After a long silence....

Friday, August 08, 2008

I’ve been working in Jamestown for nearly five days now. Jamestown is (I believe) the poorest community where we do work. It is certainly the most crowded and run-down of our four neighborhoods. It’s also the most difficult to work in. The neighborhood is close to the ocean, which also makes it the furthest from our house in East Legon. Because I want to avoid the midday sun, I wake up at a grueling 5:30 AM, and leave the house before six. The car takes about forty minutes to get to Tema Station. This is the commercial center of the city, and the dirt grounds of the vast car/bus station are illegally crowded with vendors selling everything from fruit to cheap clothing to electronic equipment. From here I walk for twenty minutes down the highway that runs along the coast—past the memorial park dedicated to Kwame Nkrumah, the former Parliamentary House, the Bank of Ghana, and the Supreme Court. From there I cross past the downtown Post Office, and continue onto a dirt alleyway that brings me abruptly into the heart of Usshertown/Jamestown.

One of the first things I noticed when I came here last summer was that Jamestown seemed to be overflowing with people. It’s partially a function of the construction of the houses. In Nima, most of the houses are built as square compounds around an enclosed private courtyard, which tends to mask the crowdedness of the area. In Jamestown, many houses open directly onto the street, and the roads seem to belong to and be used by everyone and everything except motor vehicles. Besides this, I would hazard a guess that unemployment is high in Jamestown. Finally, there seems to be a cultural difference here—people are very much into each other’s business, and not too modest either. Something I automatically associate with Jamestown is hoards of soapy kids bathing in the streets in the morning.

I walk the block or so to Tete’s place quickly, trying to avoid attention (impossible, but I try anyways) and hastily duck into the small passage that marks the entrance to his compound. The area serves some privacy, although I still have to bear the attention of the four or five families that occupy the two-story house. Tete is our most reliable field assistant in Jamestown, and although he’s somewhat dodgy and speaks little English, he knows his way around and knows people in the area as well. I wait for about thirty minutes (Nana is chronically late) and watch (and am watched by) everyone in the small alleyway dividing the house from the open kitchen.

Collecting data in Jamestown is always a struggle, because every other person in the street wants to know what you are doing there, who you work for, and why. Not everyone is open to having strangers in the neighborhood, and Tete spends most of his time assuring everyone we run into that we are just studying “air pollution.” (Fortunately, most people don’t question why we are looking at the gutters if our interest is the quality of the air, as I haven’t been able to explain properly to Tete that my project deals with water and sanitation. Either that, or he thinks that we will arouse less suspicion if we stick with air pollution. Hard to say.)

Today we had to stage a bit of a covert operation to get the work done. We were marking the locations of the public toilets, baths, and dumping sites—all pretty sensitive subjects around here. So we agreed that as we walked around the area, Tete would quietly point out the locations to Nana, who would discretely use the GPS (pretending it was a phone) to get the location as Tete and I continued past. Then we would all reconvene in a less suspicious area and I would jot down the information. The upside was that I got to see the condition of the facilities, albeit from a distance, without attracting any unwanted questions and attention. It seems to have worked, which means that I won’t be back here for another while (a fact which both saddens and relieves me…Jamestown may be difficult but it is also, in its own way, an interesting and rewarding place to work).

Crazy Voyages

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Michael left this morning, meaning that starting tonight I will be all alone in the East Legon house again. However, Raphael has decided that he will leave all his equipment here and base his work out of the house during the daytime, which means that I will have company at least until he leaves for his studies in Cyprus. It has been raining for much of the past week, which has held up a lot of my research. I’ve finished the majority of my indoor sampling, except in Jamestown, which I will hopefully be able to start tomorrow.

Fatah invited us to the wedding of one of his cousins in Nima on Sunday, which was exciting for Michael since he hadn’t been to a traditional wedding here. We ended up spending a lot of the day hanging around at Fatah’s because we missed the morning celebrations and Ghanaian weddings (at least the Muslim weddings in Nima/Mamobi) tend to involve a lot of sitting and waiting. But the baby was there for endless amusement, and Michael and I practiced our skills at balancing things on our heads.

We were supposed to leave for Volta on Monday (two day trip) but unfortunately had to stay home because I got sick Sunday evening and was unable to sleep for much of the night. So I stayed home and slept in the morning while Michael went to town to get some cheap jeans (I should think about this…), and then we finished the last few episodes of the fourth season of (bootlegged) 24. Fortunately I was fine by afternoon and we decided to head out on Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday, after waiting most of the morning for the tro-tro we took to leave Tema Station in Accra (this took forever), we finally were on the road to Volta. We had decided to visit Tafi Atome, which is a small village where they have a monkey sanctuary. We got off at a small junction about 5k from the village itself, and I started heading down this dirt road. Michael thought I was crazy, but the sign was there, and we were really close to an area where Ari and I traveled last summer. We walked through a few small villages along the way before we arrived in the village. There were great views of Mt. Gemi, a small mountain where Ari and I hiked last summer.

