Chapter 19: into the desert

Hey, suckers. Sorry I haven’t written in awhile, but you may find that the wait, dare I say, was worth it…check this out…

Folks, as a Peace Corps Volunteer draws closer to the end of their term of service, he/she must attend what is called a Close of Service (C.O.S.) conference. This, generally, is very boring. Some folks find the information distributed at said conference to be quite informative - as it deals mostly with readjusting back into American culture, finding the ever-elusive ‘real job,’ using Peace Corps on a resume to land a government job or apply to graduate school (for the poor bastards who go down that perilous road…), etc etc etc. The majority of us, however, generally view C.O.S. conference as a three-day party, reunited with all the PCVs we came over with over two years ago, at a posh-ass resort that none of us could possibly ever afford otherwise.

The remaining 27 members of my original group and I had our C.O.S. conference at a resort in Ada, located on the coast in the Volta Region, from Aug. 2nd to Aug. 5th (or 6th, I forget…). The place was nice enough: you could rent jet skis, use the swimming pools, volleyball and tennis courts, etc. Being at an expensive resort, however, does have its drawbacks. Quick example: beers that were usually 7,000 cedis everywhere else in the country now cost roughly 27,000. Being white in Ghana means you get screwed when it comes to prices (as we all know, white skin automatically means you are rich and can afford to spend 27,000 cedis on a beer…and crappy beer at that, mind you). To hell with prices like those. Peace Corps Volunteers, for the most part, are cheap bastards: it is not uncommon for volunteers in such a situation to, say, walk for an hour to a nearby village and purchase backpacks full of alcohol (at the normal price) to haul back to a resort instead of paying outlandish prices for pure swill. This was accomplished with relative ease, believe it or not, by yours truly and a crack unit of dedicated and adventurous volunteers - and yet another obstacle was cleared.

You’d think that having spent so much money on putting 28 crappy PCVs up in a resort as nice as the one they selected, Peace Corps would, oh…I don’t know, let the PCVs enjoy the aforementioned resort. But nay, friends – we were ‘in session,’ staring at flipcharts and listening to mindless drawl, from roughly 8am to 4pm every single day. Who’s honestly enjoying themselves, here? Towards the end of the conference, volunteers began skipping sessions (is it really necessary to sit through a class on ‘how to say goodbye to your friends in Ghana,’ or ‘how to make the most of your Peace Corps experience’ - come on…if I wanted cuddly, sentimental shit like this I’d go and hug a damn bunny or something…jeez…). yours truly skipped out on the entire last day of sessions….because it was all retarded as hell. If any of you out there reading this piece of literary garbage are administrative personnel working for Peace Corps Ghana, I’m sorry you had to hear that but that’s how everybody felt…and, on a side note, you can officially kiss my ass.

So that was C.O.S. Moving right along…

Work around my humble village of Sankpala, being the beginning of August and all, was at a relative standstill – farming season and all – so, surprise surprise, it was time for adventure yet again. Vasquez and I had been planning an excursion into Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso more or less since we had arrived in Ghana two years ago, and it was high-time for that shit to take place. Several other volunteers had been added and later removed from our roster of travel companions over this period of time (for various reasons), and following the C.O.S. conference we were left with only one other volunteer to accompany us: Sarah “Ma” Bristol. As we were in Accra, preparing to go around and pick up entry visas for all the countries we were about to embark to (a huge pain in the ass, and one I wouldn’t wish on my worst of enemies), we picked up a fourth adventurer: Anna Rauk, another southerner remaining from my original group. Now, as a quartet, we were ready to kick some serious ass.

