Cape Coast continued/I could get used to this

I left the group early on Sunday morning to go visit the family I have been staying with sometimes in a town called Fadama. Its interesting because I’m pretty sure the departure times for most busses are pre-determined, but they won’t really leave until all the seats are filled, so we ended up waiting at the station in Cape Coast for an hour before leaving for Accra. Its funny because as much as I expected this, the whole not knowing when we were going to leave thing was a liiittle unsettling. It wasn’t that bad, but I still hadn’t completely internalized the patient “things happen when they happen” mindset, so I guess this was good practice. Anyways, I ended up having a really great conversation about Ghanaian and American culture with the man next to me (Eric). He was just as curious about the US as I was about Ghana so our discussion made the 2 hour trip pass by pretty fast.
Once we got to Accra, I had to catch a trotro to Fadama but wasn’t sure of exactly where to find one. The bus let us down at Nkrumah Circle, which is a common destination for lots of public transportation. It’s a pretty big area with a market, post office, and a bunch of other stuff I have yet to explore so finding the cars to Fadama would have been a project without Eric’s help. I was ready to go for it and just ask a million people like I usually do, but he insisted on showing me where they were. It turns out that we had to cross a bridge over the market, then walk through part of the market, and then do the asking around thing where the trotros were parked because there were probably close to 100 of them in the area. We found one really fast because people just pointed in the direction we needed go when we said "Fadama", but its just so amazing how people automatically wanted to help us out and went out of their way to do so simply because they wanted to. It's like how Eric walked around with me for ten minutes just to make sure I found my way. This wasn’t the first time someone took my hand and lead me in the right direction either…even taxi drivers…if you’re going to a restaurant or something and you don’t know exactly where it is, they’ll drive around and help you find it and not charge any more money. And people don’t treat it like some huge favor because its just what they do, they look out for each other simply because they exist and it’s the way things work. It was almost unbelievable when I first got here, but it’s becoming a very heartening reality.