I expected my semester at NYU Accra to be the most memorable among all my travels as an NYU Abu Dhabi student. And for the four months I was there, Accra did keep me absorbed with its stories, people and landscapes. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but feel an unwavering sense of disheartenment as well.

Let me explain:

I used to think the cross-continental truth about being a student was primarily learning. At NYU Accra, my role as a temporary visitor was vague, and as I eventually came to realize, troublesome. Tourism, volunteering and learning blended together, evolved and became hardly distinguishable, whereas previously I could easily tell the three apart.

Like every site in the Global Network University, NYU Accra has an Office of Student Life, which is responsible for acquainting students with their new homes. The small number of students at NYU Accra — around 30 in spring 2016 — and the lack of Student Interest Groups makes the Office of Student Life a vital part of the site. They had a variety of programs that ranged from workshops to teach us how to prepare typical Ghanaian foods from scratch in the comforts of our dorms to talks given by someone from the local community to screenings of documentaries produced by students during their time at NYU Accra. But on certain occasions, we would leave the university’s premises and be immersed in the Ghanaian community and the learning environment would fall apart.

A major component of the immersion was the intention of leaving an impact. While contribution is no doubt a part of building attachment to a place, ideally cultural immersion would be a reciprocal process. The Office of Student Life’s overall message that donating sweets or pencils would be a much appreciated gesture obscured the importance of our own learning and exaggerated our benefit to the community. So did the Office of Student Life’s firm assurance that NYU students teaching for a day in a local high school would be of service to the community, or that the school we were helping to build would substantially improve the quality of education in one village.

Yet living through these experiences exposed us to the idea that perhaps the locals weren’t the only people benefiting. As far as the local high school was concerned, the only thing that made me qualified to stand in front of a group of students of nearly my age was my enthusiasm to have a conversation about living in Ghana as opposed to another distant country. Playing hangman for nearly two hours was probably as embarrassing to them as it was to me, but what more could I have done once I realized that the rigorous classroom setting did not allow my colleague or I to contribute in a more substantial way? Only a short break saved the situation, when we simply played games in the schoolyard. But it was us, the NYU students, who had to learn the rules.

The so-called homestay program was yet another instance that brought more questions than answers about the soundness of our immersion in Ghana. For a weekend, students stayed in Woadze Tsatoe village located in Ghana’s Volta Region, approximately a three-hour drive from Accra. The connection between NYU and Woadze Tsatoe was established through Adanu, a local organization that, with the help of volunteers, aims to build schools in communities neglected by the government. Thus, while staying in the village, we worked at a school construction site. This very fact raised several questions which were passed from one student to another even before the program started. The questions prompted us to draw upon the experience of others, who had pondered on the rationale behind similar short-term, foreign-led programs. There were students who opted out before even more questions unraveled.

Those of us who arrived to Woadze Tsatoe were not the first NYU students to do so. In 2015, undergraduate students from NYU Stern visited the village and built sanitation facilities. In fact, the sanitation facility with a large NYU label on it was the one that we, another group of volunteers, were told to use. The villagers had a different one that matched the rest of buildings in the area, with no NYU logo visible. The school that we would help to build there, however, was less likely to be used by future generations of NYU students, so our batch could at least skip the question about the relevance of the facility to our hosts.

Helping to build the school as compensation to the community for hosting a group of foreign students for a weekend may sound like a fair agreement, but questions about contribution and takeaways persisted. While doubts about the actual contribution did not take me by surprise while I was spilling most of the water I was supposed to carry on top of my head, the takeaway part became more convoluted as the homestay program unfolded. Naturally, there were several unavoidable factors such as language barriers or strangeness to the community, but the most disturbing ones were written into the program’s agenda. How do students immerse with and learn from the hosts if the latter are prevented from approaching us during dinner, a meal that was delivered to us from elsewhere? What about if the students are instructed to get up and leave if Sunday church service were to take longer than an hour? These are my takeaways, just as prominent as my memories of the welcoming ceremony or music and dance performances.

Yet during the orientation week each of us was asked to introduce ourself and our reason for choosing Ghana from over a dozen GNU sites. To leave the comfort zone, to learn about one’s heritage, to be able to better relate to one’s field of study, to get to know a remote part of the world and to surprise one’s family and friends were the most common responses I can recall. Most of the responses seemed so alike. How did our drive to challenge ourselves and to learn get sidelined by the pressure to leave an impact over the course of the semester?

Admittedly, there were trips and activities that were all about students taking advantage of being in Ghana. We were encouraged to take pictures, buy souvenirs, listen to short lectures and then quickly get back on the bus. Occasionally, of course, we would linger around for a few extra minutes — just enough time to unload and leave behind bags filled with donated items. It had little to do with developing a real understanding of the place.

Fortunately enough, classes running parallel to extracurricular activities — all of which were facilitated by Ghanaian staff — were constantly opening new grounds for discussing the issues of education, foreign aid, tourism or common history. Compared to the Office of Student Life, my professors at NYU Accra often provided a more complex understanding of Ghana and a more credible immersion in its culture without leaving the classroom even once. The dichotomy between the lectures and the somewhat unsettling Student Life activities was all the more fascinating given that, in spite of their opposite intentions and different measures, both led me to the same conclusion: learning comes first, and donations and pictures can be considered later.

The semester spent at NYU Accra was no doubt a memorable one to me and many other students who chose to pursue their degrees at this unique site. I was glad to be departing from Kotoka International Airport, neither complacent about what the country has to offer nor disillusioned about the impact my short presence could have had there. While ultimately, every part of the semester was a learning experience — due in large part to the student body — I wish NYU Accra incorporated some of the insights from the classroom environment into the activities beyond it. In this way, at the end of the semester, students could come to accept the kente stoles bestowed upon their shoulders with more confidence.