I’ve been putting off my blog posts until something spectacular happened.

Finally, the day has come and it’s time to write about my experiences. Today was our second day of internships and it started early in the day, as expected. I was personally expected at the office by 9am, and was told that with travel time and the ungodly amount of traffic I’d endure, I should leave our house no later than 7am. Without traffic, it takes at least half an hour to get from our home in East Legon to Labone, where my internship at Metro TV is located. Osu, the area where Morgan and Chantel are interning, is right next to Labone, so we decided to travel together.

After 10 minutes of waiting on the wrong side of the road, we finally got to the correct stop. We waited and waited and waited, along with Alex and Erin, for an empty (or empty enough) Tro Tro bus to take us to the 37 station, where we would then take another Tro Tro to our respective stops. We waited some more, and every Tro Tro was either completely full and couldn’t stop, or wasn’t going to the right station.

Just as we were about to lose hope, something awesome happened.

Being a group of 6+ white people standing on the sidewalk of a main and congested highway, we naturally managed to attract attention. One of the hawkers came up to Alex and told him that someone in a certain car with a Canadian flag was calling for him. The Canadian flag was completely irrelevant, but I thought was funny, so I threw it in there. We thought that maybe it was Doc, but it turned out to be a stranger. He asked if any of us were going to the 37 station, and if we were, he had 4 spots available in his car and he’d be willing to drive us to get a Tro Tro from there.

This was too good to be true. Alex seemed to think it was a good deal and that the guy seemed genuine enough, so he extended the offer and Chantel, Morgan and I hopped in. We rode and spoke with the man about music, what we’ve been doing in Ghana, and things we were hoping to do by the end. He explained why Ghanaians have flags on their windshield and that if we really want to get anywhere in Accra, we’re going to have to leave by 6 a.m. He dropped us off, gave us his card, and most importantly, made our day.

This random act of kindness by a stranger was proof that Ghanaians are truly incredibly kind people. He had no motivation to do this deed other than to help out some people who were having a rough start to their morning. We drove right past the building he worked in and went at least half an hour out of the way. He could have easily driven right past us, but his good deed really showed his true colors and the great character of the Ghanaian people.

And technically, I hitchhiked. Never thought that would happen.

I guess you can say that I finally checked hitchhiking off of my adventure list… even though I wasn’t necessarily going out of my way to do so!