On the Road Again

One month straight in Accra and the walls are beginning to close in. The traffic, the heat, the teeming masses yearning to call me Obruni all began to take its toll on me. I needed to get out of town, if even for a night so jay (my new roommate http://jaydavidson.blogspot.com), Rob, and I head to Akosambo, the sight of the Akosambo dam which consistently provides the entire country with six glorious days a week of electricity.

We’ve gotten to the point of understanding that the sights are interesting and often beautiful but the social interactions are what makes these trips memorable and Akosambo once again proved this to be the case.

Meet Mr. Cedi.

Mr. Cedi named himself after the local currency. He’s a very friendly man but I spent the majority of my time trying to avoid his hypnotic penetrating stare.

We stopped at his bead factory along the way and were treated to an interesting demonstration on how their glass beads are produced. The beads are made from recycled glass bottles and are refined, placed in molds, and heated in an open fire. Mr. Cedi just loves beads. He explained to us his passion for beads underneath a giant billboard instructing us to bead all that we can bead.

Meet Mrs. Brian:

So a group of schoolgirls coming home from church boarded our tro-tro and yada yada yada I got engaged. Rob started a brilliant rendition of ‘I want to see you my Fader’ a local favorite and the whole car rejoiced in song. Wedding is set for sometime this summer.


Meet Kofi. We were eating along the Volta River at a great little spot when a timid young boy paddled up to the nearby dock and began to patiently stare at us.

He looked terrified to approach us but I invited him to have a drink with us. The owner of the place got up to yell at him and I had to explain to him that he was our guest. Kofi ferries people up and down the river and we told him that we would come back tomorrow for a canoe ride. Sure enough he was there Sunday morning and we boarded his dug-out canoe.

It seemed that Kofi had enough paddling for the day because he handed the oar to me to shove us off from the shore. Kofi confidently directed us upstream and kept insisting we get our mast.

Our ‘mast’ turned out to be a bed-sheet hidden in a nearby tree. Kofi, our fearless captain sat in the front of our canoe anchoring the mast down with his feet while Rob stood, arms outstretched to cast out our sail and propel us along. I don’t know if the scheme worked and we may never find out of we looked inventive or dim-witted to the curious passer-bys.

Now meet giant Brian. People are short in Ghana....isn't that nice? Look how tiny this door was!!










Meet the women and children of bread junction. I’ve encountered this infamous junction twice before on my travels elsewhere in the Volta region and have always remembered it for its aggressive sellers who assault every passing car to try and get you to buy their shrimp, oysters, water, and of course bread. It’s the last stop before crossing the Volta River and a popular pit-stop for tro-tros to feed the traffic weary and hungry passengers. The last onslaught I experienced here I was damn near forced to buy bread when, with a brilliant sales pitch, a woman crawled in through the window and held a loaf in my lap until I was uncomfortable enough to hand her 5,000 cedis.

Rob and I gots to talking and devised an ingenious battle of might and will. We would join these fearless vendors. We will join them and sell bread. The stakes: boasting rights and swelling pride. The plan: buy bread from bread ladies, sell it at market price, give the revenue back to the bread ladies to buy even more bread, and the first one to sell three loaves is the winner. See if you can spot the Obruni in this pic:

It was difficult to explain our plan to the bread ladies so we opted to just start selling hoping that they would catch on. As we started to manically chase the passing tro-tros with the rest of the vendors I wondered if we were overstepping some sacred territorial boundary between these sellers. I imagined us getting stabbed with their shrimp skewers, pelted with sachets of water, and suffocated with big delicious bags of bread. A much more pleasant scenario developed as the bread ladies excitedly applauded our efforts. With Rob’s long arms and gift of gab I was the underdog. Every passing tro-tro and taxi was a potential sale and when the first car pulled into the junction I kicked Rob in the shins and flailed my arms as fought for position amongst the other ladies. I stuck my hand though the window and repeated my ingenious sales pitch of ‘bread bread bread bread 5,000 5,0000 5,000 5,000’ and was met by amusement and confusion to the marks riding the tro-tros. After uncomfortable persistence a lady bought my bread with a smile. I held my money like a trophy and the bread ladies rejoiced and danced with me. I quickly bought another loaf and waited for the next tro-tro to come.

