Sunday June 24, 2012  Africa:  Day 14

            I really wanted to go to church today, but I didn’t have any way of finding out where the closest chapel was.  We didn’t have internet access all weekend and James, the waiter we befriended, didn’t know if there was one around.  Instead I spent a peaceful Sunday morning sitting on the beach reading and being entertained by the local kids.  My friends decided to swim to the island, so I sat under a coconut tree hoping that they would make it back alive. 

The kids here seem to find a million different ways to entertain themselves.  A bunch of them had found a boogie board, propped it up along a rock wall, and almost an hour using it as a slide.  Another kid would yell, “hello” at me until I looked at him.  He would then take a large tomato can, put it between his knees, and beat out an intricate rhythm was some sticks he found in the sand.  Other kids would yell “hello” (that and “my name is ___ seem to be the English words they know) until I acknowledged their one-handed cartwheels and other stunts they wanted to perform for me.  A little girl came and curled up beside me and spent a long time just creating different sand formations with leaves, sticks, and her shoes.  Another little boy came up and stole my water bottle.  A few minutes later I watched a different boy walk by with the bottle wrapper on his arm like a bracelet, and then a third kid ran by with the empty water bottle tied to some fishing string trailing behind him.  I’m glad those sneaky little kids got so much use out of my water.

That afternoon we began our long journey home.  We took a taxi to Takaradi, a larger town with a main bus station where we would find our next ride back to Accra.  Before I even got out of the taxi, one of the bus drivers had all of our backpacks loaded on his bus, then he handed us tickets, and pushed us toward his 15-passenger van.  As we were about to climb in he pushed me toward the front of the van and told me that I was to ride in the front seat in between the driver and his brother.  Everything was happening so fast that as I got sandwiched in between the two men, I began to worry that maybe the other girls didn’t end up on this bus after all.  I felt a huge relief when I was finally able to look back and see their heads in the very back of the bus.

The next feeling of relief came when we finally pulled into the Accra bus station. The drive can only be best described as a 3 ½ hour live version of a video game.  It took us four hours on Friday night to get to Cape Coast, and Takaradi is much further past that town, so I spent the whole time watching the world zoom by as we bumped along the rough roads.  Every time we passed a car I was amazed we came out alive.  The driver must play a game to see how close he can possibly get to the car in front before he finally swerves the large van to barely avoid the collision.  I was also amazed that he was able to avoid the head-on collisions that seemed inevitable as he would swerve back onto his side of highway, managing to not sideswipe the car he was passing, and just in time to avoid the car coming right at us.  The ride may have taken less time than a normal driver, but it still seemed like an eternity as I anticipated the next impact and also because I had to sit with my arms and legs tucked in as close as possible.  The man to my right made himself comfortable and took up all the room on that side, and if I tried to scoot to the left, I would hit the gear shifter.  At one point I tried to distract myself from what was going on by attempting to start a conversation with my bus neighbors.  It didn’t work very well because neither of them spoke very much English.  My favorite part of the drive was the ironic road safety sticker displayed on the dashboard.  Whenever I looked down bracing for the seemingly unavoidable collision, I would be staring at a phrase like “Be patient today so you are not a patient tomorrow”.  Maybe the advice got lost in translation.