I came into the world on November 30th in the year 2000; a pretty uneventful day for most of the world. The circumstances of my birth would seem to foretell the path of my life. That is until I learned to read. I grew up in a culture that had long settled the answers to inquiries made about why it was how it was. The answer to an intriguing question about a specific custom would often result in a long winding answer that could be summarized in seven short words: that is how our forefathers did it. To say this answer frustrates me would be a gigantic understatement; it didn't fit as a response to a why question. My discontent with these type of questions, to the malaise of adults, was well voiced . This dissatisfaction with the answers provided by adults, in a culture where age and wisdom were siamese twins, was highly inappropriate, or so I am told. Something had to be done to correct this problem: I was taught to read early.

One might glance at this and think: they taught him how to read so he could eventually learn about these ancestors, right? No.  Make no mistake, when I say I was taught to read early, it wasn’t this grand attempt to educate me in the intrigues of Ghanaian culture. It wasn’t to resolve my questions but distract me from them. If I had my face in a book, I wouldn’t be running around making the house guest uncomfortable with my being nosy about everything. Learning to read, as with learning most things, was a pleasurable experience. I still have in my possession the picture my nanny took of me when I had finished reading my first book.

The purpose of exposing me to the joys of literature at an early age was to get me to stop asking questions, but to this day that goal has never been accomplished. Yes, I had stopped running around constantly, bothering people with my questions; and yes, I kept my attention in a book; but no, I did not let go of my questions I gained more. The wide range of children's books exposed me to the wonders of other cultures. I read about soccer players from Brazil and wondered why most of them didn’t have a last name. I read about explorers who climbed Mount Everest in Asia, and wondered what the Himalayas looked like. I read Curious George and wondered about monkeys. I read Oliver Twist and wondered about the lives of people in nineteenth-century England. I hadn’t become distracted, not by the least, I became more engaged. My tolerance for how much literature I could read increased and in turn I needed more complicated books and articles to satisfy it. I asked questions less frequently because I had begun culminating mental list of all I had to ask instead of asking single questions frequently.

My questions, combined with the fatigue of adults at answering and my incredibly unsupervised access to the internet, lead me to discover the joys of Google and Wikipedia. Though Wikipedia is now not trusted for the use academically, because of the ease of which members could update or corrupt information- something that they have all but fixed, it will always hold a special significance in my eyes. Through Wikipedia, I now not only wondered why these Brazilian players were mononymous but why they spoke the same language as the Portuguese. I not only wondered what the Himalayas looked like, but how they had formed. Through my hours reading articles and clicking links that brought me to new articles, I would answer these questions for myself and find that new questions would replace them. To this day, I am still an addict to the wonders of written information, though I have become less dependent on Wikipedia. The story of regarding when I finally learned how to create my own literature did not commence as an attempt to restrict me but the sight of my left hand gliding across the paper brought a issue that could never be fixed regardless of how many times the pen was placed in my right. That story in itself would take years to tell.