We didn’t really have a game plan for our perilous journey into the desert – that really wouldn’t have been our team’s style. Instead, we decided to maintain a laid-back attitude and shoot-from-the-hip course of action. This, in itself, was what ended up saving us from sheer disaster later on in our travels…

Setting out from Accra, we made pit-stops first in Tamale (for last-minute supplies) and then in me and Dan’s old training/stomping ground of Bolgatanga (as a stop-over) before heading for our jump-off point in Bawku – a town located in the Upper East region of Ghana, right near the border of Burkina Faso. You see, there are a couple different options of traveling through Burkina Faso (from Ghana), and this was the road less traveled. Most folks took a bus from Bolgatana (or Paga, where, if you’ll remember, I faced off against crocodiles two years ago), but we opted for adventure once again (‘Team Adventure’ became one of our many labels throughout the course of our journey, as did ‘Team Anorexia,’ ‘Team Cornholes,’ and ‘Team Natural Disaster’….but I’m getting ahead of myself….). Why take an air-conditioned travel bus when you can take a beat up piece of shit lorry for nearly half the price? Thus, it was decided, early on, that we should take a tro-tro from Bawku straight to the capital city of Niger; Niamey. This, at the time, sounded like a damn good idea to us retards…

Upon arrival in Bawku, we found a local who guided us to the Niamey station. As we walked into the yard, we watched as the morning lorry (later revealed as the ‘better lorry’) drove away. The man in charge of the Niamey station said that this certain trek would take roughly ten to twelve hours (somewhere around there). The next lorry was to leave at 2pm. It was currently 10:30am. We decided to go for it, and in the meantime exchange cedis for CFA (forget what that literally stands for, but it has something to do with France and Africa and African countries that speak French….anyway, its a currency…), which was a huge pain in the ass but eventually we didn’t get completely ass-raped in the process…which was good. The CFA is a lot stronger than the cedi: for example, 500 CFA equals a dollar, where as 9,000 (thereabouts) cedis equal a dollar. As po’ Ghanaian PCVs, we were about to enter a world of shit.

Did I say the Niamey lorry was scheduled to leave at 2pm? I did, didn’t I - well, it didn’t leave til’ 5:30/6pm. Ghana time, folks. By that time, we were all fairly exhausted from the oppressive heat and shady-ass station managers lurking about. Rest assured, it was great finally getting on the road – yet treachery lay before us, to an extent we yet didn’t even realize.

Any of you guys ever seen the movie ‘Congo’? Remember the corrupt military personnel, that, upon coming across westerners (especially whites) decide to try and scam as much money out of them as humanly possible? This is standard practice for low-level government workers pretty much everywhere you turn in West Africa (from what I’ve seen in my two years). Border guards are no exceptions, either. Bawku isn’t all that far from the border of Burkina Faso, yet it took countless hours to process ourselves through the various military checkpoints and police borders. At one point, in particular, they were going to detain us for traveling at night, and wanted to charge us a fine for keeping them at their post past ‘closing time’ (being border guards, we all know its their job to stay at their posts). Anyway, long story short, after much harassment, we finally made it out of Ghana and into Burkina Faso.

That night, for some reason or another, we were forced to stop and pass the night somewhere obscure in Burkina – not really sure where it was, but it couldn’t have been more than an hour or two inside the country’s borders. We slept in the lorry until sunrise (which was extremely uncomfortable, as these ‘tro-tros’ are all roughly 20 – 30 years old, beat down, and over-crowded as all hell). The morning finally came, and we were off – only to be assaulted by a downpour of rain so powerful that we had to stop, once again, an hour or so down the road. We sat there, in the lorry, crowded like sardines in a tin can, for another three hours. Africans hate the rain, and so all the windows of this tro-tro were sealed up as tightly as possible. Sauna time. At this point in time, friends, we had been traveling via lorry for nearly 18 hours, and had grown attached to several of our other traveling companions (such as ‘Uncle Turban,’ a Tuareg nomad from Niger – but I’ll save that for another tale…), yet we didn’t grow too attached to our drivers, so to speak: every three or four hours we had to stop and change drivers because no one, it seemed, wanted to drive us into Niger. At the Burkina Faso/Niger border, for example, our driver walked off for nearly five hours, without telling us why, only to return with another man who was willing to drive us the remainder of the way into Niamey. Burkina Faso is a shithole, and you can put me down on record for saying this: f*ck Burkina Crappo (as I refer to it…), it’s a crappier, Frenchier version of Ghana…and nothing more…

