It is 4 AM and the Pastor is up listening to a preacher on television. I, too, listened for a while and then decided to write my blog.
What is a blog?? I believe it is derived from the German: BLOJ—by-line of junk and then in English by-line of gunk. “ An article published onto the Internet by persons who think their lives are more interesting than everyone else’s, and read by persons with far too much time on their hands”. – Webster’s reader abridged, antiquated, obsolescent, dictionary for young communists, first and only edition—NOT.
For me it is kind of a personal journal, and a way of keeping everyone up to date without having to write a great many personalized emails. It is also a bit of a record of things that are kept in chronological order by their appearance in the blog on a certain date. For example:
Yesterday Elizabeth came and asked for money to go home to her village near Agogo near Konongo on the road to Accra. Marlayne gave her money and I volunteered to take her there. We became sort of her personal taxi and she had us make maybe 6 stops (some with direction reversals) and we met some of her family along the way and at Konongo she invited a ‘sister’ to come with us. It is a bit risky taking ‘locals’ in our car in a country where adequate insurance (by our standards) is not available. I got double insured and then I have to trust the Lord for the rest. Secondly, loading the Carina with extra persons lowers the clearance when we are heading onto secondary dirt roads that can reach up and unexpectedly remove your entire exhaust system! Suddenly your sedate, saloon, sedan sounds like a monster truck at the Agrodome.
Anyway, we bottomed out only once with no apparent damage and traveled about 92 Km. to her village. We met family and saw where she lived and received some plantains to take home. The villagers said it was shorter and a better road to go back through Effiduase and they were right. Our GPS trip computer showed that we had gone a total of 169 Kms. in a bit over 4 hours and had been stopped for over 2 hours. I was surprised that our average traveling speed was under 50 Km/hr. The 4 lane highway to Accra has an 80 Kph. speed limit, but getting out of town is heavy traffic and stop lights. Then there is a series of roundabouts for which the traffic is narrowed to single lane bottlenecks. Outside the city limits the villages are very close together and each has its own series of speed bumps. There are five gentle speed bumps, then a space and five harsh speed bumps and a space and then one or two axle breakers that take everyone down into 1st gear, and then the reverse going out of the village. Cruise control would be useless as you are constantly accelerating or decelerating. Apparently big SUV’s use 25Liters/100 Km. on the highway! We see so many Toyota Land Cruisers; they are obviously the status symbol of cars here.
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