A long long day.  It is 11pm, and I’ve foolishly made myself some instant Via coffee from Starbucks.  Ah, a familiar hot roasty bitterness to help prep for tomorrow.

Beth and I have complimentary skills and qualities.  I can gulp down some coffee and tweak files, scripts, and handle some email while she sleeps.  Beth can get up early and draft plans and outcomes for our work, sort out which components will be left with whom, and carefully track which speaker is recording what track.  On this sort of trip where she has been making plans for months, I like to tell people I’m her sidekick.  She denies it, and insists that I have it backwards.  But, to the Blog admin goes the narrative… I guess we will see if she remembers the password.

Our overnight bus pulled into a nearly abandoned gas station in Tamale at 5:00am.  The interior lights popped on, and everyone started scrambling out.  Beth and I watched as a scrum of tired riders unloaded the gigantic red Horn of Plenty. With my fuzzy sleep-deprived head still recovering from 12 hours of Nigerian soap operas blasted on screens during our adventure, watching the bus be unloaded felt I was somehow inside a Salvador Dali painting — roosters were crowing in the distance as I watched a baby bathtub stacked on a car bumper, stacked on a freezer, stacked on rolls of chicken wire emerge from the belly of our transport.  I knew at any second there would be a lobster phone.  There had to be a lobster phone and a melted clock to go with that baby bathtub and car bumper.  Finally, the cool air and some peppermint gum woke me up.  Beth and I, the only Oburoni (white people) on the bus or in the area, collected our luggage and patiently waited for Ray Mensah.

Ray arrived in his silver pickup and we spent a few minutes hugging, laughing, sorting out our next steps.

Thankfully, Ray had arranged for a guest house room where Beth and I could take a short 90 minute nap before cleaning up and packing for church.  By 10:00 we were on way to Pastor Monday’s church.

Immediately, in the daylight, all the sights, sounds, and smells of Northern Ghana blasted our senses.  Navy blue shirts, grey hoodies, and the black yoga pants of the western suburbs gave way to tangerine head coverings, fuchsia scarfs, hot pink dresses, neon green shirts, and patterns so intriguing Escher would be scratching his head.  Girls on motos whizzed by.  Yellow Yellows (auto rickshaws) darted in front of us.  Ladies zigzagged through the moving traffic with grocery stores carefully balanced in their heads.  Wow.  Africa.  

We joined the church as they were already singing, clapping, and dancing to the amplified sounds of singers, guitar players, bongos, and drum set.  We did our Oburoni best to groove to the music and clap on the right beats.  I noticed everyone smiling at me, but I’m confident it was because of the joyful rhythms and praise music.

Ray was the guest preacher and spoke enthusiastically to the small congregation.  The translator did his best to keep up in Dagbani with Ray’s energetic message – but there were times he just looked at Ray and grinned.  After church, we did some experimenting with the new Linux-based WiFi media distribution units we brought with us.  I’ll explain the tech later, but the first test went very well!  Thanks again for everyone’s help.  In the picture above, Beth is showing two men how to connect to the WiFi with their smartphones and download some of the sample media files we brought with us. One thing we did not expect was how many languages were represented, even in this small church.  While English was a common language for this urbanized area of Tamale, it seemed everyone’s native tongue was different.  Dagbani is the most common native language in this city, but we were asked if we had media in Buli, Twi, Komba, Konkomba, Mampruli, and six others by people who came up to talk to us.  In this area of Ghana, the last large city before the even more remote areas of the north feels like it could be NYC at the turn of the century, with people from dozens of different cultures and languages crammed together into one city.

After a delightful dinner of Jollof rice and chicken at Pastor Lewis’ house, we collapsed at the guest house.  Our bellies are full, our skin salty, our eyes a bit dry from the Harmattan, and our hearts full of the beautiful music.  A wonderful day indeed.