Man vs. Bush Fowl

It's been some time since my last blog post as many of my faithful readers have reminded me an absolutely unannoying amount of times. My excuses for this are that I have been travelling about quite a bit, my charger for my lap top fried, and there's been a whole bunch of goings on recently. These are all copouts, but I'm going to stand by them. As you can imagine, due to the amount of time that has passed since my last blog post there is a copious of amount of things for me to tell you about that have happened in my life in the time since. So much in fact that it is a bit overwhelming and I'm not going to discuss any of it. I'll instead, at the suggestion of an admirably disinterested colleague of mine, pick a random trivial experience I had in the last couple weeks and dramatise it to the point that it satisfactorily fills my blog length requirements.

First let's set the scene: Early morning, I am on my way to the nearby city to embark on a routine trip. This one happens to be a largely pointless one to Kumasi that is only happening because the Peace Corps Food Security Committee meeting was rescheduled for the 5th time. This shouldn't be a major issue for most PCVs as we rarely have enough to do to actually experience scheduling conflicts but I have the privelege of being one of the few PCVs who has no cell phone service, thus making it essentially impossible to reach me with any important time sensitive information. Thus, I did not find out about the scheduling change until the evening before I was about to leave on my trip across Ghana. Because I had already told my landlady that some of her relatives who are visiting for a funeral could stay in my house I was basically homeless for the weekend. That brings us to where our story begins.

On my way to Koforidua (Kof) to catch a car to Kumasi to pass this homeless period in my life. I catch a car from the junction near my house. Anywhere in Ghana, the only form of transportation is by hailing a taxi or a lorry (a van with a bunch of seats in it.) The road to Kof that passes my junction is rather terrifying. Windy, barely wide enough for two cars to pass abreast and that doesn't take into account the massive potholes that cars and lorries are constantly swerving around. Ghanaian drivers handle these challenges by maintaining a speed never dropping below 60mph. We are about 15 minutes away from Kof, I'm maintaining my zen-like state of terror that I like to assume when driving on the road to Kof, when JACKPOT! Standing in the road are not one, but TWO, bush fowl. To understand the situation you must first understand that in Ghana bushmeat is a delicacy. Bushmeat is essentially anything that is not chicken, goat, sheep, or beef and is typically something that is caught in the bush (forest.) Some people are hunters, some use traps, some like the fish in a barrel method of setting a forest fire and then shooting everything that comes out. Either way, bush meat is their (and now my) jam.

So these two bush fowl (basically wild chickens, pheasantish in appearance) are chilling in the road directly in the trajectory of our taxi. Now any self-respecting taxi or lorry driver will immediately put his life and the lives of his passengers in danger to hit the birds at all costs. This is universally supported by all Ghanaians. So the driver does just that. He guns it at them and as they take flight in a direction perpindicular to the car he swerves and clips one of them. SUCCESS! But wait. The bird isn't dead. It is hopping along in the road behind the car, nursing what looks like a broken wing. So the passenger in the front seat sees this, and before the car has even slowed down, dives out, and takes off down the road after the bird. The bird sees this and is understandably terrified, as I would be. It hops away from this crazed bipedal predator chasing after it and actually manages to get airborne. However, its bum wing is preventing it from gaining altitude and is struggling along about four feet off the ground.

Now the stretch of road where this is all going down is the 50 yard long straightaway in the middle of an S-bend. As you can assume, a series of 90 degree bends in no way precludes the 60mph minimum speed requirement on these roads. So this guy is chasing this bird that is flying across both lanes of this road. Somehow the cars that come around the bends from both directions manage to stop in time and join us in watching the scene unfold. The guy is gaining on the bird who is flying along the edge of the road. As he runs he picks up a cassava branch laying in a bundle on the side of the road. Whoever collected those branches would gladly give it up for its new purpose. The man has the branch and just as the bird is about to veer off and head into the woods, gets into range and with a mighty two handed cut hits the bird out of the air like a tennis ball. The crowd goes wild. The man walks back triumphant holding his prize high over his head, surrounded by an aura of victory that I don't think has been seen in this world since the days of the samurai. The driver greeted the man with the eyes of a Roman wife greeting her husband upon his glorious return from a years long conquest of the barbarians. We congratulated him upon his graduation from man to god and we continued on harrowing journey. However, we all felt, or I imagine so, that if this fateful trip was to be our last, it was worth it.

This is Ghana. Now, I will return to my work here, the amount of which prevents me from providing you lovely people with a more consistent supply reading material on everyone's favorite topic, me.