A Black Wednesday for Ghana

I started writing this some hours ago but I had to pause because my mind wasn’t in sync with my hands, and my fingers just kept shaking. Today will definitely be recorded as one of the most sorrowful days ever in the history of Ghana. A Black Wednesday indeed.

All my years in this country, I’ve never heard of any aircraft crashing in any way. There have been times we’ve heard stories of successful emergency landings due to bad weather or other reasons. But for the very first time, there’s been a helicopter crash, and the pictures from the crash are just so traumatizing.

From what I heard, the helicopter went missing for about an hour and was later identified in a community in flames. From the videos we saw, 7 people in the crash got burnt into ashes. Just one could be identified as human. And even with that body, only an autopsy would tell us who he was.

The number of people in the helicopter was 8. The minister for defense, the minister for environment, science and technology, and 6 others, including a squadron, a flying officer, and a sergeant who just got married. The videos are just too hard to watch and I can’t imagine how it’ll be for the families of these people.

I've been thinking about this all day and I keep thinking about how we complain when the sun is too hot. How we can’t eat foods that are too hot. How we run for our lives when we mistakenly enter a place too hot. Now imagine someone actually not being able to complain, cry for help, or run for his life and just quietly burning into ashes.

The fact that these people are all breadwinners of their families makes it even more sad. Just imagine how the wife of the sergeant who just got married would be going through right now? Oh gosh! I heard that these men are actually also very generous and have been taking care of people, paying the bills of people’s surgeries and now they are gone.

We also heard that the president was supposed to go for that event but he decided to go for a church program, only for this to happen. I actually thought it was a lie until I saw the flyer and remembered that truly, there’s a national program for Pastors and their spouses this week for Assemblies of God Church, Ghana. And now, people have started a theory that the president was probably the target.

But on a more serious note, life is indeed fragile. Like they woke up today and told their families they were leaving home to feed home, only not to return at all. And some of them never even probably got the chance to say goodbye. It really is a very sad day for Ghana and I pray we get the strength to go through this week mourning the national tragedy that has befallen us.