Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Bird Watcher: Peace Corps Stud

Some folks were interested, so I thought I'd inch this thread along a bit. Here's the map, from the hike. Not exactly to scale, but not bad for a hand-drawn map long before Google. Bompata (my village) was three miles off the two-lane sort-of paved main highway. Now this highway looks pretty good on Google, but back then it was a sort of heavily traveled slalom course of random washouts and potholes, driven at high speeds by aging, overloaded vehicles running on bald tires. Highway collisions is the leading cause of death of Peace Corps Volunteers, and the rule was NEVER ride up front with the driver, even though as a White person you would usually be invited.



Twelve miles from the Bompata/highway intersection to Konongo, in which market I would often shop. At that time a Dutch Contractor was building a structure at the Agogo Presbyterian Mission Hospital. One morning I was in Konongo early during the dry season and this guy appears out of the dust on a white Yamaha 500cc dual purpose dirt bike, loping casually along the main drag, scattering the sheep and chickens before him. Easily the coolest motorcycle I have ever seen

Twelve miles to Agogo from Konongo, a twenty miles walk from Agogo to the Eve (pron. "Eweh") village across the Afram (??) River. Usually when going to Agogo I took whatever motorized transport came along via Konongo which IIRC would be a two to three-hour journey. One time I walked direct from Bompata by dead reckoning east to the Agogo Road (paved), a distance of about fifteen miles.It weren't remote by that route or anything, just dirt roads connecting villages two or three miles apart. I did run into some of my students in their home villages.

I could do that walk because it was in the rainy season, and everyone with a corrugated tin roof (common, left over from colonial days) collected rainwater. In the dry season I woulda been SOL; muddy creek water loaded with the schistome flatworm parasite. I already wrote earlier in this thread how during the long dry season of '82/'83 I was obliged to walk up the mountain two miles to Wankyi every evening for water, where providentially a German outfit had earlier that year drilled a borehole well w/ hand pump - safe water . I also posted how I would walk back down the two miles through the forest after dark. A student's family in Wankyi, subsistence farmers, let me bucket-bathe in a room in their compound and would always insist on feeding me. This was long before the sky was littered with space junk, but in those dark skies, while sharing a modest repast with a village family, I would look up and watch a satellite or two crawl across the sky overhead.

So every night until the rains came again I made that after dark hike back down the mountain, no lantern or flashlight, a thing no local would ever do. They stated a fear of witchcraft but prob'ly merely common sense in a place where apex predators had originally abounded and poisonous snakes still did. Moonlit nights, so bright you could read by it, so bright you could see the forest was green. Moonlit night you could hear the all the voices and the recreational drumming coming from my village from two miles away. New moon nights, pitch dark, quiet as a tomb.

Looking back, the biggest hazard to be doing that, along with black cobras and night adders, was the risk of rabid dogs. Not an unusual occurrence. I never did have a problem though.