It’s never easy, saying goodbye. And somewhere down the line I thought it would get easier. After years of travelling I’ve said see you soon to so many faces and maybe some part of me thought that you stopped letting people in and stopped caring after a while. I’ve realised that’s not the case.

On Friday we had three hard goodbyes. Fredrik, one of the students, had to go home. And Anders, who’s been the lecturer for the past couple of weeks. And Laurie, our manager of this semester left us while some of us (after a few beers) were singing sad goodbye songs to her (this one for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5iU2dwzGaA).

Even though it’s been hard saying goodbye the past two weeks has been so inspiring and meaningful for many of us. Anders have opened our eyes in many ways and I think that everyone has changed at least a part of their way of seeing the world, which he claimed to be his goal in his introduction of this course in Political Ecology. We did a field trip in the beginning of last week to Kakum National Park. I’ve always seen conservation and national parks as something sustainable and good, but after his lectures about the consequences of conservation, it felt weird and almost wrong visiting this park. Especially since we before entering were invited to one of the local communities nearby, whom been suffering quite a bit when it comes to loss of resources and empty promises from the government after the national park was installed.

Even if we might have looked at the park in a different way, it was still really amazing to be in the rain forest, in the heavy rain. Kakum has something called the Canopy walk, which is a long series of hanging bridges up to 40m above the ground. I think everyone was happy about the day and we also had a very rewarding discussion with Anders after at the University of Cape Coast, regarding on how to analyse your data and impressions after a field study.

There’s been a lot of birthdays lately. Today it’s my room mate Ida’s birthday and last week both our seminar leader Elisabeth and our beloved Maria had their birthdays, which has led to a lot of cake and a lot scandinavian birthday songs. I think the danish one is my favourite so far.

Elin