Congratulations on Your Safety

"...Those who say getting there's half the fun have never taken an African bus ride..."

Thankfully, instead of accruing all kinds of visa fees and waiting in uncertainty for random Burkinabe, Nigerien, Ghanaian, Togolese, Beninese, etc, buses, Corinne and I discovered through the amiable young Nigerien man at the Nigerien embassy that there is indeed a way to get to Niger from Ghana. I should have known that the difficulty of finding the SNTV (the Nigerien bus company that would be taking us to the intriguing Republique du Niger) station would be an omen of how things would turn out with SNTV. We were in contact with a man named Moussa, and he was to pick us up from where we were at the STC (a Ghanaian bus company). We kept missing one another when we tried to call each other and he said he was going to pick us up on a motorcycle. I saw several motorcycles pass, and none of the drivers seemed to be looking for me. Finally, after asking people who pretended to know where the SNTV bus station was we discovered that we the SNTV station was not near the STC Central Accra station, but the Tudu Station location. So we took a cab, and the cab driver charged us 2.5 GHc to drive in a circle that took 30 seconds, and acted shocked that we thought it was unfair of him to do so. I will not miss cab drivers. We finally arrived at the SNTV station, which was enough of a distance away from the road to get mugged, and consisted of a warehouse-like building with a pile of dirt in it, a couch, some random furniture and wood, and an "office" at which we bought our tickets, from Moussa himself. I was a little skeptical of this operation, and thought at points that Moussa was a master con-artist, and was in cahoots with the Nigerien embassy, swindling cash from innocent American tourists like myself. We bought our bus tickets, and were told to come the following day, May 24th, at 11 A.M. or 12 P.M. This ambiguous time frame made me a bit suspicious.

As advised, Corinne and I arrived promptly at the bus station. Not surprisingly, the bus was not there. The bus arrived at 4:30 P.M. Then, everyone loaded all of their belongings onto the bus. Every available space was packed with umbrellas, prayer mats, teapots, dates, etc etc etc. This operation took two hours. In the meantime, Corinne and I sat on the bus with our backpacks, ready to begin our journey, that would endure for an estimated 30 hours. So when everyone was ready to go, a man approached Corinne and I and said, "The bus driver is tired so we're going to go tomorrow." We both laughed because we thought he was joking. He was not laughing though and told us that the bus was going to leave at 5 or 6 tomorrow. Agh!

Annoyed, Corinne and I decided to drown our troubles in Chinese food in Osu. A protein bomb it was, in tofu form. I'm not used to that kind of thing. My muscle fibers were screaming with delight. It was pleasant until people were begging outside (targeted again for my white skin that shouts I'm made of money), which is usually tolerable, however, until this girl threw a crumpled empty water sachet at my head, and then later a handful of orange peels. Sorry! I woke up hella early to catch a cab to the station. Our bus left at 7:30 A.M. We traveled east through Togo, where the Nigerian man next to us offered us cola nuts. They're delicious if you enjoy the most bitter taste on Earth and like your mouth to feel as dry as eating a handful of sand. An acquired taste, some might say.

We also traveled through, Benin, the country which the Lonely Planet begins to describe as, "This club-shaped country..." hahaha. We traveled the entire length of this club. It was beautiful and lush, like Ghana. The northern portion was drier, as in Ghana. Finally, we reached the Nigerien border at dawn. It was not hot out, but the temperature rose steadily during our short visit to the border, and it felt like it was going to be extremely hot. This was a different kind of heat.

We eventually arrived in Niamey after driving for a few hours through the Sahel. It was hard to discern Niamey as a capital city from seeing the other places we stopped in before reaching the capital because it was very underdeveloped. There were few tall buildings, highways, distinguished areas of commerce, etc. Niger is the least developed country in the world, and one of the poorest countries. During French colonialism, the French destroyed the fragile balance of the Sahel ecology and the methods of agriculture used by the indigenous people, and instead implemented destructive large-scale cash crop farms, that has since encouraged further desertification of Niger. Now the French are gone, and the people trapped by the arbitrary border imposed by a foreign power are the ones that have to deal with inherited poverty from the French meddling in Nigerien affairs. It was this journey, especially from contrasting the lushness and rich natural resources of Ghana, that I realized how much geography determines an entire nation's way of life, and the quality of that life.

