With hot season fast approaching, I was really excited for my birthday vacation to Ghana—the beach! Delicious food! Electricity! Nothing could go wrong.
It got off to a rocky start, to say the least. I planned to take the Poste bus down from Mango to Lomé on my birthday même to meet Joe, get my Ghana visa the next day, and then kick it to Accra. This all happened, but for about 8 hours I was not so sure. The Poste bus, which had been running later and later recently, wasn’t showing. I got there at 8 for the 8:30 arrival. 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 passed with no bus. “Ca arrive, ca arrive,” (it’s coming, it’s coming) we were all assured by the Poste staff, with varying degrees of certainty. I was sitting outside on the steps of the office with my iPod, listening to “This American Life” and probably looking pretty miserable, when one of the Poste employees came out to talk to me. “Come with me,” she said. “I’m going for a walk, and I think you should come with.” “Huh? What if the bus comes? Where are we going?” “Trust me, sister, leave your stuff behind the desk and let’s go.” So I went. It turns out this was Madame la Chef de la Poste, the manager, and she could tell I was having no fun. Most of Mango’s population is Anufo, Muslim, and therefore doesn’t drink. This is a big change from my Gangam tchuk and tchakpa drinking community, and from the Moba in the north. As this woman was Moba, she led me to a Moba hangout on the other side of town: someone’s compound that had about 30 people in it, drinking tchakpa and eating roast pork. Quite the party! When I walked it, three guys were arguing over how to read the meat scale, on which was a precariously placed pig head, and someone pushed a calabash of tchakpa in my hands. “I thought you needed to get out of there. You looked miserable,” Madame de la Poste told me. “But what about the bus! What if it comes while I’m here?” “Hun, it hasn’t left Dapaong. It broke down last night and the mechanics didn’t show up to fix it until 8 this morning. The Dapaong office will call me when it leaves. Relax!” And with this, I did my best to relax. She took me on a tour of hidden drinking spots in Mango along with a policeman would-be travel buddy of mine, who tried to reassure me the whole time that I would leave Mango that day. I stayed calm and patient until about 2:30... it was getting late, and I was ready to take drastic action. If I didn’t get to Lomé until the next night, I couldn’t get my visa, couldn’t go to Ghana, plans ruined. Joe called, and I was in the middle of explaining my plan to hitchhike with a trucker (“It’s ok, they call it ‘autostop!’ I’ll pick a nice looking trucker!” “Um, no, absolutely not, you’re crazy. Do not hitchhike with truckers that’s a terrible idea.”) when Madame de la Poste got a call from Dapaong. The bus just left! I was saved! It arrived in Mango at 3:30 and we got in to Lomé at 3:00 am… happy birthday!
The rest of the trip went really well after that. Ghana was amazing—parts are very much like Togo, and parts (Accra) are like America. There were 4-lane highways, a mall, a movie theater, and diet coke! And the best roadside fried chicken ever. We stayed in Kokrobité, a beach town west of Accra, and it was fantastic. I really missed water-- just seeing the ocean helped. And it was awesome being really off the job. Even when I’m not doing “work” I still have a village full of people watching what I do, so sitting at the beach surrounded by people who don’t care who I am was just the thing I needed. But then, as much fun as it was, we were really relieved to get back to Togo where everything was familiar. I eased my way back up north, stopping in Atakpamé, Sokodé, and then finally Mango. My neighbor PCVs found these nuns who make pork chops and sausage, so we got some of that and made chili for dinner and sausage sandwiches for breakfast. Delicious. Seriously, I’m very lucky to have culinarily-inclined neighbors : )
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