Long Road to Kumasi, Part I of IV

Long Road to Kumasi Part I
This past weekend I enjoyed an “oasis” of sorts by making the pilgrimage to Kumasi for the long weekend.

I was supposed to start work on Thursday, but when I visited the office on Tuesday, I found out that the people who are supposed to tell me what exactly I’m going to be doing for the next six months were out of the office until Tuesday! So I was told not to come back until Tuesday and I had Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday (which was Canada Day/Republic Day!) to do with as I pleased! So I decided to make the most of this unexpected vacation and travel up to Kumasi where there is a small assembly of Christians meeting as well as a family of missionaries who I wanted to meet called the Frimpongs. They invited me to stay with them for the entire weekend and I was more than happy to oblige.

Kumasi is located about 5 hours north of Accra where I live. It has about 2.5 million people which is about half the size of Accra I am told. Ghana, in total, has about 24 million people.

Getting a bus to Kumasi was more difficult than I imagined. I let Heather Frimpong know that I would be attending at the bus station at 9am and expected to be in Kumasi by 2pm that same day. Buses leave for Kumasi every 45 minutes since it is such a popular destination so I thought, briefly, of leaving on Thursday night in order to maximize my time there. But I was told by several people in the expat community that it is not safe to take the bus to Kumasi in the evening because it is often overtaken by armed robbers under the cover of darkness! So I decided to heed the warning and just leave on Friday morning. My morning started a little later than I’d planned and so I didn’t get to the bus station until about 10am. But the lineup to get a ticket for the bus was just under 3 hours long! In a building with no ventilation and no air conditioning. It was quite unpleasant, as I’m sure you can imagine.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are no strollers in Accra that I can see, so there were several women in line with children tied to them like so:

When I finally got to the front of the line, I exchanged my 25 Cedis for what appeared to be a piece of Mosaic tile with the number D18 written on it (almost like a piece of a homemade scrabble set or something…). I then followed the crowd outside to try and find a bus. What I found out, outside, was that as the buses arrive, they are assigned a letter and the people with those letter tiles can get on that bus. Unfortunately for me, they hadn’t even gotten back to A when I got out there with my D tile, so I had another 2 hour wait out on the baking tarmac for the D bus to arrive.

When the bus finally came, I was happy to find out that it was quite comfortable. Air conditioned on the inside with spacious seating! The ride was rather unremarkable, except for the awful movie they were showing. While the majority of the film was in Twi (one of the local languages), there were English subtitles. Essentially the plot of the film was that a young married woman was frustrated with her husband and, when she was feeling sick one day, told him he would have to take care of the cleaning for the day. He was not impressed. Later that evening she told him she was not feeling well and so had no interest in being intimate with him. He was, again, not impressed. The next day she seemed to be feeling better and was heading out when an older lady came by to teach her the error of her ways. She was remorseful and apologised to her husband for her deplorable conduct. That was the end of the film. Sigh.

I had some trouble determining when I should “alight” from the bus. I was told that I should get off at the “filling station”, but unfortunately for me there are several gas stations in Kumasi that the bus goes by. Thankfully Joseph Frimpong talked to the bus man over my cell phone and let him know where to tell me to get off. That happened to be at a filling station located in a busy area along the way to the Frimpong’s home. Because I had never met the Frimpongs, I didn’t know what Joseph Frimpong looked like and he didn’t know what I looked like so it was a little difficult for us to locate each other. But once again, a random person came to my rescue.

A little aside here to note that unlike in Swaziland, Ghanaians can tell instantly that I am not from here. In Swaziland, as long as I kept my mouth shut and didn’t wear anything ridiculously touristy, I could blend in with the locals. But here in Ghana, you take one look at me and apparently know I’m from “America”. I am constantly receiving the following look from every single person I pass by in Ghana:

Well, every single Ghanaian that is. The expats all think I’m from here. So its quite isolating! The Ghanaians all stare at me and the expats all treat me like a local which is upsetting since, in my experience, expats (missionary and secular alike) tend to treat locals like something to be ignored/tolerated/placated/avoided/suspected/driven over/etc. My general experience of expats is that they feel they are here to serve the locals, not live with them. Dealing with locals is part of their “work” so it’s a necessary treat to get away from them during the off hours. Sigh. There are, of course, many exceptions to this observation, but I am constantly finding it reinforced sadly.

I have asked a few Ghanaians what it is about my presentation which tips them off that I’m an “American”, but I have yet to receive an understandable answer. I will keep investigating.

Anyways, back to my random stranger. So this random young man noticed me, the American, standing around the filling station and offered to speak to whomever was coming to pick me up so that he would know where to find me. That’s how Joseph and I met up finally, which was nice. We then made the drive out to his place. [see Part II]