Ghana (Part Eight)

December 11th was my last day in Ghana. I never thought it would take me an entire year to finish writing about my experience there, but life gets in the way sometimes. Anyway, I’m attempting to finish it up here, but I still have quite a bit to cover…

I woke up on December 7th a little before 6 am. I still had some packing to do, though I got some of it done the night before. December 7th was “Farmers Day”. This is a holiday that they celebrate on the first Friday of every December. As the name would imply, it’s meant to recognize the hard work that the country’s farmers do. Anyway, there were no classes due to the holiday.

Madam cooked us chicken wings (and eggs) for breakfast. Normally I’d be all over that, especially considering what I had eaten for the majority of my meals for the past month. However, I saw the kids defeathering the chicken the previous night, so I wasn’t as enthusiastic. They were still good though.

Madam gave us thank-you cards and jewelry – A bracelet for me, and a necklace for Cortney. I finished packing and then came out to say my goodbyes to everyone. Some of the kids seemed to be in denial of the fact that we were leaving. One of the kids that I had spent the most time with (Simon) was mad that we were leaving, and wouldn’t talk to me at all. Not everyone was around, so there were some people that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to.

Isaac, Elvis, and 2 of the other teachers (names I don’t remember) took our suitcases and walked us to the Junction where we’d be catching a tro-tro. When I passed Simon for the last time, I said bye to him and he just glared at me, and then started crying… It was actually kind of sad. This is the last picture that I took at the orphanage before I left. When we arrived at the Junction, I gave Elvis the watch I had purchased when we first arrived. I bought this thing out of necessity, I never wear a watch in the US, but I usually have a phone with me or some other way of telling what time it is. It was probably worth about 25 cents, but he was pretty happy about it. The tro-tro arrived and we said our final goodbyes and hopped on the tro-tro headed to Accra.

Leaving the countryside (can you call it that?) to head for a city was usually at least somewhat exciting. I had been in Accra two other times – once when we first arrived, and one other time for a day before heading to Kokrobite. Even though it was a little sad to be leaving the orphanage for good, I was a little excited to get to Accra and do some more exploring. But my nausea was definitely outweighing my excitement.

Right after the vehicle started moving, I started feeling really nauseous, and I was convinced that I was gonna throw up, but there really wasn’t much I could do about it. At one of the checkpoints, we had to stop the vehicle and get out (usually the cops just peek in the vehicle and then send you on your way). A police officer told me to go to the immigration booth. I was trying to ask him if I needed my passport, which was in my bookbag in the “boot” of the tro-tro, but he was yelling over me and not listening to me at all. I was feeling pretty terrible at this point, and standing in the hot sun being yelled at by a cop wasn’t very cool. Eventually the situation resolved itself.

We paid the money collector (they call them “mates”) 5 ghana cedi each – The last time we took a tro-tro to Accra, it was 4.50. People were visibly unhappy about this change. The “mate” got into a screaming match with a female passenger (presumably over the fare increase) and within a minute or two, almost everyone in the vehicle was yelling. Most of this was in another language, so I couldn’t really follow what was going on, but people were pretty angry. Eventually they pulled the tro-tro over to the side of the road, and I think they were threatening to kick people off.

As we got closer to Accra, the tro-tro started to empty out. 3 or 4 stops later, we were the only people left on the tro-tro (other than the driver and the mate). This is when things started to get interesting. They mate asked me how much I would pay for my luggage. I was really at the end of my rope at this point because I felt absolutely awful. I told him we wouldn’t be paying him anything, because we had never paid extra for luggage before, and if he was going to charge us extra, he should have told us this before we boarded the tro-tro, not two and a half hours into the trip and ten minutes from our destination. In addition to this, he hadn’t charged any of the Ghanains for their luggage.

Things remained calm at first. The first time I told him “we’ll pay nothing” he sort of laughed. He waited a minute or two and then asked me again, “so, how much will you pay?” This happened two or three times, and I started to get aggravated. I was very blunt with him, and I said flat out that we were not going to pay him any more money.

We got off at our stop and he continued to ask me. I felt extremely sick at this point – I was shaking and thought for sure that I was gonna throw up at any minute. At this point I started yelling. He wouldn’t let go of Cortney’s luggage, and I was literally trying to pry the handle to her suitcase out of his hand while the argument continued. We were really getting into it, and a crowd started to gather around us. He told me that if we didn’t pay, he would take our luggage to the police station and settle it there. In retrospect, at this point I probably should have just handed over a couple cedi and cut my losses, but at that point I was determined to stand my ground, even though the odds were clearly not in my favor. Talk about being out of your element.

I noticed Cortney started to take money out of her purse, and I was pretty aggravated by that because it undermined everything I was saying – I think I might have snapped at her a little. Suddenly some guy stepped in “to mediate”. I put that in quotation marks because as he made his way into the center of the small crowd that gathered, he was yelling “I am here to mediate!” over and over. He allowed me to explain myself, and after I told him what was going on he started yelling at the mate in Ewe (or Ga, whatever). After about 5 minutes of these guys yelling back and forth, he got Cortney’s luggage from the mate and told us to get out of there. I was still pretty angry and shook up – That was definitely the most serious altercation I’d had since we arrived in the country. When we were walking away, I was really tempted to turn around and give the mate guy the “I defecate in your mouth” (thumbs up) sign, but I restrained myself.

