Medina - The First Night

Leaving the airport, I was with Aankit, the program coordinator, and Jeff, another volunteer who was there from the beginning of May through the rest of the summer.  I had my bags, and we caught a taxi.  The airport officials try to keep other taxis away from the pick-up area, hoping that arrivals will take the airport taxis.  Airport taxis are terribly expensive, though, so we walked 50ft down the road and caught another taxi.  This was an experience of firsts for me.

One, driving in Ghana.  Roads are dirt roads with major potholes.  Some parts of roads are paved, but the pavement is just a collection of rocks with mud, maybe cement, to hold them together.  They're generally about the width of two small cars, and this is a three-lane road for the most part.  Taxis are small, old cars that have been cobbled together from scraps of other vehicles.  Most are stick shifts, and some don't shift in the order we're used to.  Horns work from a button on the radio or by pulling/pushing the blinker lever.  Police don't enforce traffic laws, if they exist in the first place, and intersections don't have stop/yield signs.  It feels like you're going to die the entire time you're in the car. They don't have seat belts, except sometimes for the driver.  The whole car feels like it'll fall apart.  Between potholes, they go about 80mph, and slam on the breaks right before the hole (which is about as big as half the car) to crawl over it, then speed up again.  Sometimes, if their directionals work, they use them, but most often they don't (work or use them).  It was, in short, terrifying.

The second thing that was odd for me is that almost everything in Ghana is decided by haggling.  Aankit talked with the driver about how much to take us to Medina, a suburb of Accra.  We were staying the night because I got in late and it's a 6 hour drive to Busua.  Aankit says the driver gypped us, but I was just glad to get out of the car.  Medina is where Teach on the Beach (TOB) started about 8 years ago, and Aankit still had contacts there so we could get a room to stay in for the night.  Anyway, Aankit and the driver were arguing the entire 20 minute drive to Medina about how much it should cost.  Aankit kept saying we were social welfare, helping kids, and the driver was telling him how he's got this brother who's sick. It was entertaining, and I eventually did learn how to haggle with some success.

We made it to Medina, and dropped everything off in the room.  Aankit and Jeff wanted to go for a walk, so I went with them.  Medina is a concentration of unemployed young people, so there's a lot of activity at night.  Aankit and Jeff went looking for Solomon, who's their marijuana dealer.  Aankit doesn't smoke except in Medina because in Busua he's like the house dad.  I refused to take part, but wasn't sure I could find my way back to the room, so I stuck around while they all smoked and chatted.  I explored around where they were, just to stay away from the smoke and to see a little of the land.  Apparently, smoking and drinking are the two main pastimes for Ghanaians.  Not really something I wanted to find out.  :/  But, the town is pretty, in a dirty sort of way.

All the houses are squares of mud and/or cement stacked onto each other, and then a roof of some sort of wood, maybe tin or aluminum.  Along the road are kiosks, which function as a house for some families.  The kiosks are usually painted some color to represent a phone or internet provider. Glo (green) was popular in Medina.  There are a lot of partially built buildings, which usually haven't been touched in a year or two.  People build when they get money, stop when it runs out, so the process is long.  The buildings are all very close together; it's a dense population.

The people I saw were mainly young adults, and they reminded me a lot of high schoolers in the US because the guys walked with their shorts hanging below their butts, showing their boxers, and the girls walked in groups and flirted. Those who didn't have children tied to their backs, that is.  Overall, I wasn't that terribly overwhelmed or surprised with what I saw that first night.

The room was small - about 3 yards by 5 yards. I got the bed, Aankit and Jeff shared a mattress on the floor.  If I had to go to the bathroom (which I did way too often), I had to go outside, down the stairs, around the house and the house behind it, into this little shack over a hollow stone cylinder over a hole in the ground.  There were no lights, so I couldn't see anything.  I think I would have preferred to just pee off the side of the staircase.  But, I made it through the night, and got a little sleep even.

During the night, roosters kept crowing. And the church down the street kept having groups of people singing and shouting and speaking in tongues.  At least, until about 03:00.  (Times, when important, will be in military time because that makes more sense to me).  It was relaxing and peaceful, I think because they weren't speaking/singing in English.  I'm not a huge fan of Christianity, so in English it probably wouldn't have been as comforting, but I felt better listening to it. It was humid and hot, so that didn't help, but the breeze through the window screens was nice.  There was a lizard in the room, which I watched for a little while.  It was about 2 inches long and black.  Adorable. :)  Aankit had lit a mosquito coil, which is probably full of cancer-causing chemicals, but drives mosquitoes away extremely effectively.  I didn't get one bite that night.

My first night was definitely an introduction, but one I didn't quite understand yet.