A trotro is a van used for public transportation. There's a driver, a "mate" who takes your cash, and then as many people packed shoulder-to-shoulder as can possibly fit in one van. I liked taking them in part because I was a novelty - there was never another white person in a trotro with me - so people would be very inquisitive about my business and I was able to ask them a lot of questions.
During one ride I was just sitting in the back, crammed up against a few stranger's shoulders, when I heard a bleat. I looked under my seat. There were two goats being transported along with us. And as I learned from personal experience, trotros don't stop for goats with full bladders. That was about a two-hour ride.
I feel like part of Ghanaian culture is getting up in everybody's business. On a particular trotro ride, a woman was speaking on her cell in Twi. Suddenly everybody (strangers, mind you) on the bus got agitated and started yelling in Twi. Some were yelling directly into her phone. I asked the man next to me what was going on, and he said, "she told the person she was going south, but she is going north. We are telling him she is lying." Can you imagine if something similar had happened on a subway in New York City? While it was funny, I really hoped she wasn't trying to escape a DV situation or something.
This one didn't happen to me, but it was in the news. There was a man on a trotro who opened a Coke, slipped a pill into it, and offered the woman next to him a sip. She declined. He asked her several more times, more forcefully. She continued to refuse. Eventually, the other people in the trotro told him to stop trying to make her drink it and to drink it himself. I guess the peer pressure was too great, because he did. And it knocked him out cold. For two days. They drove the trotro to a police station, and he woke up behind bars. Sometimes getting up in everybody's business turns out to be a good thing.
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