Ghana, Day 116: Thinking about America

Hi Ruth!

I'm still in Ghana.  It's Sunday, so I was thinking I'd put a song up for you.  When you were super, super-tiny I would dance around with you to this kind of music in your carrier.  And when you were smaller, we'd sometimes have dance parties, mostly just you and me, before bedtime.  Then, you always really liked this song - now you might think it would be too loud, but maybe Mommy or Grammy can just put the volume on low for me.

I like this song because it's about people not wanting there to be fighting.

A lot of the reason I'm here is because Africa (not so much Ghana!) has had lots of fighting.  I try to learn more about it so I can be one of the people who knows something about how to stop fighting, but sometimes I feel like it's hard to do much good just writing and thinking and teaching about it - "doing philosophy," as you put it.  Right now, I'm having an argument (a friendly argument, philosophers have lots of those) about why there's a lot of fighting in Africa.  Dr. Ani (you met him, he lives over in the Guest Center where Grammy and Grampy were staying) thinks that it's mostly because some of the people from Africa in charge have been bad people.  But I have been saying that a lot of the problems have been from outside Africa - we're pretty lucky that there's not a lot of fighting where we live (even though some times you have to be careful in Baltimore).  But as you get older, we'll probably talk about this more - sometimes people set up rules that make it easy for it to be nice where we live but make it really hard for people in places like Ghana, or Congo, or Rwanda, or Liberia.  It's really important that we all try to at least not make things worse for other people by setting things up in an unfair way.

I know that's a bit heavy - you may understand better if you go back and read this when you're a little bigger!  Really, it's just that fighting is bad, but people mostly fight when they get angry, and they get angry because of stuff that happens.  Just like if you're being grumpy, I try to find out what's wrong, and sometimes it's something Mommy or I did, and we try to change - well, when people are fighting it's important to find out what's wrong, and sometimes it means we need to change instead of just telling them to stop fighting and then yelling at them if they don't.

I miss having dance parties with you (even if we did them to quieter music).  I'll be home in 17 days.