Atome is set up well for ecotourism, and has a small guesthouse where visitors can stay in the village. For a ridiculously low price ($14 each) we could stay there, get all our meals, and see the monkeys. We arrived just before 2pm, and since the monkeys wouldn’t be out until after 4pm, we decided to see if there was something else we could do until then. We ended up discovering that we could rent bikes, so we decided to bike to another village in the area where they weave kente cloth. Mike hadn’t seen that, so we decided to go. It ended up taking just over an hour to get there. It was so great to be able to go cycling, even though the bikes they gave us had no gears and Michael’s chain kept falling off every time he hit a bump in the road.

The kente village, Tafi Aguibe, was smaller and although it seemed that its residents would like to open up to more tourism, they don’t receive many visitors. Almost everyone in the village weaves the cloth, and each family has its own distinctive pattern. Our guides estimated that there were, in all, probably upwards of 300 kente weavers in the village. We saw some boys as young as seven or eight weaving, but not many women (our guides explained that this was because women have other tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and harvesting to carry out). Our guides asked that we say hello to some of their friends and relatives in Atome as we headed back. We were racing against the sun during the return trip, and I managed to capture some beautiful photos.

Unfortunately, we missed the monkeys that come out in the late afternoon and evening, much to the disappointment of both us and our hosts. We had a quiet dinner in another part of Atome (served by a really adorable girl of around ten years old). We then spent an awkward hour or so in the town bar. There were very few women but a lot of men dancing kind of sketchily. Anyways…

In the morning we got up early to see the monkeys. We purchased some bananas for our guides, and the monkeys came down to get them. If you held onto the banana, the monkeys would try to grab it before giving up and peeling it from your hand before dashing away. The monkeys eventually came back towards the village, and I almost got a picture of one of the monkeys prowling around near a goat on its hind legs.

After breakfast we really wanted to get going to see if we could get to Mount Afadjato to hike it before heading back to Accra. Unfortunately, transportation was not in our favor. We were going to catch a ride out of town, but the driver came back to tell us that he was going to wait until 9:00 for another family that was heading to Hohoe. At this point, I figured we weren’t going to make it in time, so we decided to revise our plans and hike up to a waterfall on the other side of the main road. After hiking back to Logba Alekpeti (the junction we had been dropped at the day before) we started up the road to find the junction to get to Logba Tota, the village with the waterfall.

Unfortunately, we were intercepted by a man who told us he was going to Logba Tota, and that he would be our guide. Even though we told him many times that we didn’t need a guide, that we weren’t going to pay him, and that we would rather walk alone, he insisted on accompanying us up the mountainside. As we lagged behind him, he would periodically shout “We ah goin to LOGBA TOTA!” and some other incomprehensible words about how he couldn’t understand why we didn’t trust him, that his wife would make us some chops when we got to the village, etc. He would also come up to us periodically and point at a tattoo on his arm bearing his name and the name of the town, and tell us that that was his passport. He ended up taking us up this crazy winding path that went straight up the hillside and avoided some of the detours on the road.

Logba Tota turned out to be a beautiful mountain village facing Mt. Gemi. In town we were able to finally get him to leave us, and we got a much more amiable guide (provided by the town tourism board) who agreed to take us to the waterfall. We hiked about two kilometers down into the nearby forest to get to the waterfall. Although its size is not as impressive as Wli (the major waterfall that Ari and I went to last summer) it is much more beautiful because it is contained in this little cove-like depression among the trees. We ended up wading into the pool (supposedly safe for swimming, and I seem fine now) and up into this cave where we saw some bats and a stalagmite. Then we got to climb under the falls and swim back. It was so great to be able to take a swim…sometimes I feel like it’s the only thing I want to do with the weather here.

After that we had to get back to the junction quickly so that we could get back to Accra, as Michael was leaving the next day to head back to the States. So we started down and got stuck in a torrential downpour, and managed to soak our only dry clothes in spite of rain jackets (we got the other ones wet at the waterfall). So we had a very wet and slightly chilly journey back to the city, but the trip was still great!

