My bus story is better than your bus story.

Ask a person who regularly utilizes public transportation, and he or she will likely have a crazy story or two about a memorable experience that took place on a plane, train, or automobile. Remember when our commuter ferry was given an impromptu acrobatic demonstration by a pod of performing porpoises?  How about the traveling brigade of mimes on that flight from Salt Lake, or the time you ended up sharing a cab with a Dumbledore- doppelgänger who rambled the whole way about the "kids these days"? Right. Well, I’ve got one for the books. Raise your hand if you’ve ever first-hand witnessed a bus exorcism.

Thought so.

On Saturday afternoon at 4:00PM I boarded a tro-tro (crowded African minibus, for you first time readers) with the intent of meeting several other volunteers from my organization in the beach town of Cape Coast. They had spent the day there, and I was very eager to join them for the evening and remainder of the weekend. One problem with tro-tros is that they will not leave the station until full. An hour and twenty five minutes later, we finally were on the road. Clearly Cape Coast was not a popular destination that afternoon. Frustrated but satisfied to be finally en route, I pulled out Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides and settled in as comfortably as I could to read peacefully on this 2.5-hour journey.

Within thirty seconds of departure I was startled by a man in the front row who, kneeling on his seat and facing the back of the bus, suddenly began yelling at top volume. The man wore a gaudy purple tunic adorned with silver piping. He was about thirty and at first glance attractive, if you discounted the crazy fire in his eyes and irate froth that was already starting to manifest around his goateed mouth.

I looked around, bewildered, as the other passengers patiently sat at attention. The man threw out a singsong “Hell—oo” to which they replied in unison, “Hi.” And again, like an elementary teacher ensuring attention from a group of children. “Hell—oo.” “Hi.” Suddenly he barked out a command, and the passengers shuffled. I became uncomfortably aware that I was the lone Obruni on the tro-tro, and was situated quite conspicuously smack in the middle seat of the middle row. The shuffling stopped as the passengers procured Bibles from their backpacks and purses. Suddenly the man in purple broke into hymnal song, and was enthusiastically joined by the entire tro-tro. Minus the blonde in the middle who didn’t speak Twi.

I should preface that I am a Christian, and absolutely am not mocking the message that the man was supporting. I was just completely caught off guard by what I was about to encounter, and could not in a million years envision a similar situation on Seattle’s 40 Route that I took from Ballard to South Lake Union all winter. The fact that such a display of religion was so aggressively presented in a public setting seemed crazy to me. It was incredibly invasive, yet so brightly received by the audience. Talk about culture shock.

A few hands-in-the-air, swaying-side-to-side minutes later the singing stopped and the real show began. The preacher began to dramatically dictate from the Bible he held, gesticulating riotously and shouting the words with enough Twi fervor to distract from any light reading I had planned on accomplishing. He leaned into the face of the man in front of him, screaming inches from his face like a drill sergeant. He palmed the head of a preteen boy to his right and looked maniacally into the boy’s eyes, shaking his free fist toward the heavens then back to the boy. I realized that if he outstretched his arm just a bit further, my own head was within palming distance. At this point I decided to duck down and focus on my novel as best as I could.

This proved to be wildly unsuccessful. I read page 141 about seven times over and over again without absorbing a single word, as the preacher became more and more agitated and I could literally feel the force of his words rattling my skull. I was absolutely incredulous that this spectacle was not only tolerated but accepted and responded to by my fellow passengers as well as the driver and the “mate” (the man who handles money and keeps track of stops) of the tro-tro. Every few minutes the “Hell—oo” “Hi” routine was repeated. There were several “HALLELUJAH!”s directed to individuals who answered on cue with chirping “Amen!”s. I felt him aiming his words at me as he switched to English, shaking with passion as he hurled scripture in the direction of the one person not responding to his tirade. I kept my head down, fighting the inappropriate urges to:

a) Request that he employ his “inside voice”

b) Look up and engage in a stare-off that would undoubtedly open doors for him to save my heathen American soul

c) Laugh

As a young girl proudly knelt on her own seat to read a passage from the Bible while the preacher nodded approvingly and interrupted periodically with his own two cents, I whispered to the boy next to me, asking for a piece of paper. I held open his Bible for him while he tore the requested scrap from an exercise notebook procured from a ragged once-pink backpack. For the next several minutes I took notes on the situation, suddenly itching to document the other-worldly peculiarity of the scenario.

As I wrote, a sudden hush fell upon the tro-tro. A women to my left bowed her head and silenced her toddler. I peeked up as the preacher laid his hands on the shoulders of the mate. He suddenly screamed, in English, an astonishing commandment for the demons unseen to free this captured man from the forces of the Evil One. The passengers held their hands up and murmured words of support. The mate raised his head to an outbreak of applause.

The preacher shouted out in Twi again, and everyone shuffled once more, this time procuring cell phones. He barked out his phone number in English as the passengers frantically poked at their phones, saving him as a contact. "I want to be your friend! As a commandment of the Lord I will be your friend!" shouted the preacher. As lovely as a Saturday chat over tea with this gem sounded, I declined the invitation of friendship and left my own phone in my purse.

And suddenly, after 48 minutes (of course I was counting!) the debacle stopped as abruptly as it had started. The preacher turned around and flopped into proper sitting position in the front row. Two girls behind me played Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take the Wheel” from a cell phone and sang along with enthusiasm that, in the US, would only be appropriate for the shower or driving alone late at night. I looked around in disbelief at the Ghanaians who all acted as if this had been a normal commute. When the preacher's cell phone rang and he took the call with a mild-mannered “Peter, hello,” I couldn’t help but bury a muffled laugh into my arm. In response I received a disciplinary stare from the child who had lent me the notebook paper.

The next two hours were entirely uneventful, and without another peep from Purple. This experience topped the charts of strange Ghanaian experiences. I’m proud to now hold the rights to arguably the best public transportation story out there.