Wake Up Call

Preface: This was our first night as spoiled Americans in a Third World Country. We've learned alot since our first night and have since come to appreciate the above and beyond efforts that have been made for our comfort! I post this in the interest of capturing our real experiences and thoughts while adjusting to this new lifestyle. Thank you.

The housing guy said they weren’t expecting us until Saturday. We arrived in Cape Coast to move into our bungalow on Wednesday night, so the house wasn’t completely ready for us. We flipped open every window in the house to air it out and cool it down.

They had set up 6 chairs in the living room and two beds, but otherwise, we could tell immediately that the house hadn’t been inhabited in some time. The linoleum tiles were covered in a layer of dust and the blue and green walls were dirty and moldy. The toilet seat was broken and the bowl was black with mildew. I couldn’t get the thing to flush when I repeatedly pushed down the handle. There were ceiling fans, but Cody’s wouldn’t turn, and Elle’s made such a squawking, rattling racket, we shut it off. When I turned on the sink, it promptly disattached from the wall causing a heavy drip to splash my toes. Scott took a look at it, jiggled it around a bit, and the steady leak became a stream running directly from the tap through the drain and onto the floor. “Don’t turn on the sink anymore!” Scott announced.

Dakota, who for some reason has upset the bathroom gods, locked himself in the bathroom AGAIN. But unlike in Norway, he couldn’t escape through the window this time, since four slats of louvered glass, a screen and chicken wire covered it. He pounded on the door and yelled, “SCOTT! SCOTT! SCOTT! I’M STUCK IN THE BATHROOM!”

“AGAIN? Hey Molly, Cody’s stuck in the bathroom again!” Scott chuckled, wagging his head back and forth as he pushed at the wooden door.

“You’re kidding me?” We gathered around the jammed door, Scott jimmying the door jamb with a screw driver he’d packed. When it stubbornly opened, the bottom of the door scraped along the warped floor, and Cody emerged.

“The toilet came off the wall.” Dakota announced, frustrated.

“What did you do Cody? Geez!” Scott’s own frustration starting to surface.

“Nothing, I swear! I just flushed the toilet!” We peered into the room and the toilet leaned precariously away from the wall. A slow dampness began to seep from the tank.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I honestly can’t remember who said this but I know it had to have been said.

I was seriously just glad to be somewhere where we could unpack. We’d been living out of suitcases and backpacks for the last 11 days, so I wanted to unpack and organize. Each room had a big wooden closet with two doors. One side housed shelving and the other a rod for hangers. They were dusty and dark and so deep, I couldn’t see all the way to the back. I didn’t mention it, but they were a little scary as a leaned in with a wet towel, wiping down the dirty wood. I basically had to crawl in the things to wash all the corners. Thankfully, I didn’t see any creepy crawlies (they may have seen me, though). After finishing my own closet, I went to wash Elle’s and called out to Dakota, “Cody, you should wipe off the shelves in your closet before you put your clothes in there.”

“I’m not putting my clothes in there. It’s kinda scary lookin’”

Needless to say, I could relate, so I washed it out for him. I emptied our luggage, one suitcase at a time and Cody stored the empties in the garage. The winter coats worn in Europe were loaded into one suitcase, as were any jeans, sweatshirts or sweaters, and they were placed in the garage as well. It was a safe bet we wouldn’t miss them.

Scott’s priority were the walls. “It’s just not healthy to have mold on the walls.” He used a bath towel and some dish soap he found left behind in the kitchen. He pulled up a living room chair, climbing up to scrub from ceiling to floor. Then climbed back down to lug the heavy wooden chair to his next target area.

Meanwhile, Dakota’s main concern was assembling and mounting his pull-up bar on the door frame of his bedroom. Miraculously, it held and he burned some steam with chin ups.

Elle hadn’t had her hair washed since we were in Germany so I called her into the bathroom, and turned on the faucet. I turned the knob toward the red side, and waited for the hot water to begin pouring out. And waited…and waited…and waited…and waited. There was water coming but it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t even luke warm. It was just plain cold. “Scott,” I yelled, “The water won’t heat up.”

“You probably have to wait a little while for it to warm up.” So I waited …and waited…and waited…I didn’t want to give up waiting. If I did, it meant I’d have to admit what I really didn’t want to admit. Scott wandered in the bathroom as I leaned over the faucet, hand beneath the stream of cold water. “Nobody’s lived here for a while. Maybe they forgot to turn on the water heater for us.” YES! That had to be it. “I’ll tell Don in the morning.”

“I sure hope you’re right!” At this point, the quaint hunting cabin ambience faded and I felt panicky. The panic heightened as I rinsed Elle with the cold water, and she started to scream, “AHHHHHH. STOP MAMA. THAT”S COLD. THAT HURTS!”

