From Hot Ghana Sweat to Giant Snow Banks, a Year Apart

It is difficult to write this because the heat has been broken in my apartment for five hours, and my bones (finger-bones included) are now ice-encrusted.

Maybe you’ve heard: we’ve had a liiiittle bit of winter weather here in Boston lately! What has it been: 6 giant blizzards in 6 weeks? 8 feet of snow total? Who knows. All I do know for sure is that we’ve had 5 Snow Days which closed schools, and there are hundreds of igloo-ed cars like the ones in the photo to the left nestled around Boston!

I bring this up now because I just laughed aloud, realizing: exactly a year ago (from January to March), I was in 110-degree, sticky-hot, sweaty Ghana… moaning about how I was frying up!

And so, if you want a good laugh from contrast, pop over to these two articles from January and February of 2010, a year and a vast ocean away:

Heat and Development in Ghana (where I ponder if the exhaustion one feels in super-hot climates impacted history and economics)…

…and Power Outages and the Power of Patience in Ghana (in which I describe the agony of the heat you feel in Ghana when the power goes out and the fans stop spinning… and the lesson my students in Ghana taught me from this).

Leave comments, ask questions, share your stories and insights, and laugh your rear off at this fragile human body we have, which we try so hard (and sometimes so ineffectually) to protect from the brutal elements!

“When is the mechanic going to fix my heat??” I just asked my landlord of the phone.

“Well,” he replied, “you’ll know it’s fixed when it’s not cold anymore.”