September 4, 2007- Wouldn't Mom Freak Out if She Knew!

Evening

When we arrived in downtown Accra, Edem took my suitcase in one hand and my hand with his other (apparently he and I are now friends, and that’s what he says friends do… they hold hands) and talked as we walked to the bus station where we picked up our tro tro to Kpando. 

The tro tro station was like a bus station, but more insane.  The tro tro’s zipped into the parking lot and the drivers seemed to be playing a game called “almost hit everyone you see.”  Edem told me to stay put, walked away with my bag, and came back empty handed.  I tried not to look alarmed.  Travel Rule #1; don’t lose sight of your bag.  He handed me a scrap of thin, grey paper with a number printed on it which served as my ticket and we walked together to the tro tro.  Miraculously, my bag was still in the back.

Tro tro station in Accra

Edem in our tro tro

Ahh, tro tros.  The U.S. equivalent of a tro tro is a Greyhound bus, which aren’t exactly the most luxurious mode of transportation.  However, after seeing our tro, I longed for a fuzzy blue adjustable seat of my own with an armrest and a headrest and a footrest and a little mesh pocket to hold my water bottle and reading materials.  Sigh

The tro tro was green.  Or at least it was at one point.  Now the exterior was grayish and rusty.  When I first saw it I thought it had been abandoned in the 1980s and was still waiting to be towed.  All the windows had cracks—      the windshield had an impressive one spidering from the top right all the way to the bottom left.  The four greasy faux-leather bench seats had stuffing popping out of each ample crack, and the glue no longer held the dingy fabric to the ceiling very well.  Two brown, frayed, pathetic looking toothbrushes were wedged in the passenger-side visor.   A thin blue rope tying the trunk door to what was left of the bumper was the only thing keeping my suitcase from bouncing down the pothole-ridden highway and into the jungle.

I had to climb up and push some ceiling fabric out of my face when I climbed in.  I clutched my backpack to my chest as I slid into my middle seat in the third row.  The woman to my left was snoring against the window, feet up on a lumpy zippered plastic bag, a five-gallon tub of margarine in her lap.  My feet rested on a large tractor tire which held up the seat in front of me, and my right knee jammed into a metal bar no matter how I angled myself.  There was no room for my backpack anywhere except my lap, and with my legs jammed up as they were, I had to lift my head up and over it to look from right to left.  Edem sat to my right, and another man sat next to him after folding down a little stool in the isle.

As we settled into our seats Edem explained that Kpando is a medium sized town in the Volta Region of Ghana.  He is the Executive Director of a children’s home called “HardtHaven,” which he opened three months ago in partnership with a 22 year old girl from Spokane, Washington.  There are 14 children living there and the organization supports a dozen or so other children and families in the community.  It’s technically not an “orphanage,” as some of the children still have family members who are alive, and some even visit.  Even if all of the children were bona fide orphans, the term “orphanage” is frowned upon by the Ghanian government as it refers to institutions rather than a home-like environment.  The government is working toward shutting down “orphanages” in favor of funding smaller children’s homes and foster care programs, so HardtHaven is planning to keep the numbers small, and purposefully put the words “Children’s Home” in their name.  Regardless, each child has his or her own humbling story as to why they qualify to live at the home.  Some families have been ravaged by HIV/AIDS and the parents or grandparents are not well enough to care for the children.  Some of the children are “sick,” which is how the home refers to children who test positive, and their remaining family members or entire community will not take care of them because of the gross stigmas attached to the illness.  Some arrive relatively healthy, and some malnourished, hosting tapeworms, and covered head to toe with ringworm.  Edem loves nothing more than to turn sad skinny kids into giggling little butterballs. 

Thirty or forty minutes in, once all the people in the four back rows and the front were seated four across, the creaky door slammed shut in a cloud of dust and flakes of rust.  The trip to Kpando was only supposed to be a three-hour tour, and so, of course, it took over five and felt like an eternity.    

The first two or three miles out of Accra took an hour, but at least then it was light out.  The last stretch toward the highway provided some solid entertainment.  The tro tro would inch along, revealing a new on-foot vendor selling something delightful or revolting, but always random, and usually from a bowl on the vendor’s head.  Plastic bags full of whole dried minnows or other shredded and smoked fish, Ghanian flags, freshly picked mangos, regional maps, baby clothes, belts, day old soggy fried chunks of dough, pink hardboiled eggs with a dollop of hot sauce, foam take-away containers oozing with red oil, cell phone credit, bright plastic cheaply made children’s toys, biscuits, bread loaves, tomatoes, Nigerian films. It was like a drive-through Wal-Mart.

We made it to the open highway just as the sun went down and my ass went numb. 

The relief that came with knowing where I was headed and that I seemed to be in good hands was forgotten once we inched outside the city.  The “highway” opened into one wide paved road with no lines, and pothole after pothole.  Staying on our side of the road was apparently optional.  The driver preferred laying on the horn while flying around sharp turns in the wrong lane rather than returning to his side of the road.

This was sort of novel for the first two hours.  Look at me on the other side of the world zipping around in a death trap on the wrong side of the road, wouldn’t Mom freak out if she knew!  Once the sun went down and the rain started pouring from the sky it was harder to keep up that charade. 

After seven eternities we skidded and splashed into the Kpando tro tro station in one thankful piece.  A take-away container of food some how materialized in Edem’s hands, and we took a cab to the children’s home and carried my bags through the night and into my room.  I ate and passed out under my mosquito net on the bottom bunk.