At the bus station in Accra, we had met a young Nigerien man, named Mamoud. He told us that we could stay with his mother in Niamey. Upon arrival in Niamey, we received a phone call on the bus, and were informed that someone was going to be taking us to Mamoud's mother's house. We met the two young men, and after arguing with a cab driver, after hearing "Americain" thrown about a few times, i.e. they should pay more because they are American (still, being ripped off by cab drivers is a pan-African phenomenon), a fair price was decided and we were off to the house we'd be staying at for the next week. This could have ended badly, going to an unknown location somewhere with two strangers, but I've put my fears behind me by now, and have embraced African kindness with trust.

We arrived after spending 28 hours on a bus, battling deep vein thrombosis, listening to 25 hours of extremely annoying music that sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks singing along to fast-paced Arabic music and guest appearances by a female T-Pain, and having ankles the size of thighs. Niamey is the strangest capital city. There were about three tall buildings and only a few paved roads. The residential areas only had dirt roads that formed grids around the compounds that everyone lived in. Niger is 90% Muslim, so that was also a different experience from the largely Christian Ghana I've been living in. Nigeriens are very reserved, and did not approach you to bother, sell things, or hit on you, like the other places I've visited in West Africa. They were all very kind, friendly, and helpful when you approached them though.

We stayed with a family of Nigeriens in Niamey. We had a mom, "Mama"!, and there were four brothers and two sisters. We had a huge room to stay in and were fed elephant-sized portions of food, so enormous that even a glutton would have difficulty finishing half of the meal. I had to put veganism on hold because I did not want to be rude by asking for accommodation for my diet. Thankfully, Corinne, although vegetarian prior to coming to Africa and current flex-atarian, is a real trooper, for if there were any surprise meat chunks in what we were eating, she ate them for me. Thanks, friend.

We spent most of our time with Mama's son, Lamin, who was 25, and a rather attractive young man Corinne and I thought, until he was a total narcissist, (i.e. doing push-ups out of the blue, lifting weights, dancing, all in front of Corinne and I, I guess to impress us? Not impressed.). He spoke very few words of English. He said things like, "C'est cool?" (It's cool). I guess he spoke some "Frenglais", as we did too. He had a friend, Ibou, who spoke enough English to communicate with us. Ibou was a sweet boy. We enjoyed hanging out with him. When he would try to remember some English words he was at a loss for, he would close his eyes in concentration and maybe frustration until he remembered them. One of my favorite memories of him is his reaction when we would cook things he was not used to (i.e. frites (french fries) with the skin left on them) and then proceed to try what we thought were culinary delights. When he put a fried potato in his mouth, he made a face as if he dropped it in the gutter outside before giving it to him. When we were laughing at him because of his disgust, he tried fruitlessly to convince us that he liked what we made by eating another fried potato, although we could still detect his disgust in his countenance, although he tried to hold it back. He did the same thing when I made what I thought was a delicious vinaigrette of sesame seeds, black pepper, herbs, salt, garlic, (all pounded in what looked like a huge mortar, with a stick for pounding fufu for a pestle!) oil and vinegar. Wrong. I asked if he thought Mama and Sadia (the sweet 13 year old girl living with us), would like some. He said with a straight face, "They cannot eat that." Ouch. So we then had a salad adulterated with "salad cream" aka straight up mayo, mixed with oil, and some vinegar and salt. My arteries were angry at me after eating this concoction that I have avoided for the duration of my stay in Africa.

