We are safely at the airport relaxing.  We arrived early, and have time to just kick back. Of course, I could always be pressed into service to fix a flat tire on the aircraft…

The last big driving day started in Tamale at 4:00am.  Beth and I made some instant coffee, unplugged all the recharging gear, and started packing up for the long drive back to Accra.  Each of our guest rooms at the Tamale International Center for Cultural Studies (TICCS) was $9. Converging at the truck at 4:45, we played one last game of Tetris with our suitcases to pack them tightly into the bed of Ray’s truck.  Our clothes, hands, luggage, and shoes have a beautiful antique patina of red dust.  We huddled in the dark to pray as large fruit bats swooped in and out of the trees and in the distance, the mosques began their loudspeaker calls to prayer.  By 5:15am, I was driving. 

Driving in the dark, even on an asphalt road, is truly terrifying.  Just a week ago, someone from the Bunkpurugu church that we met last year was hit while riding his motorcycle and lost his leg.  Gigantic overloaded semi trucks, with goods stacked so high that they often just topple over, barrel down the road.  On the 14hr drive from Tamale to Accra we saw no less than four semi trucks that had overturned within the past day, goods still scattered along the shoulder.  Also sharing the road are bicycles, motorcycles, and donkeys pulling carts, and sometimes cows or donkeys just wandering across the road.  The majority of those vehicles (and animals) don’t have reflectors.  Imagine driving in the dark at 60mph, headlights stabbing ineffectively at the darkness, and coming across a black-butted donkey standing in the middle of the road.  I don’t have to imagine that particular scenario.  One final hazard keeps my hands gripping the steering wheel and my eyes blinking rapidly:  speed bumps. There are three kinds of speed bumps in Ghana.  First, are the official speed bumps put up in cities.  They come with a joyfully red warning sign followed by a blue sign marking the spot. For attentive drivers immediately spotting the red marker, going from 60 or 80mph to 10mph is possible.  Second, are the unmarked speed bumps for which nobody bothered to put up a sign.  Finally, there are the home made speed bumps – where neighbors have just gone out to the road and arranged a line of large rocks across the road to slow people down.  I’m convinced that about half of the overturned trucks were victims of seen-too-late speed bumps.  More than once I saw the hint, just a shadow, of an unmarked speed bump in the dark and slammed on the brakes, released them before impact, and then pounded into the cement wart, waking everyone in the car and feeling like my kidneys and been worked over by a Rolfing practitioner. In the US, we get accustomed to driving long long stretches of open road with our feet stretched out comfortably, letting the cruise control do the work, and our finger resting on the steering wheel while we text our friends, fiddle with the radio, or get absorbed into a conversation with a friend.  Not here.  No, during the few moments when someone in the car was awake, I could not have a meaningful conversation with them because I was focused completely on avoiding a high speed cow tipping or going airborne with a speed bump and loosing my front tooth on the landing.

Another feature of driving in Ghana are police roadblocks.  Sometimes, barriers are strung up across the road, and a policeman with a flashlight swirls his light in some pattern that means pull over, while a different pattern means drive slowly around the barriers.  We probably passed 15 to 20 barriers during the drive. Occasionally, we would roll down the window and wave.  Sometimes, the men with guns slung over their shoulders would wave their light that we could just zigzag through, other times, they wanted to look inside our truck. What I didn’t want to do was smash into a poorly marked chain that had been strung across the road.

After the sun came up, motoring along still required careful attention, but it did not wear out my adrenal glands.  Enoch asked if we had “chewables”.  I wondered if he needed some medication after my driving.  No, “chewables” are the Ghanaian equivalent of “munchies”… peanuts, soybeans, etc.  

At one police checkpoint, a man in a white uniform instead of the green fatigues we had driven past all morning motioned for us to pull over after we had slowly passed him (I didn’t really see him, as he was talking on his cell phone walking along the road).  He wanted to see my International Driver’s Permit (IDP). Of course, I don’t have one.  They are a $20 sham printed by AAA, a USA club. Yet the officer wanted to see it. Bummer.  It was 8:30am, and he told me to pull over and park until 9:00am, when the court would open.  OOOf. Ok, he wanted me to ask if I could pay an “instant fine” right here and now, in cash, instead.  

We waited at the side of the road a few moments, prayed, and then Ray got out of the car and walked back toward the officer.   I slide over into the passenger seat and fiddled with my Internet, hoping to get net and look up how to make myself an IDP online, with my laptop.

A few minutes went by. Spending the night in a Ghanaian jail did come to mind, but I quickly figured my imagination was getting the best of me. Ray returned without a smile, handed me my Illinois Driver’s License that he had retrieved from the policeman, and started driving away.  “We can continue our journey” he told us.  I asked “how much did you pay him?”.  “Nothing, I don’t pay bribes” Ray replied.  Whoohoo! After we had left the police barrier, Ray smiled broadly again. We thanked the Lord for safety through the night driving and taking us through daytime hazards as well.  Next time I go to Ghana, I’m going to print myself an IDP…

Sometime after noon we hit the traffic of Kumasi.  Once again, motorcycles, bikes, pedestrians, trucks, and cars all shared 2 lanes of pavement and potholes.  We purchased a new spare and had it installed while we enjoyed lunch.  Since we were back in central Ghana, it was time for Ray to enjoy some fufu.  Imagine a cantaloupe-sized wad of doughy starch (80% pounded cassava root and 20% plantain) combined with a bowl of spicy soup.  With your right hand, you pinch off apricot sized chunks of the starch, dip it into the orange soup, and then slurp it down as your fingers burn in pain from the hot soup.  The soup was a “light” soup.  When asked, Enoch told me it was made from Garden Eggs.  “What do they look like?” I asked.  They look like the size of eggs, and they are white, and grow on a small bush. I puzzled…. “Are you sure they are not laid by Garden Chickens?” I replied.  After several questions, we figured out that Garden Eggs were a variety of eggplant that were small, not purple, and perfect for light soup.

With full bellies and a new tire we were pushing forward with only a few more hours to Accra. At various points along the road men held up large cat-sized rodents for sale.  They are a local delicacy.  “What are those” I asked Ray.  “Grasscutters” he informed me as he braked for a speed bump. A Google search revealed that the Greater Cane Rat is also called a “grasscutter”.

By evening we had slammed into the traffic of Accra.  We spent another hour going a few miles to the Korum’s house, unloading, and then enjoying dinner at a Turkish restaurant.  All of yesterday and today were spent editing and arranging the Fulani and Bimoba audio tracks we had recorded.  However, we also had a nasty computer glitch.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but it seems that the specialized software made by the company that supports the BiblePlus+ units has not been updated in several years, and uses an old 32-bit Java 6 SE implementation.  The compressed files we had from the Fulani recordings ended up being 2.2GB when assembled into a “bundle” for the player… which is a little too big to be indexed by a 32-bit pointer.  We did not ferret out the cause of the problem until about 6hrs of debugging and a short night of sleep had gone by.  Thanks everyone for your prayers and support, we managed to sort out a workable hypothesis, test it, and prepare a work-around before leaving for the airport.  Whoohoo! We were able to hand Ray 10 Bimoba units for testing and 9 Fulani units.  Over the next few months we should hear back how they like the recordings and if anything needs to be tweaked.

Ok… off to Brussels. I’ll send one final blog post once we are safe at home on Sunday, right before the Superbowl.