Museum Fatigue & Traveling

As a museum educator for several years, I learned the real impact and presence of "museum fatigue" -- that inexplicable tiredness you feel when you've been at a museum for just a little too long. Mainly this happens because you are looking at so many new things that you physically feel tired, even though you may have spent only an hour in a museum.

Elmina fishing village, on the Gulf of Guinea. This is the view from the Elmina Slave Castle, the oldest in the world. The beautiful and the horrifying in the same place.

After non-stop traveling and exploring in Ghana for the past week and a half, I think museum fatigue also translates into traveling fatigue. Even sitting in a car/bus/restaurant/office all day, I am exhausted from taking everything in. Mainly this is because everything here is new, and it takes a lot of energy to absorb and process all of the new sights, sounds, smells, and ideas floating around.

Urban farm in Accra, where most farmers are in a cooperative that gains knowledge, technology, and inputs from the government to help increase agricultural productivity.

This NYU Wagner class on hunger, poverty and food security is certainly exposing me to all kinds of ideas, programs, and plans that I haven't learned about before. We've visited urban farms with farmer coops who manage them, small roadside farms run by individual farmers, USAID and other NGOs working on increasing agriculture production and healthy eating in Ghana, large farms and cooperatives, and lots of cultural sites in between. Now that the class is coming to an end, I'm looking forward to reflecting on the packed days to really understand how all of our meetings and visits coalesce into a broader picture of how Ghana is working to reduce hunger and poverty.

Kuapa KoKoo cooperative cocoa farmers, drying cocoa beans in a village outside Kumasi, Ghana. The beans smelled really cool, not quite like chocolate but something very similar. These beans are Fairtrade and are directly linked to Divine chocolate bars, available at Whole Foods.