Dreams Do Come True

I do not know why hitchhiking is so appealing to me. Whenever I go anywhere, I secretly hope that some component of my transportation plan will fail me and that I will be forced to hitchhike. About this time last year, this is exactly the situation with which I was faced.

After a morning of service learning work, my classmates and I decided to bike into town and go to the market. This involved borrowing enough bicycles for all of us. Most got ahold of a bike, but some of us were going to have to go in pairs.

I partnered with a tiny Japanese girl, Terumi. Needless to say, I was to do the pedalling and she was to ride on the back. This is one of those times when I overestimated my own strength.

Had I been taking a bike path while riding a fancy road bike, carrying Terumi would have been easy enough. Using a single speed bike on a hilly dirt road in Ghana was not as easy. In fact, I gave up as we began to climb the third hill. As it would likely have been physically impossible for Terumi to pedal both of us up the hill, we began the long walk into town (10 kilometers, I was told).

Not 5 minutes into our walk,a motorcyclist skidded to a dirt cloud of a stop in front of us and waited until our walking feet reached him.

"White girls, what are you doing?"
"We're going to town, but we only have one bike."
"Oh! One will ride on my moto!"

Terumi and I looked at each other. My dream of hitchhiking was about to come true. Terumi wanted the bike, so I hopped on the motorcycle. This is the first and only time I have hitchhiked. It is also the first and only time I have been on a motorcycle. I found both experiences to be most enjoyable.

A friend who we passed along the way realized that it was me on the back of the motorcycle in time to take this picture.