Playing Telephone !?!

When I was a kid, kids loved to play the game telephone. One kid would whisper something into someone's ear and then they would pass it on to the next person. At the end of the long line of kids, they would have to say the message out loud. It was amazing to hear how the message was changed by the end.

Well, here in Ghana, someone started a real game of telephone. Someone of Sunday must have been sacred by all the earth quake talk over in Haiti, and decided that there might be one in Ghana. (Forgetting that Ghana does not lay on any fault lines, and has probably never had any kind of major earth-quake). This person proceeded to call friends and tell them of their fears. So, the idea became fact, and spread like a brush fire all over Ghana. I am not kidding. All over Ghana, from Tamale in the North to Accra on the coast people where calling all their neighbors, family, and friends at 3:00am in the morning. Thousands of children and families where herded outside to wait for the shaking to begin.

Finally after about an hour most people got tired of waiting and went back to bed. For the skeptic, here is the news report from the Ghana Homepage:

"Rumor of an impending earthquake that reverberated across the country woke the whole of Ghana up at dawn Monday January 18, 2010.

While no one seems to know the source of the rumor, friends, families and neighbors made phone calls, sent text messages and knocked on doors to send warnings for people to wake up and leave their rooms.

One of my neighbors called and simply said, “they say there will be an earthquake and everyone should get out of their rooms and sit outside,” without giving further details and there was no time to ask questions as he moved to alert other neighbors who were fast asleep.

But Geologist and earthquake expert Prof. E. Otchere-Amamoo formerly of the University of Ghana Centre for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Services told ghanabusinessnews.com on the phone that “the information could not be true.”

He said “it is difficult to predict the precise occurrence of an earthquake,” adding, “unlike an eclipse which is easier to predict because it is the movement of the earth in relation to other planets, earthquakes are movements of the earth happening 500km or 700km deep down in the belly of the earth.”

He also said if indeed there was going to be an earth-quake, it would have happened within the period that people were rudely woken from their sleep. While most Ghanaians are still wondering where the rumor started from, most citizens would have to catch on some sleep on a Monday morning.

Though it is a sad reminder of the hardships that people are facing in Haiti, it is amazing to have such a strong evidence to the power of gossip.