I arrived in Paris by train and had to take a connecting train to my hotel. I looked around and all I saw was the busyness of the environment around me. There were people running to catch their train and those waiting for God knows who, artists playing music or some other performance. Who do I ask?

I remember walking towards a lady who, realising I needed help with directions, pointed to the wall. Of course, these were everywhere, maps of the whole of Paris with the train lines in different colours. How on earth was I supposed to figure out which train to take and which stop was mine? There, I just wished I could hear a trotro mate calling out for passengers so that I could ask him/her, which way and which trotro would take me there.
Trotros are mini buses that are a major means of transport in Ghana and in many other African countries. In Nigeria it is called danfo; in Uganda and in Kenya, it is called matatu and daladala in Tanzania.
Tro is a Ga word which means a meagre sum or small amount of money. Trotros are the cheapest means of transport that the ordinary Ghanaian patronises.

They represent the everyday lives and encounters of the ordinary person in many ways.
It is about movement - from a set off point to a destination - as is life, generally, for all of us. Sometimes, they speed. Sometimes they move too slow because they want to pick enough passengers or simply because people are getting down and passengers complain either way.

It is the same with life -although the clock moves at the same pace every day, it can seem to move too fast when we are having fun or when we have deadlines or seem to move too slow when we want painful moments to pass quickly or when we want our hurts to heal.
Trotros are a great place to meet people: market women, business owners, students, adults, kids, foreign nationals and even animals - fowls and livestock tied on top or inside the trotro with passengers. They can carry all kinds of goods with no place for passengers to place their feet sometimes.
Inside trotros - we hear our languages from all over Ghana. We learn respect or the lack of it for elders, women, the youth and people different from us.
Trotros are breeding grounds for fighting, laughter, donating our lives to God or snatching them back (lol); we sell - local medicine, plantain chips, chewing gum etc - and buy.

We meet people from all walks of life in or around trotros.
People disrespect the environment while sitting in trotros - littering, spitting, peeing around them. There are the sleepers, the thieves, cheats - those who don’t want to pay the fare or mates who don’t want to give the change. There are the comedians, the smiley ones, those who pay for others.
It’s a place to meet the whole of Ghana, to experience every kind of human trait.
The trotrogirl is a blog about every day in the lives of the people we encounter, told from a girl’s perspective. Like in a trotro, we may sit beside someone and either talk with them or not but they get to their destination and that’s it. We know nothing about them - their personalities, beliefs, faith, pain, sometimes nationality and religion.

The trotrogirl is about telling the little tales of these lives to enrich our own. It is about the ordinary and the not-so-ordinary experiences of each day that eventually define our outlook on life.
It is as much about a girl as it is about trotros; as much about Ghana, Africa, as it is about human encounters and the consequences thereof; it is about careers, it is about goals, it is about love, pain, culture.
It is about you and it is about me. It is about our shared humanity.
…because after all, we are all only human.

Phone: +233 (0) 209 979 718
Email: thetrotrogirl@gmail.com
Web: thetrotrogirl.com