Initiation - Ghana

At first I didn’t see the blood. I sat on a wooden bench in the small waiting room at the University of Legon hospital, when, under the harsh illumination of florescent lighting, I noticed a lake of redness had melted into the teal fabric that covered my arm. I gazed down and saw my fingers splattered with blood. I never realized how fast hemoglobin dries.

I scraped the flakes of another’s sanguine fluids off of my skin. The sweat that poured from my forehead in the nighttime heat dripped on my hands and the blood smeared like weird paint. I told myself not to cry. The other women in the waiting room stared at me, while they conversed in what I assumed was either Twi or Ga. My eyes watered. I rubbed my hands together, while earing the anthem of mosquito’s buzzing.

It was my first hour in Ghana and I was trying not to imagine accompanying my friend home in a casket. The nurses told me to sit and wait. I’ve never been good with patience, but what else could I do but sit , sweat and esperar?

Neither one of us saw it coming. We were strolling down the campus on the side of the road. I was closest to the sidewalk, while Deborah meandered on the side closest to the cars. The two empty lanes beside us were occasionally occupied by taxis, though at 10 pm, the cars were few. As we walked towards the main gate of campus, discussing our upcoming plans for my two-week stay, cabs and private cars sped past. One car flew by so quickly Deborah made a comment about the stupid goats trying to show off.

I never heard the next car, which I saw only after it had past and sent Deborah’s body a yard flying in front of me. Half of her body was hunched in the trench used for drainage while the other half rested on the sidewalk. When I saw her lying in front of me my first thought was that it was a joke. It was that unreal. I called her name and asked why she was playing around, why had she flung herself onto the ground? It took a few seconds to register the fact that the smashing sound had been the beat of car against flesh.

Students walked towards us at which point I asked for one to call an ambulance. An ambulance? I had been in Accra for all of an hour and it seems I must have hit my head, in forgetting where I was. She might bleed to death waiting for an ambulance.

At this point Deborah raised her head from the ground, blood cascading from her eyebrow. She was coherent enough to say, “Get my phone.” Her I phone had ended up on the other side of the street beneath a tree. The battery was about to die as I frantically searched the contact list to call her roommate. At this point students were coming from all directions to aid us. A car stopped and strangers helped my friend into the back seat.

For the five-minute ride, Deborah shook as her blood soaked the Samaritan’s car seat. She rocked back and forth holding out her arm in shock. I tried to comfort her, ensuring her that she would be all right, even though I secretly panicked.

I sat there waiting in the university hospital, which was about the size of my apartment, trying to distract myself by observing my new surroundings. There was a small boy on a stretcher attached to an IV. Women in vibrant wraps with their children, sat quietly and were not shy about fixating their gaze on me. It was almost completely lightless outside, save the occasional flash of headlights. I faced the door, swatting the malaria inducing buggers that snacked on my flesh.

Within 30 minutes Deborah’s roommate and her friends arrived and greeted me. Everyone wanted to know what had happened. They requested descriptions of the driver and the guilty car. I had been standing there when the car whipped by in a fury and smashed against her rib cage. I had been standing there as it sped down the roadway. I had been standing there when it was stopped a few yards away. And yet I couldn’t remember. Heated arguments were exchanged in Ga among her friends, and it was decided that they knew who the driver was, based on an exchange of information provided by the Samaritan who had driven us to the hospital. I sat there, useless, and wearing someone else’s blood.

An hour later Deborah wobbled out of the little room where a doctor was treating her. They placed a hideous patch above her eye, had wrapped up her arm where the skin had come off around her elbow and her calf. Even though they had injected her with painkillers, she winced with each step. The doctor’s sent her off with a hand full of prescriptions and told her to return in two days to redress her bandages.

Outside the hospital she lay on a pile of rocks and started to cry. Her friends crowded around her and told her not to cry. Crying only makes the pain worse, they said.

It was a miracle that she had been hit by a car and hadn’t broken any bones. Sure, she had stitches all over the place and pain up the wazoo, but she could walk.

Even though she was in pain, the next morning she ring leadered us into going to two other countries. I have never known anyone as warrioresque as Deborah. That next morning we tossed disposable thermometers and bandages into a plastic bag and set off to the market to find transportation to the border.