The Trek

The flight from JFK to Ghana on October 26th was somewhere around nine hours. After meeting my Mother and her partner, Chris at JFK we waited several hours for departure. The flight was over night and although sleep was difficult, it did come.

We landed in the captial city Accra at about 7am. From the plane window, the red dirt left a striking first impression. The airport looked to me like a military bunker with a colorful welcome message painted on the side. AKWAABA!

The customs officer who reviewed my passport informed me that he would pray for my speedy return to Ghana to do medical work. So, no problems there.

We exited the airport to a throng of Ghanaians. Several begging for money, but most looking to retrieve passengers. Our car service manager stood patiently to the side with a sign and greeted us warmly when we identified ourselves. We then met our driver, Edward, and loaded the car for our journey to Kamasi, an approximately five hour drive. Thank god for air conditioning or it would have been unbearable.

Driving out of Accra on a DIRT road was chaos. Vegetable stands on the street sides, people shuffling to and fro in traffic and cars minding no road rules made me repeatedly gasp. I am a terrible passenger at best and this most definitely forced me to rethink the amount of energy I could invest in worrying about the ride. Ha.



After the dirt road was one of the most pot hole infested paved roads that I have ever rode upon. There were again no lines demarcating where the north and south bound traffic should be contained. Many wrecked trucks (one in a building) and cars lie at the side of the road. Additionally, many folks were actively working on their broken down vehicles (dude, probably not best idea to lie under car with legs extended into highway).

We reached Kumasi and our hotel around 1 pm and took a leisure afternoon. The hotel was called The Beauty Queen. And while my room was generally clean, the bathroom kind of skeeved me out (think ants/shower). Ants or not, I showered (drops of cold water from shower head) and rested.





We received a visit from Mom's friend (a Habitat employee) from Kyekyewere named Daniel. He and a woman Lydia dropped by on their way to a clinic (Lydia having severe abdominal pain, more on this later) to say hello. We discussed plans for the next day. The contents of this discussion and what actually occurred the next day began a trend of communication/planning mishaps that characterized our future interactions.