It took us about half an hour to get a taxi to the airport because people kept trying to charge us ridiculous prices. We experienced this the whole time we were there, but this was the first time that it actually bothered me. We ended up paying 4 cedi.

The reason we were going to the airport was to see if we could leave our luggage there, since our flight didn’t leave until the 10th. We planned on doing some traveling and didn’t want to have to carry around all that extra weight. When we arrived, I asked some security guys where I needed to go to check my luggage in, and they said to look for “left luggage”, and told us to where it was. So we started walking in that direction. On the way there, someone hissed at us to get our attention. He told us we were going in the wrong direction, and said to follow him to left luggage. As we walked back up the ramp that we had just walked down, I asked a security guy if we were going the right way, and he said yes, continue following the guy who is leading you. So we did. Eventually we passed the security guards who I had originally asked about left luggage, and they started yelling at the guy who was leading us. I think they were yelling at him for not leading us in the right direction, and because he apparently wasn’t an airport employee. This situation quickly escalated, it was as if the guy posed some kind of threat. I stood there in disbelief and watched the second shouting match that we had caused within one hour. They kicked him out of the airport and told us the correct way to left luggage.

It ended up costing us 8 cedi a day (per person) to store our stuff, which was not ideal, but there was no way we were gonna lug all that stuff around with us our last 3 days, especially since we wanted to do some traveling. We grabbed a taxi to Lake Bosomtwi hotel (we had stayed there before) and on the way we saw this dude walking down the street in his underwear. Also, you’ll notice in the Lake Bosomtwi Hotel picture that the hotel is spelled two different ways, one right next to the other. You see stuff like that a lot in Ghana.

When we checked into the hotel, they had raised the room price another 7 cedi since the last time we were there. Cortney went down to the lobby to pay, and I went up to the room because I felt extremely sick. Maybe you’re noticing a pattern here? I remember I was lying down in the room, and “All About The Benjamins” was on TV, so I watched some of that… I thought that was funny, because it was the pretty much the first time I had watched any TV while I was there, and I wasn’t expecting to see something like that.

We decided to go walk around for a bit. Cantonments Road was about a half mile walk from our hotel (we had been there earlier on the trip) and there are a good amount of stores/restaurants there. It is probably the most similar place to a US city that I saw while in Ghana. There was a grocery store there (called Koala) that was air conditioned, and if you were to somehow warp from the US into the middle of that store, you probably wouldn’t even guess you were in a 3rd world country. The prices reflected that, too.

Anyway, we stopped in Koala and I grabbed a Red Bull (I don’t even drink these in the US, but for some reason I wanted one). Checked out some of the vendors wares, I bought 3 more masks. Then we walked back down the road, and decided to stop for a drink. We relaxed for a bit and had a Club beer. While we were sitting there, 3 kids (2 guys and a girl that looked like a dude, all probably about 15 years old) came and sat down at the table right behind us. One of them pulled out a cell phone and starting blatantly taking pictures of us. Didn’t really bother me, but then the girl starting swatting at Cortney’s hair. Each time either one of us turned around, they acted like they were just sitting there, minding their own business. They were acting like we were the first white people they’d ever seen.

We walked back to the hotel and relaxed for a little more, and then decided to go to this Vegan place (“Sacred Tree“, we had gone there once before) for dinner. The menu was pretty limited, so I just ordered something random… An eggplant and tofu salad. I started to feel ridiculously sick, probably the worst I had felt so far, so I got up and walked into the restaurant to cancel my order – There was no way I was gonna be able to eat anything while feeling like this. I walked back to the table and sat down, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way in my entire life – I was super lightheaded and sweating profusely (my shirt was soaked), and I was getting rapid hot and cold flashes. I put my head down on the table and thought I was about to black out or vomit, or both. Within 1 minute or so, there was a puddle of sweat under me on the table, and my head almost slid off.

Cortney said that I really didn’t look good, and that we should go – I definitely wasn’t in a position to argue. The rasta owner guy came out to try and help. He brought a straw mat for me to lay down on. He was really nice, but he kept touching me and it definitely made me feel worse. The rasta’s wife (an Australian lady who we had met before) felt my forehead, and said that I didn’t feel feverish. She suggested we get a thermometer and told Cortney where a 24 hour pharmacy was. The rasta hailed a taxi for us… Even though our hotel was less than 5 minutes away by foot, there was no way I would have been able to walk that far feeling the way I did. The taxi driver charged Cortney 2 cedi which is ridiculous considering we were in the cab for about 2 minutes, but I couldn’t be bothered  at that point. I went up to the room to lay down, and she went back out to find this pharmacy. This was really nice of her, but in retrospect, I wouldn’t have let her go alone (it was probably around 8 pm) had I been thinking clearly.

I don’t remember much after she left, I think I was just drifting in and out of some kind of feverish sleep. At one point I knew I had to puke immediately, so I grabbed a small trash can that had been sitting in the corner of the room. I took it back to the bed with me and got down to business. As luck would have it, there was a big crack in the bottom of the trash can. By the time I noticed that, my pants (and the bed) were covered in vomit. Perfect.

When she got back, I took my temperature and determined that I didn’t have a flu. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing at that point. I made a weak attempt to clean up the vomit and then went to sleep.

I’m gonna cut this off here because I’m falling asleep, and I think my current state is probably affecting my writing. I will definitely make my last Ghana post(s) before Christmas.