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It was daybreak and the workers were getting themselves on the crew boat that was to take them to the oilrig stationed twelve kilometers off the shoreline of Ghana’s South West Coast. The sun was still trying desperately to poke its head through the gathering grey clouds and all along the seashore, there were fishermen pulling in their canoes; with the current craze for outboard motors, the noise was deafening in some parts. The first boat filled up with about nineteen men, all dressed casually with their protective helmets and boots, lunch pails and sometimes a backpack. Some of them would be returning that evening but most of them would stay on the rig for another three weeks. The men all knew one another and as they greeted each other, there was a sense of shared purpose in their smiles, their easy taunting and the faraway look in their eyes. The boat eased away from the shoreline and towards a rig that looked very small in the distance but gradually loomed larger. Few of them looked across to the rig as they approached; most were playing cards or regaling one another with their sexual encounters over the weekend. As the boat got closer to the rig, the men gathered their belongings and got ready to jump into the air tugger that was being lowered from the deck. This was a big basket that transported the workers from boat to rig as opposed to a helicopter that would have deposited them directly on the rig platform. As they climbed out, one of them turned to the others and asked in a Chinese dialect:
“Where is Li?”
The others looked around. A few shrugged and then one older man shouted back to Guang, the man who’d asked the question.
“I guess he didn’t show up. I hadn’t noticed because he’s often quiet anyway. Did anyone see him last night?”
No one responded. Theirs was the first crew boat of the day so it was likely they’d see him in one of the later boats. The tugger took just about a minute to take the first group up to the Oil Rig deck and before long, Li was forgotten. Another day had begun at the Freedom Oil Fields.