Wellsangels

We have breakfast every morning between 715 and 730. While we eat excellent egg and vegetable scrambles, and even more excellent bread and strawberry jam, Julianna irons her baby blue nurse’s uniform and tells me she will be ready to go before 8. Sometimes one of her friends will be stopping by, and they will come to the table to greet us and quiz us in Twi:

-Maakye, wo ho te sen? (Good morning. Your body is how?)
-Me ho ye. Na wo’nso e? (My body is fine. And what about you?)
-Eye (I’m fine.)

We go downstairs to get ready, and sit on our patio while we wait. Every day, it is about 830 when she is ready to go to work—because she does so much. In addition to having a full time job, right now she is caring for four guests (6 over the weekend), son, and husband, training a new house boy, active in her church (goes almost every evening), sells cloth from her house, and washes her car every morning.

The drive starts with all of us piling into her five-seater (barely) Daewoo, which is bright red and gleaming after its morning wash. When Julianna climbs in she usually says, “Abenaa, can you hold my bag?” (Abenaa is my nickname—‘Tuesday-born’) and then, “Tom how are your legs? Are you sure you don’t want to sit in front?” But he doesn’t, and we pull backwards out the gate and head up the red gravel street. Our first stop is always at the salon (about 50 yards away) where we roll down the windows and Julianna honks on the horn. The hairdresser comes out for her morning greeting, smiles broadly at Julianna and they laugh. Julianna gives her the keys to the gate, which she keeps until someone comes home and needs to get in.

Then we pull up to the corner with the main Edwenase Road (10 yards from the hairdresser), where Julianna inevitably knows someone and strikes up a brief conversation. On the road, there are all these taxi drivers and tro tros, coming one after another, and beeping their horns, both as a warning and to advertise open space – everyone’s trying to go to work at once. There are usually ten people at the intersection waiting for rides, and we pick one up if there is room.

Then Julianna begins inching out into the traffic, continuously beeping her horn and complaining about the taxi drivers: “oh, those taxi drivers don’t know how to drive. Look at him! Look at where he is going! Where do they teach them to drive?”

Finally we get into the driving lane, and we move quite smoothly except for new cars inching into traffic. We pass the mechanic’s store, where Julianna gives the horn two honks and waves her hand up above the window. We approach our second intersection. Again she inches out into flowing traffic, honks her horn, looks carefully and then crosses. Then we see one of her closest friends, who is a trader on the side of the road, usually trading kenke (fermented corn dough usually wrapped in banana leaves) and dried fish. She yells “Akosua! Akosua! Akosua ne abrofo!” (Akosua is Julianna’s nickname—meaning Sunday-born, and the phrase means “Akosua and white people”), which without fail causes Julianna to giggle hysterically and honk the horn more.

The next several roads, through the suburb of Patase, tend to be quite open, and we talk about work or some aspect of the Twi language. As we get closer to the city center, we arrive at our first traffic circle, which elicits a fresh stream of taxi driver criticism, even as Julianna makes a right turn from the left lane, cutting around the (relatively) law-abiding turners. And she points up the road to the regular route to her house and says “look at this long line of traffic. This is traffic here, but that, that is bad traffic.” The rest of the drive, we inch up the hill, past street sellers with bowls of water packets on their heads, phone minute stands, tros tros packed with people, the odd motorcycle or moped weaving through traffic; we pass through another circle, and drive through the gate of the hospital, where a guard sitting on a chair lackadaisically reaches his leg out to the gate, hooks it with his toe, and draws it open enough for us to pass.

There she honks the horn to get crowds of people out of the way. As we pull into the staff parking zone, she says, “look at these potholes. There are terrible, terrible potholes, very bad.” It is difficult to disagree with her as we navigate a lot that seems to be mostly potholes—it is the protruding two-foot chunks of actual paving that seem to cause the trouble. It is pointed out how few people are able to successfully grapple with the challenge of parking in their assigned spaces, and Julianna backs into our space. Julianna asks us each the part of the hospital we are working in that day, and tells us the names of the nurses we should greet or to whom she will introduce us. Finally, we go to work.