just a typical afternoon in accra

Let's quickly talk about what happened yesterday.

So Caitlin and I are on our way to Beacon House, the orphanage where we go to hold babies. We get in a cab and tell the driver East Legon, near American International School. Like most cab drivers here he half listens to what we say and just motions for us to get in. Naturally...we miss the turn we have to take and so I'm like, oh hey, you need to turn around, we needed to go left. The cab driver starts complaining about 'meh meh meh you confused me blah blah' so Caitlin and I are like, uh huh, make a u-turn. The first attempt to make a u-turn he is motioned away by a cop who tells him to go further down before he can turn around. We do this and manage to get going the other way.

So now we are heading the other direction...we need to make a left turn but there are no simply left turns in Accra so we end up needing to do another u-turn. The cab driver is moaning like a little girl about this and how long it's going to take. So we get to another area where we can turn and there are two cops patrolling it. One of the cops sees what the driver is trying to do and motions him to stop, but our cab driver ignores him and makes the reverse turn anyway. And then all hell broke loose.

We make the turn and suddenly there's the other cop in front of our car with his hands out YELLING to STOP THE CAR AND PULL OVER. So he pulls over the car, out of nowhere the passenger door and the back door open and the cops are telling me to move over so that they can get in the car with us. They start yelling at the driver and at us and are all like CAN'T YOU READ STREET SIGNS?! YOU CANNOT TURN HERE!!! WE'RE GOING TO THE STATION! And our driver is all blaming it on the girls for 'confusing him' and in his mind ordering him to make illegal turns.

Me and Caitlin hear the word 'station' and are immediately FREAKING out and ready to call Christa, our program director, and tell her about the latest mess we've gotten into so she can spring the two spoiled NYU girls from jail. So we're like, please please pleeeease can we get out of the cab??? We want to leave can we get out?? And the cops are like WE'RE GOING TO THE STATION. So we continue asking them to let us out and finally they're like yes you can get out and get another cab up here. And then they dropped this lovely line:

"We're not trying to kill you. We're trying to save you."

GET ME OUT OF THIS CAB RIGHT NOW.

They let us out at a tro-tro stop and Caitlin and I ran from the car into another cab before the police changed their mind and decided to take the two manipulative obruni girls as well as the reckless driver to the station. It was a lovely experience. As we're driving away in our new cab and staring behind us to make sure we're not being followed, we see our old driver running after us trying to flag us down. Fantastic. He wanted to be paid before he was taken into the police station, so we gave him some money and he took it, but not before informing our new cab driver that "these girls confused me, they told me to go to Legon and then they changed their minds and made me turn around". And all we wanted to do was hold some babies.