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| A MINI VAN KNOWN IN LOCAL PARLANCE AS TROTRO |
There I was, basking in the sun on the beach, when suddenly, a huge lion with its fiery mane from nowhere, sprung out of the Atlantic ocean towards me. I need to act fast, I thought, or I am minced meat. Then I pulled the toothpick that was clipped between my teeth and stuck it into its neck. “Boom”, the roar of heavy thunder, was the sound that made me jump suddenly out of bed and from an adventurously interesting dream. Oh it was just a dream? Argh!! I checked my clock; it was 4:30am. Damn, I was thirty minutes late in preparing for lectures! I forgot to set the alarm! The cool breeze, the roar of thunder and bright flashes of lightening, signified a rushing rain storm. I had to speed things up or I might get stuck at home. Quickly, I took a shower and without breakfast, off I sped in the heavy wind to stand by the road in hope to catch one of those rickety mini vans fit for the junkyard. They are called Trotro in local parlance. It’s the cheapest and preferred mass transportation type for majority of the people to which I belong.
THE
ROUGH RIDE
I got to the main road
in time before it started showering. I hate raincoats and umbrellas; they make
me feel clumsy so I rarely use them. The showers started getting heavy but
luckily I had a waterproofed leather bag in which my books and phone were safely
tucked. I was one of just three passengers seeking transportation; on a normal
day the place is crowded and it’s usually a dogfight to get an early ride in
one of those rickety vehicles. As the
storm rushed in, I looked left and right and the only available shelter was a
nearby kiosk with a broken roof; I was in danger, I thought. Just when I was
scrambling my brains for the next solution, I saw a bright headlight in the
distance so I decided to wait awhile before taking cover. I heaved a sigh of
relief when the conductor stuck his head out and yelled “37, 37” (the name of
the station I was headed to before I hitch another ride to Legon my original
destination). Without hesitation I sprung into the bus, oblivious of the cut
that a rusty protruding metal from one those improvised seats inflicted on my
right thigh, despite the fact that I was in thick denim pants. As usual of the arrangements
of seats in such vehicles, anyone sitting in the middle would have to give way
to someone sitting at the back should he/she wish to alight at any station! To
avoid the inconvenience, I scrambled my way straight to the back and heaved a
sigh of relief as i sunk relaxingly in the left corner seat. Three more passengers joined in at the next
station and the bus was full. Off we headed to our destination, in slow and
careful motion as the storm raged on. By my side, sat a middle aged woman,
apparently a market woman off to find her daily bread, rain or shine, with a
huge head pan that kept scratching my arm as the rickety ride, swayed left to
right on a bumpy rough road filled with flood and mud. I shall not complain
because I know what it feels like to be the bread winner of the family
especially for single mothers; I assumed maybe she was. My mind was on how to
find shelter at ‘37’ for the rain to subside before I hitch my next ride to
campus. Just then, I felt a drop of water on my head. Usual of such rides there
was bound to be some drops so I ignored it but then it started getting heavy.
Infact, it started pouring in, wetting part of my shirt. Apparently, there was
a long crack on the entire length of the roof covering at the back seat. Infact
we would have been actually better off in the rain at this point. Some of the
passengers came to our defense with heaps of insults and complains towards the
driver; some telling him ‘how all they cared about was collecting the fare and
not fixing their wretched vehicles’. I thought, afterall, there was no
guarantee I wouldn’t get wet at the station anyway so as my usual self, I
stayed calm; strangely enough I was actually enjoying the ‘adventure’ somehow.
I found the whole episode very amusing. At this point, it was virtually raining
on the three of us in the back seat but guess what, instead of saving and
protecting herself, the market woman decided to save me. She requested i leaned
on the headrest of the seat infront and she placed her pan against the leaking
roof over my back. She would hold on to the pan until it was filled with enough
water and then she will slide the windows, throw it out and then put it back
again. How sexy was that? All this while, she was getting wet but never ceased untill
we got to ‘37’. Luckily, the storm had then subsided and it was just drizzling. At the station, I took the pleasure to thank
her and wished her a happy day and good luck in sales. She was called Esi. She
responded by saying that she knew by my accoutrement that, I was a student
hence a potential future leader of this country so she had to protect me.
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| THE INSIDE OF A 'TROTRO' |
LESSON
Esi’s act never really
struck me that much at the time except for the fact that, she was an awesome
woman who cares for people. I also thought then that her response was one of
those usual clichés people used to encourage the young. Not until I left
University and worked in public service for a short period, did her response
hit me really hard. Everyone who has not had the privilege of higher education
expect those who have had that privilege to fix and not compound their problems.
That is why we get education, right? As revenue officer, I together with my
team was tasked to enforce the law that everyone, including the struggling
roadside hawker and market woman paid their taxes. These are women, boys, men
and girls barely making ends meet, yet somehow we had to extract tax from them.
Some of them pay in tears. Some threaten to mug, kill and hide our bodies all
in the belief that we represent a corrupt system that only extracted from the
poor. This was a common feature of our job anyway but I relish these challenges
because they really shaped my life. Once, i had a woman petty trader, come to
me, in tears willing to have her clothes seized as collateral because she
couldn’t afford to pay an amount of ¢10,
an equivalent of about $3 at today’s going rate. I had to let her go at the
risk of losing my job but that would have been a small price to pay. What do
you do as a revenue officer if at the same time, you read stories of multi-nationals engaged in 'smart accounting' to avoid paying the appropriate taxes and
engaging in money laundering? Don’t get me wrong, I am by no means an angel and
there are lots of great people serving very well in public service but I just
thought it was not for me. Corruption, as you may deduce from my narration,
exists in both public and private sectors of every economy. It’s just part of
human nature, the reason for which laws exist.
Besides, Esi’s words
were perpetually painted vividly on my mind. It’s even sadder, when on a daily basis, hawkers
and market people are chased out of the streets by law enforcement but come
back to extract daily tolls from these same traders. By all means laws must be
obeyed to install order in the city but this is the creation of the educated,
myself included, who have failed to fix a basic social problem through good
planning and implementation. That was
how I was eventually pushed into fulfilling my long term ambition of being an
entrepreneur with the hope of fixing problems and helping others in the process.
With graduate unemployment on the rise, entrepreneurship is the way to go
anyway. I admit it’s not an easy road to travel but I am enjoying the
challenges so far because they always present something new to do.
CONCLUSION
In my opinion, any form of education and its
benefits therein, that does not engender social change is waste because the
totality of the deprived among the world population, exceed the totality of the
privileged. If you’re privileged and you help the under-privileged, you will be
helping yourself in the long-run. Do you have a story that may have influenced
your life in anyway? I would be honoured to hear it.
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