Cunning I am not. Despite our best efforts, Rob and I failed to sell any more bread for the next twenty minutes. But then, a woman, possibly sensing my growing desperation, asked for two loaves of bread!!! I only had one loaf of bread with me and clouded in judgment from my success, I unwisely directed Rob to sell her the second loaf of bread. Instead of a 3-1 victory the score was tied at 2-2 and Rob finally sold his third bread before me. Rob pranced around the lot in victory and I am left eternally saddened by my ruinous error.

Meet two idiots who have lots of mosquitoes in their room. Our shoestring accommodation came with a complimentary swarm of mosquitoes. Unbeknownst to Rob, I filmed our attack on the flying intrusion and Rob has diligently uploaded the movie to youtube.com (despite the unorganized and lopsided photos that I didnt have the patience to fix look how tech savvy this blog has become!).

[Rob]The sound is delayed. Don't know why. Closed captioning is therefore supplied for the hearing impaired and unimpaired alike (reads far more dramatically than the reality, anyway):

Brian: Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh.
Rob: C’mon, track it, track it.
B: Oh oh oh oh oh.
R: I see it!
B: Over here!
R: Where?
(Slapping noise)
R: Did you get it?
B: I don’t know…maybe.
R: Too many shadows in the room…maybe…oh oh! It dive bombed passed me.
(Extended pause, followed by slapping)
R: I heard that fucker. Did I get it? I should have got that one. I don’t think I did…
(Laughter)
R: Oh oh oh…oh oh oh…over there.
B: Oh yeah, I just saw it.
R: Where? Where?
B: Oh!
(Slapping)
B: There’s two of them!
(Slapping)
B: Oh my god!
(More slapping)
R: I got ‘em, I got ‘em.
B: Dude, there’s three of them!
R: I got one.
B: There’s three of them. I just saw two more.
R: Ok Brian, they’re panicking because of the…the…the thing. They can’t handle it. They’re going insane. I killed one. Did you see? I killed one.
B: That was good.
R: And it hadn’t bitten us yet. That’s a victory…non-bloody ones.
B: Oh!
(Slapping, then laughter)
R: You had such form.
(Crosstalk)
R: I was quite impressed with it.
B: Shit. Oh….Oh!
(Slapping)
B: Aah! I got it. Nope.
R: Yeah, yeah. What’s that?
(Screaming)
R: What?
B: It was stuck in between my fingers.
(Laughter)
B: That was weird.
(More laughter)
B: Uck. That…I definitely got that one.
R: Ok, that’s only two, though. You said you saw…
B: Oh! Here’s another one! There’s one behind your head. Oh, there’s two of them! Shit. There’s two more…
(Slapping)
R: Oh! Oh, look at that!
B: Oh, there’s still two more. There’s one by the light…
R: Do you see this fucker? I’m just going to smash him into the wall a lot…
(Slapping)
R: It’s paste. I’ve made it paste. I’ve fallen…fallen into a rage. Did you see the paste? Ok, give us some more. Gimme…
B: There’s definitely another one or two.
(Crosstalk)
R: Oh! Right over your head! Right…oh two, two right over your head! One…there, there, there, there, there, there. Track it with me.
(Slapping)
R: Nope…missed it. Did I!?
B: Oh, there’s another one.
R: I got some on my finger…
B: Or maybe you can…get that one. It’s going for the light.
R: Where? Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh.
B: Fudge. Two of them.
(Slapping)
R: Oh look at the fan…look at the fan…(gasp)
(Slapping)
R: Oh oh oh oh!
(Slapping)
R: Aaaaaaaaagh!
B: Nice. There’s another one in here…
B + R: Oh!
(Crosstalk)
R: There’s one on the roof.
B: Fuck.
R: They’re not all mosquitoes…(laughter)…they’re…they’re not all mosquitoes, some of them are like…that’s a mosquito. You see him stuck on the roof?
B: Yeah.
R: Ok, he’s on the move again.
B: There’s a chair right there.
R: Watch him…oh…it’s moving. Keep him…don’t…if there’s others, we’re going to let them get away for a minute, this one is going down. I’m going to kill you…
(Laughter)