Last night it poured. The snow looks beaten and more of the ground and road can be seen. It is so warm a morning that there is a hazy fog everywhere. The sky is grey. Tree branches are bending and swaying. I can the sound of the wind. It is supposed to be 50˚ today and 13˚ tonight when the cold settles back in for a while.

Grace just called me from Accra, and we chatted until her phone died. In Ghana you buy minutes for your phone and calls everywhere are the same whether it’s to the compound next to yours or to the US. Grace usually runs out of minutes. I called her back but didn’t get through. Grace’s call reminded me of when I called home during my Peace Corps days. The trunk call, the name for a long distance call, had to be set up at the telecommunications building in Accra a day ahead of time. The day of the call you were assigned a phone booth. I closed the door, sat down, picked up the phone and heard the operator from Ghana call London and that operator call White Plains then I heard ringing and my Dad answered the phone. He was shocked to hear me as I hadn’t told them I was calling. It had been over a year since we had last spoken. He was so stunned he must have told me three or four times he was shaving when the phone rang. I next spoke to my mother who told me she missed me and asked if I was really okay. I assured her I was doing just fine and I loved Ghana. You couldn’t say much in three minutes but hearing their voices was more than enough to hold me.

I wonder if staying so closely in touch with home as a volunteer now is a good thing or a bad thing. We wrote aerograms. Mine were filled on every surface with news and my daily doings. I wrote small. I told my family all about my day, the market, the weather and anything else I could think to say. What was routine for me was different and alien to them, and I kept that in mind very time I wrote. I thought my letters were boring, at least they were to me, but to my friends and family they were a look into a whole different world. I used adjectives as if I were being paid by the word. If I were there now, I could Skype and call them as often as I chose. One volunteer I met the second summer there told me she would not be in Ghana if she couldn’t Skype her family every week. That’s what got me to wondering.