The Fear, Again.

The sounds issuing from the back yard were terrifying; the strangled screams of an animal in the throes of hysterical fear. *Oh my God,* I thought, approaching the back door with extreme trepidation, *what the hell are they DOING?* As I stared out into the darkness, I located the source of the screaming; a couple of goats had broken into the back yard, and The Reverend, wearing only his boxers, a vest and an expression of bland contentment, was picking them up by their hind legs and throwing them over the garden wall. It was thus that another day in Achiase came to a close.

It's been a stressful sort of week so far, what with My Mother and GOM arriving in Ghana to pay me and the school a visit. Already GOM has caused a huge amount of damage to everyone's health by insisting on driving himself around Ghana in a four-wheel drive, because he is a MAN, and he is INTREPID, and he needs HELP FROM NO-ONE. I tried to explain that driving in Ghana is not like driving anywhere else, but my words of wisdom fell on deaf ears, and so My Mother has been permenantly aged by our four-hour trip up to Achiase. It was complex enough what with the potholes, goats and small children running out into the road, and GOM having to rely on my map-reading, but just to add to the joy we were then hit by the most intense lightning storm I have experienced yet in this country. I'm pretty sure that every person sitting in the vehicle was convinced of their own, intermittent death. My Mother was at least half a head greyer once she got out of the car than she had been when she climbed into it that afternoon. Since then they have required help from two separate mechanics. Fantastic to see them both, but it was with a faint sense of relief that I waved them off to Elmina yesterday morning.

It's still hot. Hot, and sticky, and the storms come with a strange regularity so that I can predict them almost by the hour. Our school is still a building-site; the new block supposed to have been completed at the beginning of March not quite there yet. The strange, inexplicable drought of pineapples seems to be over.

And now we are into June, my last full month in Ghana, and The Fear is striking again. Only this time, The Fear is of returning to the place I was so anxious about leaving in January. The towering buildings and jam-packed streets of London are now as alien to me as the notions of rainforest and tropical beach were last Christmas, and I have a growing conviction that once I get back I'm not going to feel as though I belong. I couldn't tell you a single thing about current affairs in the UK, or how much the congestion charge is at the moment- but I do know how much I should be willing to pay for a decent-sized pineapple, and how to get a sachet of water, leaning out the window of a speeding vehicle on a freeway. It's as natural to me as breathing that I should never accept the fare a taxi driver tries to charge me, but to argue it down to around half the price, and I respond to a yell of 'Obruni' these days faster than I do my own name.

Once I step off the plane in a month's time, what are all these skills going to become? Nothing. Entirely redundant. Useless pieces of information that are irrelevant in the world I am going back to, and that no-one is going to give a damn about. How can I argue with a London cabbie that the fare is ridiculously overpriced, or go into a Topshop and try to explain I could get a double of the dress they are selling for fifty quid made to measure for two pounds fifty?

Oh, the fear. The fear of being useless in my home-that-is-no-longer-a-home. I have friends, a job, and a place in this community, and when I go into school and my kids leap up to hug me, shouting my name, I feel like for the first time in my life I'm doing something actually worthwhile. And once I leave in exactly thirty-four days, I will probably never see my pupils again. The thought sits in my stomach like a lead weight.

"Madame, when you go, they will start beating us again," one of my boys said to me quietly last week. I have to leave them knowing the are absolutely right, and there is nothing I can do about it. At last I have started to get the hang of this whole teaching malarky, I have finally started to make some sort of consistent impression on the school and the children there, and suddenly I only have around seventeen days of teaching left! How has this happened so fast? And now whenever I wake in the middle of the night, breaking out into a cold sweat; it is the thought that soon I will not be sleeping in this cobwebby room, with the peeling wallpaper, the gritty sheets, and the constant smell of damp that has woken me.

Of course, there will be The Raconteur in London. There will be The Actor, The Stud, The Medic, and The Kid. There will be Thai resteraunts, Waterstones, Trafalger Square and the London Eye, still standing as far as I'm aware. I'll be able to walk around in the confidence that I am no more than fifty feet from a Starbucks- or a rat. But there will be no Roomie to yell at me for wandering into the road in front of a speeding bus, no bright-eyed, hyperactive children dancing in front of me every morning, no goats getting stuck in high places, and no Reverend to throw them over the wall, or watch with an air of peaceful bemusement as I skip like a maniac on the front porch.

"It's like a dream," The Savage reported after returning from Canada, "When you get back home, the whole thing is like a dream, as though it never happened."

Soon I'm going to have to wake up, and it's scaring the shit out of me.