Ghana Galavanting, Part 1

As so many of you have been asking me… how was Ghana?!?!


One word answer; AMAZING.

I’m guessing most of you would like a little more detail than a one-word answer, so I’ll try and paint the picture of our 4-day journey in a few postings of our great Ghana adventures!

Our journey started at 5am, 20 February, 2012 with our alarms screaming at us in the darkness to get up, finish packing and head out to the Togo/Ghana border where we were to meet up with our friend, Jon around 7am.

Sooo.. behind the scenes of this trip, I had been trying for weeks and months to plan out our trip both Stateside and from the ship. My hope was to go 1) to Bodinka (about 3 ½ hours North of Kumasi, the 2nd largest city in Ghana) to visit Nyanjah, my other World Vision sponsor child (if you remember, I visited Mattu, my World Vision Sponsor child in Sierra Leone in April, 2011), 2) go to Cape Coast- a very beautiful city on the Southwest coast of Ghana, 3) head east along the coast, back through Accra, and then back to the Lome/Ghana border to cross and get back to the ship on Thursday evening.


This may sound very straight-forward and simple to most of us western-nation people who are used to being able to google hotels, rent cars, and easily plan routes according to our research, time, and GPS devices. When you travel in West Africa, however, sites like Travel Advisor and google searching doesn’t really work. There were no websites with bus schedules, no car rental companies, no list of hotel websites to check out for this trip. I knew it would be a huge trip of Faith to see how God was going to come through for us in our traveling and planning. From finding the correct bus stations, to knowing how far everything was from one place to the other, to how much it would all cost, I knew my planning was a shot in the dark. I knew that I had planned out our time to the fullest, on a best-case-scenario situation and time-frame, dreading the fact that we would probably have to skip at least one portion of our trip if even something small went off-schedule.

Let me tell you…God was SO amazing in providing for that trip! To start off, a new friend of mine, a missionary who ran an orphanage in Northern Togo who I met when he brought one of his orphan kids to the Africa Mercy to have cleft-lip surgery, connected us with a friend of his, Stephen, who happened to be traveling back to Ghana the same day we were to start our trip. Stephen was Ghanaian, and so he knew all the bus systems, how far places were, and could haggle with the drivers for fair prices on our transportation. Oh my goodness! All of that was a HUGE blessing and answer to prayer! From the port of Lome, straight to Accra, we went all the entire way with (what felt like) our very own tour guide). Stephen not only traveled with all the way to Accra, but took us to the bus station and ensured we found the right buses, bought the right tickets, and were on our way to Kumasi before the early part of the afternoon. A HUGE answer to prayer!

Even our friend, Jon, who joined us (who many of you are probably wondering who in the world he is), was an answer to prayer. Good friends of mine at home, Kathryn and Jessi M. had mentioned to me the week before I left Minnesota, that their cousin, Jon was going to be in Togo with his dad this spring. “Nooo…. I said. Not Togo! Who goes to Togo?” At this point, only 3 of us girls were planning to go on this trip to Ghana, which made me nervous to 1) be in such a small group, and 2) not have a guy with us. In West Africa, it is not generally considered wise or safe for women to travel alone. So, after I heard this Jon fellow might be in the general vicinity of Lome around the time we would go on our trip, I decided to facebook stalk him and send him a message. Let’s’ just say the message went something like this…

“Hi Jon, you don’t know me, or any of my friends, but I am a great friend of your cousins and am wondering if you want to travel to a strange country with 3 strange girls for a 4-day trip to Ghana?”


I found out later (God, you are so funny), that he usually never opens messages from people he doesn’t know, but just happened to open my message, read a bit about our trip, and respond, within a couple days, that yes, he actually would really like to join us! We messaged back and forth a bit before our trip, and then met for dinner in Lome the week before we left, to officially meet one another. Little did we know the 4-day bonding experiences we would have traveling for 96 straight hours together. Poor man. 96 straight hours with 3 women. I will admit, though… with a 6 foot, 4 inch tall man, I felt very safe our entire trip. The explanation to all of the local Ghanaians who wondered how this lucky white man had 3 wives who all seemed to be friends was another story!

On the travel side, these guys were fantastic! We are all pretty laid-back people, ready to go with the flow in the midst of changing plans, which was fantastic for me… the “planner” of the trip! They were SUPER when things didn’t quite go according to plan.


After we got aboard our… umm… tastefully decorated bus (a.k.a. who in the WORLD picked the fabric for this interior?) we enjoyed a long bus ride from Accra to Kumasi in kingly comfort on high-backed, cushioned seats in semi-air conditioning. Top of the line style in Ghana!


We arrived in Kumasi, after riding an excruciatingly bumpy ride due to, apparently through a 2-year construction project (still very unfinished) on the road from Accra to Kumasi. The yelling of Nigerian movies lulled us to sleep as we felt the hum of the motor beneath our seats. It was actually very comfortable and timely (besides the poor quality of the road), and we met Francis, our World Vision driver, at the bus station with the help of a sweet Ghanaian woman who was traveling with her 2 small children back to Kumasi to see her husband.

We found a hotel, settled in, walked to a local restaurant and ate rice with fried chicken (yum, yum!), and walked home as dusk was settling and groups of bats circled above our heads, enjoying mosquitoes at the beginning of night. We were back in our restaurant, ready to meet the other Francis, the director of the local World Vision branch, when BOOM! All the lights went out at the hotel. We visited by flashlight, then realized their back-up generator wasn’t working. Thankfully our driver, Francis, told us to pack back up and move to a functional hotel. TIA (This Is [definitely] Africa). We slept like babies that night, and prepared for our early start to head up to Bodika with World Vision to visit Nyanjah. And… I will pause...

Stay tuned for Part 2!