“It’s ok. It’s just one minute. Like a sprinkler, honey.”

“AHHHHHHHHHHH”

“Almost done, almost done. It’s ok. One more second.”

“AHHHHHHHHHHH”

“There, all done. Here, sweety. Wrap up in this towel and go jump in our bed.”

I stomped to Scott. No one was forcing me to subject my child to another cold shower. “If we don’t have hot water, we need to call the Embassy! Hot water is our right! Showering in cold water is like torture. If this place doesn’t have hot water, we’re moving to a place that does.”

“I agree.” Scott said.

As we laid down in bed that night, Scott simply asked, “What next?”

By the way, you should never ever ask “What next?”

The electricity went out. The ceiling fan stopped and the house went black.

I slept lightly, stiffening upon every unfamiliar noise, which was basically any noise. I heard rustling in the leaves beside the house throughout the night and stifled any mental images. It was still dark outside when a loud COCKA DOODLE DOO told me what wild animals were lurking around our bungalow! Roosters. Not two or three.  A whole flock of the cocky screechers. They squawked back and forth to each other, calling out their cocka doodle doos. One efficiently dropped the middle man, screaming COCKA DOO. Another was just plain lazy, COCKA. All of them were loud, especially on top of the silence of no electricity.

I swear, I didn’t ask “What next?”

But I must’ve thought it!

A low, eerie monotonous voice sounded through some sort of speaker system outside. It was a moaning, chant. Six syllables that I didn’t understand. Repeated over and over and over, a fraction louder with each repetition. I guessed it was around 4:30 a.m. at this point, and the groaning chant went on for at least 15 minutes. Scott was still sleeping. I may have drifted off for a moment, only to be jolted awake when the low chanting became an urgent sermon of some kind. This was loud preaching. Passionate and urgent, all in a language I didn’t understand. The man yelled into a super megaphone, and his oration echoed through the dark. I listened in shock, straining to hear any recognizable word. His message was loud and angry. The roosters screeched. His impassioned diatribe mixed with the screaming fowl blended into some horror movie soundtrack as I lay in the pitch black for nearly an hour freaked out!

Scott awoke then. “What is that?”

“I don’t know. It’s been going for at least an hour.” I filled him in on what I had already heard. “I only understand one word. He says ‘America’ sometimes.”

“Is it Christian or Muslim?” We lay quietly listening to the preacher’s heated address. “I think I heard ‘Allah’” Scott said, “It must be Muslim…or maybe a revolution has started.”

“Oh My God! Don’t say such a thing!”

As the amplified yelling continued, we heard muffled group responses. Scott looked at his watch. It was now close to 6 a.m. and a dim sunrise bled into the black sky. The service went on and on. The man got angrier and angrier.

Suddenly Scott blurted, “I’M GOING TO KILL BUCKRIDGE…I’M GOING TO KILL BUCKRIDGE!” Buckridge is a fellow professor who first recommended Ghana as a site for our international experience. “IF THIS HAPPENS EVERY MORNING, I’M GONNA KILL ‘EM!”

“How did nobody tell us about this? It’s not as if they didn’t hear it. How could you not hear it. It started before 5 in the morning. It’s a frickin’ megaphone. How did we not hear about this?”

We continued like this back and forth, trying to make sense of the situation we’d gotten ourselves into. Scott flipped from side to side, putting the pillow over his head. Grunting in frustration. A few times the voice stopped. We both perked up, shot each other a hopeful glance. Our eye contact remained unblinking, our breath caught, then the yelling would start again. Again and again and again.

“OOOOOHHHHH MMMYYYYYY GGGGGOOOOODDDDD!” Scott groaned.

“I know,” I whined. “It’s been two hours, nonstop!”

Scott summoned his cool and vowed, “If I could, I would just walk through all the people strait up to that guy and say…and say…” he contemplated during a pregnant pause, “I’d say ‘Dude, What’s Your PROBLEM?!”

We both lost it. We laughed hysterically at the absurdity of it. We giggled and guffawed and snorted and cackled until tears streamed down our cheeks. We would regain our composure for a moment, catch our breath quietly. Then the man called out to his congregation again or a rooster screeched beneath our open window. Then we collapsed in hysterical, uncontrollable laughter again. We must’ve whole-heartedly rolled around laughing for 15 minutes strait, totally missing the finale of the sermon. I don’t think we’ve ever laughed so hard together before.

That was our wake up call. This experience will be different. Some days will be hard and scary and absurd. But we will get through it together. And we can whine and cry and get frustrated. Or we can laugh ridiculously together until tears roll down our faces.