So today I’m gonna tell the story behind a scar I still have today that occurred when I was about 12 years old.

In Ghana, it was common for little kids or neighbors to go through our trash and take whatever they might want. To my parents, this was not acceptable and they certainly did not appreciate it. They yelled at the kids and told them not to but nothing really kept them away so we resorted to burning our trash every time we took it out. It was usually my brother’s job but one day my sister Moriah and I did it instead. Now the other thing to know about the trash in Ghana is we never used the trash companies (nobody really did except maybe businesses) so we had to dig our own holes in the ground to put our trash in and then burn it. That’s another reason we started burning it- to save space in the holes we were digging.

Anyways, Moriah and I took out the trash and dumped it into the hole but the trash pit was so full that it wasn’t really a hole anymore so we really just dumped it onto the ground but on top of other trash. Then it was time to burn it. We all grew up accustomed to using matches and building fires for cooking with our friends and what not so this was nothing new to us. Now, the problem that ensued because the trash pit was too full was that the fire from the burning trash was close to reaching the dead grass and brush around the fire pit. I foresaw it catching on fire and burning the whole field or house down so in an effort to fix the problem, I grabbed a branch full of green leaves (because I was aware that green leaves don’t catch on fire and burn like dead ones) and started smacking the fire on the outside so that it wouldn’t spread.

However, there happened to be some plastic on top of the fire, and I don’t know if you’ve ever burned plastic before or not, but it melts and becomes very very hot and it’s gooey almost. Since it has a sticky nature when it’s melted, a piece of plastic stuck to my green branch and since I was using this green branch to continuously smack the fire, I was unaware the plastic had stuck to it. You’ve probably already imagined what happened next but a small piece of the plastic flew off the green branch and landed right onto the back of my right hand. Realizing my hand was actively being burned, I tried to brush the plastic off but it had already pretty much melted into my hand so it ripped my skin off with it. I ran inside and grabbed a bucket of cold water to stick my hand in and let me tell you, it hurt soo bad. I guess it was a third degree burn because you can still very clearly see the scar on my hand from the plastic melting it. Fortunately, I was not too scared to burn trash after that; only wary that I probably shouldn’t try to control fire with a branch of green leaves. I know most of these pictures aren’t necessarily related to the post but it’s just some cool pictures of people from Ghana.