We did everything with Lamin and Ibou for the duration of our trip to Niger. Lamin talked at me in French a lot, and I learned quickly how to say some basic phrases, greetings, and what I did and did not eat, which I thought would be helpful in restaurants if we were to go to one. I thought milk was "lait," but this was not the case apparently. Corinne and I tried going to this restaurant called Happy Donald of Hamburger House in Burkina, a name which seemed to get funnier the more we mentioned it. We wanted to go there solely for the name. After spending our entire morning attempting in vain, most of the time, to get our hands on some funds, [[sidenote: Okay, so I've been having problems with my ATM card with overdrafting. I took a chunk of change out of my account, but then I overdrafted, so I had to call to transfer funds. I had these changed to CFAs, and then right before we were leaving I took a bunch of cedis out of my account, but did not exchange them for cedis. I used all of my CFAs in Niger, and had to then exchange my cedis in Burkina. You would think that you could exchange cedis in Burkina with ease because the two countries neighbor each other, and the exchange would not be an unusual request at banks, forex bureaus, right? Wrong. You could exchange Japanese yen, but not the currency of Ghana, the neighboring country. Ha. So I was just barely scraping by when in Burkina. I could not be the baller I wished to be.]] we were famished for some greasy fries and, naturally, hunted down Happy Donald. We spotted our fried food haven, and it looked a little dilapidated from the outside. The navy awning was falling off the building, but it did not really phase me because that kind of dilapidation is not uncommon. I told Corinne to look excited in her pose for a photo opp under the ridiculous sign, so she jumped in the air and put her hands up in excitement. The next photo is of Corinne crying and laughing at the same time because Happy Donald of Hamburger House was no more! We tried to open the door, and that did not budge, so upon peering into the window we saw the place was bare. Too bad, but I think that is my favorite series of photos ever.

Back to Niger: Niger was awesome. I don't know how much I liked Niger itself, it was certainly different from Ghana, but the people we met there totally made the trip. Mama became our mom, and always we were fed (maybe a little too well...afterall, someone at the clinic told me today, "You've grown fat!"...I mean whenever someone has said I looked big here, I hope they mean tall, but I couldn't even pretend that this time.) and taken care of. One highlight of the trip was our trip to Koure, the last herd of wild giraffes in West Africa like to hang out. We had to rent a car for the day, and Lamin drove to Koure which is 60 km from Niamey. We packed six people in this car, Lamin, Igbou, Mohammed, a driver, Corinne, and myself. The ride out to Koure was wild. Niamey looked like Manhattan compared to the area directly outside of the huge arch indicating that you were leaving Niamey. You could see for miles in all directions, and the landscape looked pretty similar the entire drive. It was dry and the life that lived there looked like it wanted to give up in the harsh environment. When we finally arrived to Koure, we had to pay hella cash to get into the park, that is we paid for ourselves, and our three friends, the compulsory guide, the vehicle (I mean the vehicle we brought, not actually provided by the park, like you would think..that's okay, have a few thousand CFAs!)..I think that's all..and then the guide got into the car with us, and by that, I mean, the guide hung out of the window until we reached giraffe territory. The giraffes were spectacular. We got within 15 feet of some of these wild creatures. They are the strangest looking animals. They remind me of when two people wear a horse costume, and it's obvious that it's not real, because of the weird neck..okay, I don't think anyone but me understood that last statement...i'll try to draw a picture when I get home...
Niamey is located on the mighty Niger River, the third longest river in Africa. One of our days was spent on a pirogue trip down the river. We rented a car and drove to an area near Boubon. The river is a beautiful greenish color, and surprisingly shallow. The pirogue we were on was manned by two men, each with an oar and a bamboo pole to row and push off of the river bottom, respectively. We slowly made our way down the river for five or six hours. There were wild hippos in the river! Enormous beasts they were. At one point we swam in the river, and hoped we weren't becoming host to any bilharzia. The land on the river was remarkably lush. Life flourished on the Niger. People washed clothing, bathed, and played in the water. There were some subsistence farms along the river. Fisherman fished and set up basket traps. We took some breaks along the way on the small islands in the river. The sun set as we made our way to Niamey and shrouded the earth in a light as warm and rich as the red desert around us. We finally reached Niamey and alighted from our pirogue. It was a long but enjoyable day.

