Early morning call...
on Jude Timothy (Ghana), 19/Jan/2010 11:21, 34 days ago
Sometimes when I’m out something so surreal happens that I can actually imagine the word ‘blog’ written all over it. And as I’m living through the experience I find myself running words and phrases around in my head in preparation for recording it here. This was very much one such occasion, so here we go...One of the reasons I like Ghana as much as I do (apart from the weather that is...) is that just when I think I’ve exhausted all there is to say about the place this sort of thing happens. Around 4am this morning I was woken by a disturbance outside the flat. I could hear voices and the sound of car engines. I lay in bed trying to get back to sleep when someone rang our door bell. To start I ignored it primarily because it was 4 in the morning but also because the bell itself does in fact resemble a light switch and is often pressed by mistake. I figure that if people really wanted us they would ring again, so when they did, I reluctantly got up and went to answer the door. Needless to say nobody wasthere.However I was up and still being curious as to the reason for the commotion outside went to the balcony to try and figure what was going on. From where I was I could see pretty much the entire inhabitants of our building on the‘lawn’ below me. Some people had indeed moved their cars to the road or open ground away from the apartment block. My first thought was fire... but there were no obvious signs of a blaze and there seemed no sense of panic or urgency from the assembled crowd. In fact it was quite the contrary, everyone was very calm, laid back... in short very Ghanaian.Further investigation was required so Mike, Aiden, a friend who was visiting, and I trooped downstairs to do just that. On the way down we met one of our neighbours who informed us that there had been a warning that an earthquake was about to shake the city. Now although I am no seismologist I do know enough to realise that earthquakes normally only occur at the point under the Earth’s surface where two tectonic plates meet, and that the nearest of these ‘fault lines’ to Ghana is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. So it was with some bemusement that we descended to meet our neighbours. People where milling around in various states of dress not seeming in any real panic. Rather we were greeted by a collection of puzzled, confused and bewildered faces on our arrival at the scene.Whilst Mike and Aiden went to enquire of the neighbours where the warning had originated I walked the streets to gauge the extent of the‘panic’ on neighbouring houses and apartment blocks. And sure enough outside all the buildings people where milling around some with suitcases or moving cars to presumably ‘safer’ locations. I returned to the others wondering if I had time to return to the flat to recover my most valuable possession, Barnaby, from the building before it collapsed to be greeted by Mike with the reason why everyone found themselves outside, at four in the morning, in their pyjamas.It appears that an anonymous text message was doing the rounds claiming that NASA, the American space agency and the BBC, had issued an Earthquake warning. The message suggested that“Cosmic Rays” emanating from “Mars” would strike the Earth between 12:30 and 3:00 (so seemingly it now being 4:30 we were safe) that morning and result in a natural disaster with catastrophic consequences.To their credit there was neither panic nor mass hysteria but as I have found as the day has progressed much of the city, and indeed country, spent some part of the night out on the street waiting for the drama to unfold.Now before you scoff at the absurdity of it all, and the words coming to mind are something along the lines of ignorant, uneducated, superstitious, backward... then shame on you... think what you would have done in the same position. Admittedly the‘Cosmic Rays’ part of the story is a little incredulous I concede but in light of the recent events in Haiti and the ensuing humanitarian disaster being played out on televisions screens across the world, would you have stayed tucked up in the comfort of your own bed not allowing this ‘mumbo jumbo’ to affect your sleep or taken your nearest and dearest to the safety of the garden ‘just to be on the safe side’... makes you think doesn’t it !!!