a prayer of thanks and appreciation for being able to feel the itch and I let it consume me. It completely consumed me. It was an incredible sensation; I felt deep energy and I fell asleep. When I woke, it had subsided substantially. I feel much better than yesterday. Now, 10.30 a.m., I can feel the itch intensify again with the heat.

But I am grateful, once again, for being able to sit and communicate with you. I’m topless, by the way. Topless blogging woo! I can’t wear anything on my upper body or I’ll cry. I can’t leave the house. But I can write and I can cultivate ideas and gratitude too. And Nick Cave is playing on my lap top and I have a cup of tea. Life is good.

I’d love your thoughts on how you managed after returning home from a life-changing travel experience. How did you make peace with knowing about how much of the world suffers and much is clueless about such suffering? Did you just smile and play along when friends complained about broken fingernails? Did you talk about what you experienced? Did it make a difference? Did you drift apart from your friends or family?

Or, how you managed when someone you knew returned home from such an experience? Did you resent their experience? Did you feel distanced? Did you resent hearing about others’ suffering? Did it sound real to you? Did it open your eyes or make you see your life differently? Did you try to understand?

p.p.s Thank you Ms J for the email that triggered this post.

You may wish to check out a Blog Carnival on Culture Shock!

Water by Tsja!

A luxury