From Amanokrom to Ann Arbor

Name: From Amanokrom to Ann Arbor
Author: Ben A. Dwamena, MD

A Life Redirected

One road, two worlds — a life that spans continents, cultures, and seasons.

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About the book

Synopsis

From Amanokrom to Ann Arbor: A Life Redirected follows a single road. It begins on the red laterite earth of Amanokrom, on Ghana’s Akuapem Ridge, and crosses — through the discipline of PRESEC, the University of Ghana Medical School, and nearly three decades of academic and Veterans Affairs nuclear medicine — to the snow-lit avenues of Ann Arbor, Michigan. One road, two worlds; together they trace a journey carried by curiosity, faith, and an unbreakable will.

It is a physician’s memoir, carrying real clinical cases (patient privacy protected throughout) alongside the family, community, and faith that formed the author’s earliest years. Honest about hardship — including the 1998 spinal-cord injury that redirected everything — and luminous about grace, it reads as the continuity of a single life shaped by both landscapes.

About Amanokrom

Pronunciation: ah-mah-NOH-krohm (four syllables, with emphasis on “NOH”).

The town’s name is also rendered Àmanokrom in one historical account, which explains it as “Amanor’s town,” after Nana Amanor Awuah. Amanokrom’s community history dates the founding to about 1742 and names Nana Amanor Awuah and Konton Mensah as founders.

Music from the memoir

Three recordings alongside From Amanokrom to Ann Arbor.

Safe Thus Far

Download Safe Thus Far (MP3)

Through All the Changing Scenes

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Beloved of God

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Poem and song

The Red Earth Remains

A poem for From Amanokrom to Ann Arbor

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In Amanokrom the rain came first as scent, iron rising from the laterite, and a boy stopped on the path because he knew the signal. My mother's hand was on my head before every leaving: keep him on the road, and bring him back to me. I did not know what she was setting into me. I know it now.

One sentence in an office at Legon moved me from numbers to biology. I opened the new book that night. That was the first redirection, and I mistook it for loss.

Korle Bu, and two funerals inside the years of study. Baltimore under fluorescent light. Atlanta, and a woman who was steady without ever performing it. Ann Arbor, where the snow did what the red dust had done, covered everything, and taught me patience.

Then July, US-23, a bright afternoon. The command went down the cord and met a wall. I read my own scan in the grayscale I had learned like a second alphabet, and no one had to say permanent.

Again, the therapist said. Again. Not encouragement. Method. The arms learned what the legs had done. The chair learned the reading room. Francesca learned the monitors, and stayed.

I have not been told why. Providence does not explain; it sustains. Some mornings the prayer is full, some mornings it is only habit, and both mornings count.

Twereduampɔn, the One you lean on and do not fall. I have leaned my whole weight and I am still here.

Snow lies on Michigan all winter. Soil does not vanish because it is covered. Beneath every redirection, beneath the chair, the admissions, the years, the red earth remains.