I am in Accra!

By Stephanie Fox -
I wrote this post a few weeks ago and have only gotten around to posting it now.

I have travelled to Ghana’s capital Accra to see off Anglea who is heading home to Canada, and to welcome my assistant Andy who is arriving from Canada.
The drive to Accra is about 8 hours in total, but it requires various modes of transportation and so we take two days to make the trek. We had arranged with the taxi driver from Boabeng to leave BFMS at 7:30 am to get a good start on our day. Unfortunately his car broke down in the morning, so at 9 am we headed off in a trotro to Nkoranza. From the trotro station in Nkoranza we caught another trotro to Kumasi. Angela and I somehow managed to swing the two front seats making for a cushy ride, or at least a more cushy ride than expected. The driver made a point of praying before we departed- praying for our successful arrival perhaps? I wasn’t especially comforted that he felt the need for this. Thankfully, the trotro only had two mild breakdowns – a door issue and some exhaust issues – and the driver was prepared with a nearly complete tool set stuffed into the pocked on his door.  Angela and I had a nice afternoon walking around Kumasi so I could get my bearings, followed by a very nice dinner at an Indian owned restaurant that has an awesome selection of food.  
To travel to Accra we took “VIP Buses”, which were like our coach buses. We thought they were very swanky with their individual seats and air-conditioning, and they had a TV at the front where they played a few episodes of some hilarious (in a cheesy soap opera way) TV show that I think was produced in Nigeria – something comparable to The Young and the Restless perhaps, only with the content adjusted for a very Christian crowd. I got a kick out of how the young men on the bus were so into it. From the bus terminal we caught a taxi (side story: the driver accidentally punched me in the nose while warning me to get out of the way of a car. My nose actually bled.) and now, ta-da! – I am at Hotel Afia African Village, a swanky hotel in Accra that is right on the ocean. 

Today I went walking around Accra while waiting for Andy’s plane to land. First, I went to see the independence archway and the black star square, where Ghana claimed its independence in 1957. It was strange that such a huge and grand seeming square was completely empty. Then I went to see Kwame Nkrumah’s (the first leader of Ghana) burial site, where there is a big park and monument. I mistakenly went walking far past this park and came across this very worn down, very old and abandon looking building on the ocean that I thought had to be a historical site of some sort. The gateway was wide open so I stepped in to see what it was, and there was no one there so I took a look around. It was absolutely stunning in a broken-down-building-with-white-washed-walls-and-plants-growing-all-over-it-and-no-roof-so-the-sunlight-comes-pouring-in-plus-you-can-smell-the-sea-breeze sort of way. Eventually I came across a man and I asked him if he could tell me what this place was. He told me that it was a colonial fort called Ussher Fort, initially built by the Danish and then later passed onto the Brits – in addition, this man was a tour guide named George (who had a very big grin the way that so many Ghanaians do) and might I like a tour? The museum was upstairs in the back he said, and he showed me the way. I enjoyed an extremely informative, enthusiastic, and well-mannered tour for the fine fee of 5GHC. I will add that part of the tour involved taking me into a dark cellar like room, a room which was entered through a door labeled ‘the door of no return’ – where slaves would go before they were traded off to the Americas. George, in his extremely polite way of speaking, assured me that the sign was only to give an idea of the experience of the slaves and that it did not mean that I would not return. To top off my day I walked up to the National Musuem of Ghana, a good visit that ended up being very thorough because it was raining so hard that I could not leave.

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