Looking Forward to Traffic

It’s almost midnight, which is incredibly late by Ghanaian standards (with wake-up ranging from 6-7am on campus to 4-5am in rural areas), but I’m staying up to write this blog post because I haven’t written in awhile. We just got back from a weekend trip to Kumasi with our orientation group today – it was amazing, but I’d love to go back alone on my own (less structure, more exploration).

Kumasi is the biggest city in Ghana, noticeably bigger than Accra (the capital and the city closest to my university), and ex-capital of the Asante (or as most people know it, Ashanti) Kingdom. It is now the capital of the Asante region (one of 10 in Ghana… I guess similar to states in the US) and the cultural capital of the Asante people (the largest ethnic group in Ghana, of more than 70 total here, amounting to nearly half of the population). It’s a much prettier city than Accra I think, but that’s just a first impression, I barely know either. All I know was that walking through the central Kumasi market was an exhilarating experience that attacked all my senses: smelling roasted bat grilling away (and doing a double take at the fact that it was a bat), being bombarded with sellers of kente cloth and other trinkets, and just seeing the daily hustle bustle of people’s average days from within the mob of Ghanaians. It was awesome. Kumasi was interesting, from the long chat I had with the guy selling paintings outside of where we were staying about his struggle to hustle and make a living for his village to cheering at the top of my lungs for Ghana demolishing Mali to move forward in the African cup (literally with every other Ghanaian alive – life literally stops for soccer games – the smartest people do all their errands then because there are no lines ANYWHERE. Those that do not have TV’s simply echo the distant screams from those who do… but actually). But what I really want to talk about is not Kumasi, but the drive there. Specifically, the traffic.

In California, and actually in every other place I have ever been, traffic is something to be dreaded. I remember actually wondering why nobody has ever fixed the problem before, it couldn’t be that hard, right? And how many hours of time do people absolutely waste waiting in traffic commuting back and forth to work and back? It never occurred to me that the problem was not the traffic itself, but the social world surrounding it, because in Africa… I actually look forward to traffic. First of all, traffic is to be expected. Most roads here are pretty terrible, potholes everywhere, so a drive to Kumasi that would take 45 minutes on a sleek California highway was equivalent to driving to LA from the Bay Area over here – not exaggerating in the slightest. Because of that, people here have introduced GMT. No, not Greenwich Mean Time – Ghana Maybe Time! That means you know that if you set a meeting for 4pm, it might not happen until 5pm… or later. Someone might be caught in traffic since its so spontaneous, maybe their car broke down, but you sit there, wait, and find an excuse for them. Timeliness is not guaranteed, so life changes… suddenly, nobody is in a hurry, you greet everyone you meet and actually ask how they’re doing instead of giving them the nod/wave/eyebrow-raise to recognize their existence as you brisk past them. Life slows down.

Back to traffic, though, the best part about it is the ingenuity of the fix. Instead of speeding up the cars, you slow down all of social space around it to match the momentum of the road. As Einstein taught us, time is relative, right? It’s not that the cars are too slow back home when stuck in traffic, it’s that they are misaligned with the rest of the fast-paced universe surrounding them. And don’t worry about being bored in traffic. I look forward to traffic here because that’s when you get all the best snacks. From tiger nuts (which you have to chew a lot and literally taste like pineapple) to frozen yogurt treats (did you ever freeze your go-gurt… epic huh?), traffic is a reason to sit back, pay for some of the cheapest delicious snacks for your friends, and spend time with those around you. Ghanaians have no reason to be bored in traffic. As soon as they get that feeling coming on, they step outside of the car and start walking down the road (the drivers switch off if needed), chatting up people in their cars, the street vendors, that random guy desperate to sell you a belt for a price made special just for you. You’re no longer isolated in that bubble of a car, all filed in line looking smug on your daily trek to work. You’re now connected to the world around you, engaging with it… kind of like the difference between the car and motorcycle in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Breaking the rift between the space of transportation and the world around you. When the traffic’s lightened up, those outside hop back in their cars or stare at them go by nonchalantly knowing that they’d be stuck in traffic again in a few hundred meters. It’s hilarious. And strange. And new. And awesome. Just like the rest of Ghana.

As for how I’m doing, ill throw in something brief just because my dad reminded me to speak from my heart. I’m really having the time of my life. I’m not sure if its because I’m somewhere completely new, with no vestiges of old life back home, but I am constantly feeling refreshed. I can be anyone I want to be here… we all live with sand bags on our shoulders and we don’t even know they’re there until we take them off when we live somewhere new. I feel like I’m more energetic than I have been in years, I’m not usually the life of the party back home in Berkeley but somehow I've become that here. I feel happier, stimulated, challenged. Of course, missing home and wanting to keep in touch, but knowing that this experience could not have come at a better time for me. I needed this. I needed to be allowed to reinvent myself. To be born anew.