Who I Was Isabel Patterson I was born in the Cradle of the Revolution, a landscape pressed with sweeping mountains and roving hills that descend onto the course of the flowing Gan river, from the broad rice patties dressed properly in hues of green to the brown soil underfoot that began the Long March. I was born into a country brimmed full of breath, beauty, and the inevitable reality of loss, spoken throughout the country and echoed in resounding chambers of my heart, constantly probing for the definite answer. I was taken to the land of the Great Lakes, an icy winter tempress and a mild summer sentinel that yielded its gaze from the changing temperaments of the mighty lakes and their surrounding course around her supple and tender edges. I was taken to state replete in the joy of being a child, an area of picking sour green blueberries or falling forwards in the snow covered ground, bounding up the high-storied library, waiting for my dad to catch up. I was taught with the world as my playground, an ever shifting environment tempered by my will to stay grounded and in control like the heated harmattan spewing red dust into every corner and crevice, before the torrential summer rains washed it out. I was taught in the humid Ghanian air and through the tepid Zambian breezes,
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