transport

Between my stint as a volunteer and my upcoming job as the volunteer coordinator, I have about a week to explore the country. I’ve set off with two of my favorite volunteers, Emma and Patrick a brother and sister team from Ireland who are making their way overland from Ghana to Spain. If any of you want to consult a map, we traveled up the Volta River to Tamale and them farther on to Bolgatonga, near the Burkina Faso border. By x-mas we ended up at the Mole game reserve where we had the luxury of spying on elephants from our swimming pool and excitement of narrowly escaping a baboon attack in our hotel room. The following blogs were written during those travels.

Road transportation in Ghana falls into two distinct classes of vehicles, providing a nice metaphor for Ghanaian society in general. The first category is filled with well-built all terrain SUVs and luxury sedans driven by wealthy Ghanaians and expats and the other category is filled with cars that look like they’ve been resurrected from junkyards and probably are. I have ridden around solely in the second category of vehicle. It is not at all uncommon to enter into a cab or tro tro (minibus) with a non-functioning emergency break, duct tape holding the door open and a transmission that requires a manual push start. It must be against the law or something, because I have literally NEVER gotten into a cab with a working speedometer, and I look every time. This is the norm. The need for transportation dictates that no vehicle is truly beyond repair, and there is nothing that some duct tape, a screw driver and a few prayers won’t fix. It seems like Africa is where cars from wealthy countries come to die – well not exactly die, but become mechanical zombies haunting the roadways beyond any reasonable expectation of mobility. Actually, this is not so far from the truth. Two volunteers found their way here across the Atlantic on a cargo ship that was filled with thousands of broken down cars from America that had failed emissions tests or were otherwise deemed unfit. While this is probably an efficient use of resources, putting the world’s most dilapidated vehicles on the world’s worst roads in countries with the least likely access to emergency roadside assistance should the inevitable accident occur, just seems unfair. In fact riding around in these vehicles is probably the most dangerous thing I do here. I remember reading somewhere (google it, doubters…), that more people die from traffic accidents in poor countries that from tropical diseases!! I may have gotten that slightly wrong – it may be more than die from malaria or AIDS or something. Either way, that’s just amazing when you consider the amount of press and attention given to malaria versus transportation. I guess transportation is just not that sexy. And yet, I’ve devoted an entire blog entry to it. Sorry.