Ghana Day 37

My toesies are in pretty terrible agony after walking a couple miles in uncomfortable heels this morning because I’m still not really sure how to get to work from the midway point I normally get dropped at. Sometime soon I’ll need to figure it out, but I’m sure my mom and sisters (at least one of them) will be pleased to hear that I might need to consider a pedicure before I get married so that my feet look a little less mangled when I walk down the aisle.

After hanging around at work for a while and looking into the story on Ogbogbloshie market and reading lots of interesting articles from Good magazine and BBC and CNN and all the other sites my bored surfing self has picked up, I came out to the orphanage where a few of the western girls are volunteering because Prince wanted a story written about the donation of items that they had so he could get the organization’s name in the paper. So I went over, but quite honestly it wasn’t a huge donation in terms of money spent on the items and probably not newsworthy as an event. The guy who runs the orphanage is certainly newsworthy from a human interest angle, though, so I might get that story printed based on him. I’ll try to keep a mention of the NGO in it for Prince’s sake, but it will probably be just in passing.

The only other interesting thing to happen today was on my ride home. I got into the tro-tro and was immediately joined by a guy who invaded my personal space much more than normal, smelled pretty bad, and was very loud and abrasive the entire way. As he boarded the bus, he was picking a fight with someone (I think he said he’d been insulted, although I’m not sure what the insult was). He told him he would fight him, and he said “your mother is a bushman, and your father… [pause to think of an original insult… fail]… your father was a bushman.” He then went on, either because of me or in spite of me, I was unsure, to say “I know the white man! I worked the beach for 22 years, and I know the white man! I know what he does! He just injects you, that’s all he does… [rambling, speaking in languages I don’t understand, shouting]… You are all slaves! You did not realize it before this moment, but that is all you are to these people, you are slaves! They think, this black man, he cannot be better than we!...” etc etc. At one point, he said, “I used to be a boxer! You see this arm [points to arm] this can knock you down in one blow!” And of course none of these phrases were devoid of expletives, but I’m leaving them out to spare my father. So anyway, I got to sit next to him the whole way home. Goody for me.