Team Adventure found itself stranded an hour or two south of Niamey. Our third tro-tro (or maybe it was our fourth, its hard to keep track…) had broken down, yet hope remained – at that point in our 24 hr. plus hellish trek, that’s about all we had left. I should note, however that having two white girls with you in the middle of West Africa can sometimes be a blessing just as much as it can be a hindrance. So can having a Mexican who’s an experienced world traveler. Vasquez was able to secure us a ride with a private car within a half hour of roadside begging as a hitchhiker (more efficient that really anything else when traveling in a third-world country), and soon we were off – tearing down the Niger highway towards Niamey, blasting – surprisingly enough – James Brown.

There is a hostel, in Niamey, for Peace Corps volunteers. Multiple bedrooms, verandas, a basketball half-court, entertainment lounges, their own laundry service, etc. This is not a sub-office, like the two we have in Ghana – this is a non-monitored Peace Corps establishment…and its frickin’ nice. Who the hell are these people?! They make almost twice what we make, by the way…and that’s enough to drive a poor man to murder, I guarantee you that. Anyway, back to our tale: when we four weary travelers stumbled into said hostel after one of the worst days of travel in my adult life, we were spellbound. And again, I won’t go into details; because, honestly, I don’t think you’d appreciate the little things…

We toured the Grand Marche in Niamey, as well as a few touristy spots around town before mounting a Greyhound-esque bus (similar to our Ghanaian STC buses) bound for the ancient, desert trade-city of Agadez. Our bus left at 4am, and it was supposed to be roughly a 12 hour trek – which is about the same if one was to travel from Tamale down to the capital city of Ghana, Accra. So this, really, was no big deal to us experienced bus-riders.

It was smooth sailing for a long time – we stopped every three or four hours in order for passengers to ‘go to the bathroom’ (but, of course, that meant just squatting over a patch of sand…), get something to eat (brochette….or however you spell that – its lamb meat, grilled…I think), etc etc. Well, these busses were better than Ghanaian transports in one respect: they were only about 1/3 of the way full: in Ghana, they’d cram as many people as physically possible in a bus before leaving. In Niger, the second-poorest country in the world (and no, I don’t know the poorest, so don’t bother asking me), no one can afford to take the cross-country bus - except dumb, white tourists who can’t speak any of the local languages (or French).

Sometime around 10am or so, it began pouring down rain – a strange occurrence, seeing how we were entering the largest desert on the face of the earth. I contemplated this for about two hours, on and off, until the bus stopped…in the middle of the road. As it turned out, a flash-flood had taken down the road – bisecting it in half and making it nigh on impassable. We waited in our seats for about an hour, then the driver must have thought, “screw it” and got up and left. Once again, here we were – Team Natural Disaster - stranded by a crappy vehicle in the desert, strangely enough cut off from civilization by raging rapids (coming from somewhere in the desert, at that…). I know, it doesn’t make much sense. We weren’t the only car forced to halt in our tracks, though – on both sides of this sudden river, traffic was beginning to be backed up (and please don’t think of ‘traffic’ backed up on an American expressway…I’m talking more like four or five cars on either side of the ‘highway.’). A few cars tried at first to make it across, but it was all for naught – they didn’t make it far. From the sidelines, the shores of these rapids began to swarm with people – most of which were in the same circumstance as we were. For sport, many of them began trying to throw a wandering madman into the river (they managed to succeed at this quite often, actually).

I’m not really sure how long we were stranded by the side of this “river” – but it was at least six hours. The monotony of the waiting was broken up by the attempted crossing of the rapids by various vehicles who had gotten sick of waiting. Pick-up trucks, tro-tros, private cars, dump-trucks and different construction-type vehicles – they all tried crossing. Some made it, some didn’t. Finally, our driver must have either gotten himself drunk enough or else found the courage he had previously lacked – he decided it was time for us to try our luck with fate. He gunned the exhausted engine of our faithful STC-esque bus, rallied us hopeful passengers on board, and bore down on the raging rapids, shrieking war cries and prayers in the same breath…

(to be continued…)