It was the scary excitement I only remember experiencing when I was a little girl. Like when we would play hide and seek in the middle of the night during primary school camp. But actually, a bit more of an excitement of something you knew were not supposed to be doing as a child. Like looking in all the closets of other peoples bedrooms (would there be something sex related??) Or like copying someones answers in a test while the teacher was walking behind you.
But this time the children were 30 and 34 and sneaking around inside the UN building in the evening. There was nobody there, except one poor man hoovering every single chair of the room of the United Nations General Assembly. But he had left the door open. So when he turned his back we sneaked in and looked around in the massive room with the hundreds of chairs. We whispered and shivered. We were standing in the room on top of the Security Council, where hundreds of resolutions have passed or where rejected. Where life changing decisions on the future of people and countries were made.

We pretended to be the Netherlands’ and Ghanaian delegation (or was it the Russians, for the historians amongst us?).

















Then we hesitantly walked up to the speaker’s desk on the stage. The place where Kofi Annan used to stand. Where he stood when he called for action on how by 2015 we should reach the Millennium Development Goals and have made the world a better place to live for all of us.
It felt weird standing there, knowing that Kennedy once stood on those same cm2 too. And Gorbatsjov and more recently Obama. People who changed history. I gently touched the wood they must have touched as well while they were speeching and tried to imagine what they might have thought and how they felt. I imagined they were nervous, knowing that the whole world was watching them. I already felt tremendously intimidated and fairly awkward. And the cleaning man hoovering the chairs wasn’t even watching me.

sweat and sour home

I violated the number one blog rule: Write on your blog at least once a week or you lose all your readers.

But I think I had some good excuses. I turned 30, again, drove around beautiful Friesland in an old VW camper van and all my friends were camping in my parents garden and surprised me (and made me cry with happiness twice). My sweet grandma passed away and we had to organise a funeral with good wine and food to honour her life. And then I went to New York, the city where it’s just impossible to find time to check your emails or write quietly on my blog. I did a great course at the New York University, but besides that –or should I say more importantly- I enjoyed three weeks of uninterrupted loving company of my dependant spouse (official UN terminology for the greatest boyfriend on earth).

Needless to say I wasn’t overjoyed to wake up this morning alone and jetlagged and ready for work. On the bright side however, my dear colleagues lifted me up and spun me around in circles and for once didn’t say I gained weight after travelling. Besides, it’s much cooler here than the heat wave of New York and the road people have been starting to fix the scary potholes on my way to work. So, cleaning out my inbox now, unpack my new clothes and enjoying quiet Accra-life with lots of sleep.