Although the West African guidebook lies about a lot of things, i.e. places existing, the prices of things, recommendations, it did not lie about 2005 nightclub. Corinne and I wanted to go here because of the strange name (2005, a great year, right?) and because clubs just aren't our scene. There is also a club called 100%, but 2005 is supposedly better according the locals we met. That night we went out with two people we met one night at a nearby restaurant who were sitting outside that night. They wanted to take us out to a restaurant, and it seemed somewhat suspicious because we thought they knew the people they were living with when they arrived at the house uninvited, but they did not know them. Igbou came with us that night for safety reasons. It was a strange night. The one guy, Abdoul could speak good English, or better English than some, but his friend Youssef, could speak little. All I wanted to do that night was get down at the club. It was late when we went to out that night to eat with these people and I started to get impatient. I was not hungry and I did not feel like trying to understand Frenglais. Finally, after eating the food I discovered meat in because the outdoor tables we were sitting at were in the dark, and drinking two Biere Niger, I was ready to go. We went to our house and collected the others. Corinne, Igbou, Lamin, and Mohammed took a cab and I went with Thierry on his motorcycle. Sooo fun. 2005 was strange. The music was alright, but there was a huge video screen and it was showing old Queen concerts the whole night. Weird. And there were lots of prostitutes getting down in the club that night, or maybe just an unremarkably high presence of fairly attractive African women that were into ruddy-faced, thin-haired, pudgy old European businessmen...We got down for a few hours, watched some terrible dancing (i.e. Lamin holding his leg straight out in front of him supported by his palm under the back of his knee, and jumping around on one foot...and I thought I was a bad dancer...), and were groped by our comrades (Humorous sidenote: Corinne and I did not shave our legs for the entire trip, so we had quite the forest going on on our legs. So the night we went to 2005, all of our boys we went with were trying to get some kind of action from Corinne and myself, but we weren't having it. At one point Corinne was sitting next to Mohammed, who started rubbing her leg up and down, but after one stroke, and feeling the resistance because of the hair on her leg, only would stroke down her leg, not both ways. That was the last time he'd rub her the wrong way...har har.) . We had a rude awakening when we returned from the club late that night, or late that morning I should say. We came back at the time of the first call to prayer, and hung out side the compound, both boys and girls together. Mama yelled at us, saying, "You cannot hang outside the house like that! I am am Muslim woman and boys and girls are not supposed to be together outside of the house, especially at that hour! That looks very very bad!" So it was kind of awkward times that day, but eventually she warmed up to us, I guess understanding that we are not Muslim, but I guess we should have been a little more culturally-sensitive.

The Niger National Museum was enjoyable for the short time we visited. There were some awful aspects of it, i.e. cruelty to animals (listless animals, pacing animals, small cages, an ostrich that was being prodded at with a stick by a visitor...I wanted to murder that man with the same stick. ). There were some huge dinosaur skeletons and some artifacts from traditional Nigerien cultures. We were getting a little annoyed that day because our comrades were asking for money for things that we weren't even part of, i.e. cigarettes, gasoline (after had getting gas once that day, etc), the language barrier, etc. I'm glad I was with Corinne because I rarely get peeved by her.

Most of the trip was spent with the people we met, and being at the house. We went to the market one day with Igbou and Lamin to buy food to make dinner, out of appreciation for the cooking that Mama and Sadia did for us, and to avoid another meat-, dairy-, and egg-filled meal. I would not be eating any salad cream that night. We made pasta, fresh sauce, salad with a vinaigerette, and Corinne was a trooper and made some fish for the omnivores. She asked Igbou to filet the fish, (filet, a French word, understandable, right? Wrong.) which meant hack it into large chunks with the bones still in it, apparently. It took us four hours to make dinner, an endeavor that would only take Mama and Sadia an hour to do, at most. Perhaps it was because we were only equipped with a knife, some pots, bowls, and a spoon, to use as our preparation tools. Thankfully, it was well-received.

We left our Nigerien family after about a week. The night we left I stayed up all night, trying to speak French, and watched some strange Ethiopian music videos Mama wanted to show us and wanted us to dance to. I felt a warm feeling in my heart, until the last five minutes of our stay with this family. So here's what happened. We paid Mama for allowing us to stay there, with meals, shower, etc. Lamin then asked us for more money for being our "guide." Oh yes, the guide that told us so much about everything, and we understood it because we spoke French. We were so annoyed, because it wasn't like we asked him to pay for anything, if we went anywhere together. We paid for him, and his friends, to go to every place we went with them. We even paid for cigarettes, and things that did not have anything to do with us. We refused, and left with a bit of a bitter taste in our mouths.

