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July 17, 2006
'I'm Getting the Bus to Ouagadougou.'
On my way to Bolgatanga, I kept getting calls from a young man who had helped Cathryn on her visit to Ghana last year. I had explained that, unlike her, I had no camera equipment that needed carrying or watching over. But he was very enthusiastic about joining me. And I, not knowing what lay ahead in Bolga, thought maybe it couldn't hurt to have him along.
When the public-transport bus arrived, eight hours late, in Kumasi, where he lived, he was clever enough to meet me at the fueling station, where we parked before moving to the bus stop itself. There, he hoped to talk his way on the bus before the people who'd bought official tickets.
It almost worked, but the bus was one seat short. To stay on, my friend would have to sit on the floor for the remaining nine hours of the journey. I thought, and almost hoped, he'd get off. He'd been flashing me almost constantly for the past hour, and I found his enthusiasm worrisome. He seemed to be leaning towards getting off, but then declared that he wanted to go for it. He looked at me expectantly to cough up the $14 for his fare. I did, and at nearly midnight we pulled out of the station, heading north.
My day had begun at about six, when I woke up and went to meet the driver for a member of parliament who had offered to help me go north to see farms, industry and infrastructure for my story about the Millennium Challenge Account. We took a little time to get to the bus station, and the 8 a.m. bus to Bolgatanga was full. There was a 10 a.m. going to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, that would stop in Bolga, where I could get off. The way to get a ticket was to find a fat man in a Panama hat and get him to take me past the long, motionless line at the ticket counter and into a personal conversation with the teller. "Can't you do something for me?" he asked when this transaction was over.
The 10 a.m. became the 11, and then noon, and then 3 p.m. The trip from Kumasi to Bolga was also longer than promised. (The bus, a big, air-conditioned coach, at least outshone some others I'd been on.) We'd stop at dark but busy markets in modest-sized cities, where fresh bread cost 50 cents and using a urinal in the pitch black cost about three. I had to jump back in mid-use when I realized that the urinal's contents were spilling directly out its bottom.
When we stepped off the bus in Bolga it was 9 a.m., 25 hours after I first showed up at the station in Accra. I had slept as well as one could in a rigid bus seat, and my friend got his own seat halfway there after someone else got off. After we checked into a nearby hotel, and I paid the bill, he asked me where my camera equipment was. Over breakfast, I asked why he'd come, and he said to help me, and for adventure.
We dove into a full day of reporting, interviewing politicians and farmers in several districts running right up to the Burkina border. Our guide was a man named Sadik, who works for the Catholic church in the area and runs an NGO setting up irrigation dams and employment for women.
Unlike the green, hilly south, northern Ghana is flat, dusty and dry, dotted with giant rocks piled like tossed dice and baobab trees within them as if they'd been blown in like dandelion fluff.
My friend's friends, back in the south, didn't believe that he was so far north, so we stopped to buy a phone card he could use to call their cell phones from a land line, to prove he was there. As we asked about the pricing on the cards, I turned to him and said, "Do you have any money for the phone card?" No, he said.
Later I learned that calls on his mobile network were free after 12:30 a.m. Before bed I asked if anyone would be calling that night. Yes, he said. Could he put his phone on vibrate? He rolled over. In the middle of the night, I woke up several times to what I've always thought was the most annoying of the generic cell phone rings.
In all, my expenses for the trip had nearly doubled, and there are no cash machines or check-cashers in this part of the world. On the way back, the bus fares increased from their stated prices on every leg of the trip, even when the bus out of Kumasi failed to start and we all jumped up and ran to another. (In Ghana's defense, these vans had 15 seats and held only 15 people. And before barrelling crazily down what passes for an interstate, the whole bus bowed its heads in prayer.) At the bus station in Accra, a homeless man who seemed to think he'd helped me find my taxi clung begging to the doorframe as we drove off and then reached into the car and punched me in the head. When I arrived at my residence, I had 2,000 cedis in my pocket. Less than 20 cents.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at July 17, 2006 9:39 AM
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Posted by: Broderick Guthrie at November 12, 2008 7:54 PM