When Alan and I got home from a dinner out last night, we saw on Facebook that a cargo plane had crashed on a road near the airport. It was really raining heavily last night and while Alan and his boss, Rob, were grilling meat out in the rain, they heard a really loud plane and even commented that it would not be safe to land in this weather. What they probably heard was this Allied Cargo plane, coming to Accra from Nigeria, overshooting the runway and skidding through airport cement barriers and onto a very busy road and straight into a tro tro, or what is a minibus used for public transport here. These are some pictures I found on various websites about the crash.
The media reports say 10 people were killed, all passengers on the minibus, but it seems that it would be a miracle if not more people lost their lives. This is a road we take every week and is right next to residential neighborhoods where many of our friends live. As tragic as it is that people lost their lives, I consider it a miracle that this was not more of a disaster. This particular road is usually loaded with cars and tro tros so how only one tro tro was in the plane's path, I don't quite understand...especially on a rainy night when traffic was sure to have been worse than normal. And on top of that, tro tros, especially on rainy nights are usually loaded with passengers, sometimes with up to 20 people. Of course I immediately wondered what sorts of people were on the tro tro, where there children and babies as there usually are? Despite the unusual nature of this tragedy, unfortunately tragedy comes in so many forms and is so common in Ghana, I wonder how the Ghanaian people understand something like this. People lose their lives all the time for totally preventable reasons here. These are some recent examples:
1) a woman lost her life trying to find a hospital that would deliver her twins because doctors had recently gone on strike. Her husband took her to hospital after hospital and when she eventually arrived at one that would agree to help her, it was too late.
2) a tro tro filled with passengers was crushed by truck that was overloaded and not properly balanced. The truck simply fell over on top of a tro tro killing everyone.
3) the other day, Alan saw a dead body on the new highway that was just completed (thanks to the American government funding the project) because this man, as hundreds of other Ghanaians do, was trying to cross the 4 lane super highway over the barrier at night. He was propelled through the front and back windshield of a car that was probably going 70 miles an hour. Despite pedestrian bridges being built over the highway, people do not want to walk the 5 minutes to one and instead risk their lives crossing a major highway, sometimes with their children on their back.
4) our friend's driver's daughter was killed after being hit by a car...but not directly after. You see she had a broken arm and was attended to in a hospital but they never checked for internal bleeding and she bled to death later that day. Her father showed up for work the next day.
These examples just go on and on and so death here is somehow not looked at like we see it in the Western world. Most of these events get shrugged off as part of life in Ghana when you ask Ghanaians about them. In fact funerals here are not somber and sad like in the US but are big parties where people sing and dance and spend lots of money they don't have to throw a big bash.
So today, as Alan and I drove near the plane crash, we were stopped in traffic for quite a while and noticed the hoards of people who simply came from all over the city to try to get a glimpse of the crashed plane. People brought their children, carried cameras around their necks, and bought snacks along the way. If you hadn't known about the crash, would you have thought there was a street carnival going on.
The media reports say 10 people were killed, all passengers on the minibus, but it seems that it would be a miracle if not more people lost their lives. This is a road we take every week and is right next to residential neighborhoods where many of our friends live. As tragic as it is that people lost their lives, I consider it a miracle that this was not more of a disaster. This particular road is usually loaded with cars and tro tros so how only one tro tro was in the plane's path, I don't quite understand...especially on a rainy night when traffic was sure to have been worse than normal. And on top of that, tro tros, especially on rainy nights are usually loaded with passengers, sometimes with up to 20 people. Of course I immediately wondered what sorts of people were on the tro tro, where there children and babies as there usually are? Despite the unusual nature of this tragedy, unfortunately tragedy comes in so many forms and is so common in Ghana, I wonder how the Ghanaian people understand something like this. People lose their lives all the time for totally preventable reasons here. These are some recent examples:
1) a woman lost her life trying to find a hospital that would deliver her twins because doctors had recently gone on strike. Her husband took her to hospital after hospital and when she eventually arrived at one that would agree to help her, it was too late.
2) a tro tro filled with passengers was crushed by truck that was overloaded and not properly balanced. The truck simply fell over on top of a tro tro killing everyone.
4) our friend's driver's daughter was killed after being hit by a car...but not directly after. You see she had a broken arm and was attended to in a hospital but they never checked for internal bleeding and she bled to death later that day. Her father showed up for work the next day.
These examples just go on and on and so death here is somehow not looked at like we see it in the Western world. Most of these events get shrugged off as part of life in Ghana when you ask Ghanaians about them. In fact funerals here are not somber and sad like in the US but are big parties where people sing and dance and spend lots of money they don't have to throw a big bash.
So today, as Alan and I drove near the plane crash, we were stopped in traffic for quite a while and noticed the hoards of people who simply came from all over the city to try to get a glimpse of the crashed plane. People brought their children, carried cameras around their necks, and bought snacks along the way. If you hadn't known about the crash, would you have thought there was a street carnival going on.
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