Sighted: Real Coffee

Chris and I have once again schlepped our bags and our weary bodies to a new home in an area of Accra called Tema. We had a stroke of luck finding the place, and it is extremely posh and spacious, not to mention less expensive than the last place. We each have our own huge empty rooms with tiny mats on the floor where we sleep. Because I have so few belongings and it all fits in the one dresser provided, it’s basically an empty concrete room with a bug net in one corner. It’s relatively easy to get to and from work and basically takes the same amount of time as before, however now I am coming from an Easterly direction rather than Westerly. At my NGO I’ve been attending meetings, editing and proofreading reports, and spending time with lots of interesting, smart people.

This past weekend was a whirlwind of activity. The plan was for me to go to Kumasi, meet Julie, and for us to head to Bui National Park in the Western Region to see some hippos. I got up early on Friday and headed into the city to find a bus that would take me to Kumasi (the trip should take 4 or 5 hours) and found one that was leaving at 11am. Six hours into the trip I was thinking what an unbelievably long time it was taking (Julie insists the drivers get paid by the hour) and I heard a loud pop and the bus broke down on the side of the road. After about 40 minutes the driver got us fixed up and we were back on the road, which meant that I didn’t get into Kumasi until much later than I had expected, around 6pm. I met up with Julie, we grabbed a bit of food, and found our way by taxi to the tro tro station that would take us North to Techiman, and from there we would get yet another tro tro to Wenchi. It was dark by then and we were ripping down the road, giggling to ourselves in the back, and the trip took about two hours. When we arrived in Techiman I was starting to get a bit hopeless about finding a place to sleep, and we somehow managed to get a tro to Wenchi.
At this juncture I would like to point out that when I am traveling I often deliberately dehydrate myself because there is no where to urinate in Ghana other than the odd awful and very public urinal. By the time we had arrived in Techiman, I hadn’t gone to the bathroom in 14 hours, and had been traveling for equally as long.
So we were on the tro to Wenchi and we got off at the last stop (by this time it was 10pm), which was when I realized, bewildered, that my phone had disappeared. I searched my bags, searched the tro tro, but it was gone. Gone, along with all my contacts and my super organized cellphone calendar.
I was so defeated.
We found a place to stay though, and I reasoned with myself that I would rather have a place to stay than a cell phone, especially considering cells come pretty cheap around here. It’s more of an annoyance and an inconvenience than anything. The place we stayed at was very shady and minimal – two beds, no sink – but we were happy to have anywhere to lie down at that point.
The next morning we hopped on a trotro going to Bui and waited about an hour and a half for it to fill up before it finally exited the lot. We were preparing for about a two and a half hour ride, and they had crammed 4 extra people in the tro so we could barely breathe never mind extend our legs. Half way through the trip I started feeling a fiery sensation on the top of my right thigh, and thinking it was just something to do with being overheated and cramped, ignored it. It got hotter and hotter until it felt like someone had poured lighter fluid on my leg and lit a match. I tried to figure out what had happened when I realized: my pepper spray had got jostled around and the safety came off, and it discharged through my bag and my shorts, all over my thigh.
It burned, it burned. But there was nothing I could do except sit there and bounce along and hope against all odds the burning would stop.
It didn’t.

Eventually we arrived at Bui, and after about a half hour of seeing no people and no vehicles, we finally talked to a man who said he was a guide and could take us on the tour to see the hippos. It was midday at this point, and excruciatingly hot. We dumped our bags and hitched a ride into the wilderness, got in leaky canoes, and saw some real life, terrifyingly big hippos. I was bailing out the boat nervously the whole time. We brought only 1.5 liters of water for the trek, thinking it would be enough, and it didn’t even come close. It was around the same time as we realized that we had not brought enough water, that we realized we had to walk about 3km back to the camp where we were staying.
By the time we were half way back, I could barely drag one foot in front of the other and I thought I was going to vomit from dehydration. Julie said she thought she might pass out and I was starting to wonder what exactly the guide planned on doing if one of us hit the dust. There was a period where the end was no where in sight, and I said out loud, “This is what I imagine hell to be like. The sun bearing down on us, with no end in sight, with no fluids left in our body.”
Eventually though, the end did arrive, and we bolted for our room and chugged down the warm bottle of water we had left there. We were both so dizzy and covered in filth and sweat all we could do was sit on this little wooden bench they had provided for us and feel pity for ourselves. Julie then mentioned she had brought two apples and my jaw hit the floor, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I grabbed the apples out of her bag and we devoured them, I was moaning with delight and I ate the whole thing, even the core, and then I ate her core. I haven’t eaten an apple in 5 months, and I will surely never eat one again as tasty as that one. It tasted unbelievable; it tasted like deity or something out of this world.

There was no electricity where we were staying, so we ate some raw noodles and went to bed early. Our tro tro left the next morning at 5:30am and I didn’t get home that night until 6. It was an exhausting weekend and the heat of my mace hasn’t left my mind, and I had to buy a new phone. But we saw hippos and it’s a good story, and I guess that was the point after all.

Midterms are coming up at the end of the month and my NGO has kicked into overdrive applying for grants, getting a new office, and struggling over revamping their accounting methods.

10 more weeks til my plane takes off.

Claire