Corinne and I were then off to Burkina Faso. The bus ride was going to be 12 hours, but seemed like nothing, compared to the ride from Ghana to Niger. I slept nearly the whole time. The first time I woke up, I was in a different country. The second time I woke up, it was to a bloody man, lying down in the seat next to me. He had a rag tied around his thigh, and his leg from there down was covered in blood. Apparently, our bus caused a motorcycle accident, in which two people were injured. We were in the middle of nowhere and had to wait for medical help, and the police for a report to be written. We remained stopped for three hours. This experience made me realize how different things are in the U.S. Even if there was an accident in a rural place, like in the middle of Montana, there would be help on the way immediately. Who knows what happened to this man, if he got good medical care, and if his huge wound became infected, etc.

We arrived in Burkina in the late afteroon. Ouagadougou is probably my favorite city in West Africa, that I have visited. It is a dusty, gritty, somewhat developed, hectic city. I loved it. Corinne and I spent our time in Ouaga relaxing and walking around the city before heading back to Ghana. We stayed in a room that was highly recommended by travelers, according to the guidebook. We booked a room with a private bathroom, and we got a room that did not look unlike one of a psychiatric ward, with a lawn chair, and a chair that looked like it was from a spacecraft, a view of a wall six inches from our window, and a private bath with a toilet that didn't flush. It was going to be a hilarious time in Ouaga. We enjoyed some delicious Lebanese food and had some disappointing Indian food, as you read earlier, haha. We saw a Bollywood movie that night, which was really strange, and full of singing. We left early though because we were both falling asleep. The next day was spent exploring the city by foot. It seems like a neato place to live. There are a lot of trees and attractive buildings, that do not indicate that Burkina is the 3rd poorest country in the world. At one point while walking around, this man came from one of the shops we passed and started talking to Corinne in French. She told him she didn't understand, but he kept talking, and followed her for about a half a mile, asking her for her address over and over again. It never fails.

That night we wanted to take a mototaxi to a restaurant and we found a group of men on motorcycles sitting at the side of the road, so surely thwe thought they were mototaxi drivers. We asked them, "Mototaxi?" and they looked at each other and said, "Yeah!" So after pretending they knew the place we requested they take us to, we were off. The rain was approaching. The air grew chilly and the wind picked up, blowing dust between the buildings and on the street. There was a sheer curtain of dust that dropped onto Ouagadougou, making me a little fearful when zipping between cars, trucks, and buses, when I was closing my eyes because there was so much dust. The city looked like Seurat painted it, with everything possessing an undefined edge and accentuated with red stop lights and brake lights. We reached our destination, and discovered that these men were not actually mototaxi drivers when they charged us ten times the price the normal fare. After arguing with these men, we went into this restaurant, enjoyed Alain, the quirky owner, had delicious food, got slightly crunk accidentally after drinking two So.B.Bras, and then took a cab back to prepare for the long busride that awaited us the following day.

We got to the bus station at the time we were supposed to get there, and left there right on time, too. This was a strange occurence for leaving in a timely fashion is something that transportation never does here. As soon as the bus left the station we were both snoozing. We woke up at the Burkina / Ghana border, and the sound of "Oburoni!" was music to our ears. The border officials gave us a hard time, I guess because they were bored, and acted as if our documents were not in order. At the border, I saw a woman with what I thought were these millet balls, which were somewhat delectable in Burkina, and Corinne and I could have used a protein bomb. So I bought one cedi worth of them, forgetting that I was in Ghana and a cedi bought an awful lot, so I got about one kilogram worth of what I thought were millet balls. So I bit into one expected to taste the slightly sweet gritty protein goodness of millet, but instead I received a sour taste of some kind of fermented corn. I tossed the rest of the one I bit into into the gutter, and handed the bag stretching under the weight of the corn balls, to a man, confused by, and perhaps suspicious of, my strange gift.

