Polio & Bus rides

In the morning I phoned my Unicef contact and they agreed to pick me up and take me out with them for the day, even though the PRO in Accra hadn’t actually phoned her to let her know I was coming. They were doing a mop-up assessment exercise, so we drove to a little town north of Bolga and wandered into the millet looking for the telltale marks of the polio volunteers, a little circled Q1 written in chalk. The woman from Unicef turned out to be John McCrank’s host mum, so I was able to get his stipend to him afterall.

It was one of those days when I think I could do this forever. A beautiful morning, with a gorgeous blue sky, big fat puffy white clouds, a cool breeze, a warm sun, an interesting story, an air conditioned truck… We drove out to the town, walked around a bit, met some people, saw the inside of people’s homes, drove around some more. We stopped at a baobab tree and met some people drinking pito who’s baby had not been immunized. It was just great. The little old guys who arrived to have a swig of pito happily posed for pictures and laughed and laughed at me and my camera.

I thought I could wrangle a ride back to Tamale with them, but it turned out that I had actually kicked someone out of the truck and that person needed to get back to Tamale. So they dropped me at the bus station at 11 a.m. for a bus that left at 3 p.m. I had a bit of lunch at a spot across the street, bought a Fanta, read a book. I was really hoping the bus would be mostly empty, so I could stretch out and sleep. It’s a long haul from Bolga to Accra – 13 hours, to be precise – and I was going to arrive at about 2 a.m. Instead, the bus was full right to the rafters and the floor was littered with cooking pots, bags of yams and cassava. There were a few babies, none as whiny as the one sitting behind me, who cried every time its mom put it in its grandmother’s arms. I was sandwiched between two older women and slept about one hour during the entire 18 hour drive. 18 hours. As we drove into Tamale, the sky lit up with lightning, which John and Oliver had talked about and I figured was just sheet lightning. Turns out it was the precursor to a pissing rainstorm, which would slow the bus to a crawl and delay our arrival by almost two hours. On top of that, not far from Tamale, the bus sputtered to a stop. The driver managed to revive it, but it broke down three more times, until it finally shuttered to a stop meters from the “Welcome to Kumasi” sign and the engine would not turn over no matter how long the driver tried.

A quick-thinking passenger hopped on her cell phone and called the ticket office in Bolga. “Send another bus,” she said. “We’ve broken down and the driver cannot get us started.” Instead they sent a bus with two mechanics. Rather than put us on the bus and let the mechanics figure out whether the old bus could be fixed, they had us sit on the bus for 40 minutes while they fiddled with things and eventually got the engine to fire up. Then we drove to the bus office, where the mechanics had another go at the engine, hoping to repair it enough that it would make it for the next five hours – roughly the time it takes to get back to Kumasi. I was fuming, absolutely spitting mad. It was 2:30 a.m. when the bus stopped. It was after 3 a.m. when they brought the second bus. It was 4 a.m. by the time we got back on the bus and took off. I knew we were going to get stuck in Accra rush-hour traffic and I was hot, tired, hungry and did I mention tired? I seemed to be the only one perturbed, though. I told a guy on the bus that this is why STC treats its passengers the way it does: because it can. Not one single person complained. Unbelieveable.