We returned to the bus, and began the snooze routine again. We were about two hours into Ghana, past Bolgatanga, on the Walewale Highway, when we awoke to the sound of gunshots. Our bus had stopped and we heard shooting outside. Flustered, we were told with panicked urgency by other passengers to, "Get down! Get down!" and we followed these instructions with no question, putting our heads between knees and covering them. Corinne and I just stared at each other with wide eyes and gripped the other's hand. People were screaming. Children were crying. The passenger next to us crawled over to our seat, reached under the seat in front of us, and started pulling out four-inch thick wads of CFAs from a black plastic bag and stuffing them into his pants. WTF are you doing?! We thought..We did not know if there was someone on the bus with the weapon(s) we were hearing, and if there were, this man next to us may have surely been drawing attention to us and endangering our lives. After the shooting ceased, I waited a few seconds, and looked out my window to see what I could see, not expecting to see anything. When I peered out, I saw one of the attackers of our bus, dead, on the ground, with blood on the ground near his black ski-masked head. We were in the back of the bus, the second to last seat, and everyone was standing up, so we could not see anything that may have been happening at the front of the bus. We drove away with haste, leaving the dead man behind. Apparently, there had been two armed robbers that were trying to rob our bus. They ran down the road towards the bus, prompting the bus to stop. When the driver refused to stop, the men shot the front of the bus four times. The bus stopped after this. Then, one of the men tried to get in the front entrance of the bus, and when the driver refused, he shot the driver in the shoulder. One bullet grazed the face of a little boy, and another, the face of a woman. There are two plain-clothes police officers on every STC, which I didn't know until that day. One of the officers shot and killed the one man who shot the driver, and took an AK-47 off the shooter. We drove for a short bit, and then got off the bus at some village for some unknown reason. A woman with a white rag, with blood showing through it, around her head came from the front of the bus, and I wondered what other carnage was up there. We got back on the bus, after some authoritative figure told us to do so. We drove straight to Tamale to a hospital to treat those who had been injured, not stopping and when someone tried to cross the road, the driver blasted the horn of the bus franticly, sending stares from the villagers in each community we drove through. Upon arrival at the hospital, a man outside told us in awkward English, "Congratulations on your safety!" Thanks? Those who needed medical attention were admitted to the Tamale Teaching Hospital, and we waited around for a bit, and then drove to the STC station in Tamale. The bus drove away to be repaired, a.k.a. have a black garbage bag over the window, and clean the blood cascading down the front steps of the bus. Somehow, that took a few hours. In the meantime, Corinne and I tried to help Paulo, a young Italian man, who had his first initiation into Ghana, as this incident. He was working on some project in Burkina Faso, and then was going to spend some time in Ghana before heading back to Ouagadougou, Burkina for his flight there. We tried to assure him that was the first violent incident of that nature that we had seen in Ghana. He just wanted to go back to Burkina, feeling safer there. We provided him with whatever comfort we could muster, whether it be food, water, information, or just conversation. He was an extremely pleasant fellow. Too bad that incident would be what he remembered of Ghana. Finally after a few hours of sitting at the bus station, eating mangoes, donuts, and fried rice, watching various animals (ducks, goats, chickens, cats, crows, etc) mill about, and seeing some public urination, our bus arrived. We boarded it and drove until the following morning. Throughout the night, every time the bus slowed down suddenly, every person in front of us perked their heads up, I think in fear that another attacker may decide to accost us. We eventually reached Accra at 11:30 the next day, making the bus ride only 26 hours...yikes...

This incident did not make me feel any less safe in Ghana. The director of STC in Ouagadougou called Corinne and I on our cellphones to make sure we were okay. The director of my program was extremely helpful, and told me that there was a counselor, if we needed someone to talk to. And the way everyone was so kind and helpful to one another on the bus also showed me again as to why I love Ghana so much.

The last week or so I spent in Ghana was a blur. I had an exam and a paper to write, which was insignificant. I spent most of my time seeing wonderful people I had met on the trip. I had about three hours of sleep every night because I stayed out so late every night. I swam in the ocean a few times late at night / early morning. Drank some drinks. Cooked some meals for my friends. Watched Gouda practice under the trees one last time. Gave away lots of clothes. Had one last dance party or two with Angela in our room. I went to my internship one last time, and shed some tears on the way to the road to catch a tro-tro. It was a very tearful week, in fact. I did not want to leave my life where everyting was goin to be allrriiight. I enjoyed having no responsibility of a job or challenging classes, and having tons of time to learn from my environment and my position as foreigner. I enjoyed socializing to the maximum and doing things that I normally wouldn't do, i.e. getting down in the club, etc. I left without saying goodbye to a lot of people because it pained me to do so. In all, it was the greatest experience of my life, so far. Everything was not great all the time, but overall, it was stellar. It was everything I hoped it to be and more. I can't wait to go back.