Gutter Disaster

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Yesterday, the thing I have feared ever since I arrived here finally happened—I fell into a gutter. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen the way I expected it (taking a clumsy misstep while working and treading in two or three inches of murky water). Instead, it happened last night as Michael and I walked back from dinner at PizzaInn (white-person land) with a few Harvard students staying at the University. We were walking back to the house, against traffic. I was hoping we could cross over to the other side, because there was a slightly wider margin on that side. The traffic was heavy, so I took a step back, and all of a sudden, realized I had fallen and slid about ten feet down the side of one of the biggest gutters in Legon. Lovely.

Some other men heard Michael shouting down to me and came over to help drag me out of the pile of trash and up the steep slope back onto the roadside. Fortunately I came out with only a few scratches and a lot of dirt. I didn’t even lose any of the groceries that I was carrying!

It’s hard to believe that I’ve now been here almost two weeks. I’ve gotten a lot done, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that I am ¼ of the way through my trip. I guess I should also realize that in a week Michael will be heading home, and basically every other American I know will have returned home a week after that. At which point I will still have almost a month in Accra ahead of me.

We also had a torrential downpour yesterday—the first I’ve experienced here in a while. Michael, Nana, and I were sampling in Asylum Down. We fortunately arrived at this woman’s house as it really started coming down hard, and huddled in the entrance to her house as she and Nana complained about politicians and their inability to help people out of poverty. Basically, she was saying that if she ever met the president here, she would kill him, the way he is killing the people of Ghana. A little extreme, but she made a point.

It continued to rain as we reached the main road and another household where we intended to sample. The rain didn’t seem like it wanted to let up, so we decided to wait and head back another day. As we left, I caught a glance at the main gutter; it was already a wild rush of brown water and at least halfway up the ditch’s cement sides. Nana tells me that this area is severely flood-prone because of the gutter, and even pointed out a few houses that have their front steps built over a cement wall that surrounds the whole house, a moat that could keep out nearly a meter of unwanted water.

Super Shopping

Monday, July 21, 2008

In Accra, the journey home also serves as a drive-thru shopping experience with variety comparable to that of your local WalMart. Today, on the forty minute journey from Asylum Down to the eye clinic near the East Legon house, I had the meager choice of: water, plantain chips, soda, apples, soy milk, Nescafe, donuts, matches, bread, soccer balls, sandwiches, boiled peanuts, crackers, plastic buckets, mangoes, dishrags, biscuits, wallets, bananas, sunglasses, chewing gum, and individual plastic cutouts depicting all the letters of English alphabet. The hawkers swarm into traffic at every red light, or even amidst slowly moving traffic, shouting the name of their product and running after the slowly moving vehicles to grab coins from the consumer. Some of the street vendors appear to be no more than ten years old. Pure water sachets are primarily sold by children, while women sell the plantains and other food products from baskets balanced precariously on top of their heads. Young men sell sunglasses stitched to cardboard sheets and soda cans out of large plastic trash bags.

The past few days I have been doing most of my work in Asylum Down, our middle-income neighborhood in the heart of Accra. The area is an interesting mix—large hotels, fancy banks, and smaller apartment buildings line the major highway, while shacks cluster on the side of the main gutter just a few minutes away. It’s the same gutter that runs through Nima/Mamobi further upstream, but here it is broader and deeper. Where it runs under the highway you can see squatting shadows; people use this area as a public toilet. In some places, the giant cement slabs that line its sides have broken away, and lie discarded and crumbling further downstream. There is evidence of extreme erosion in these areas, a footprint of the heavy flow that must come through during the rainy season. I no longer hesitate to believe Kilu’s stories about cars being carried away during heavy rains.

Fatah and I have spent two days (Saturday and today) working on the gutter classification in Asylum Down. It’s much more difficult than the other neighborhoods, located in a central part of the city, so there are many gutters and many road crossings, which adds to the work. We’ve only made it through two-thirds of the path, even though we spent nearly four hours there today. Yesterday we did a backpack run with Michael here as well—five hours of walking slowly under the hot sun. Michael got us in a bit of trouble taking a picture of somebody’s yard. The guy who owned the place came out and started yelling at him, asking him what right he had to be taking photos. We apologized a lot but it was really awkward because we have a stop on the path right in front of his house, and we’re supposed to stop and take data for five minutes. We were only partway through so we had to hang around waiting for time to be up. Today he was there again and Fatah overheard him chatting with his friend, wondering what we were up to and why we were hanging around his property…

Yesterday, in the morning before the backpack run, Fatah and I went and finished the indoor sampling in Nima. More to come, but preliminary spot-counting indicates that water sources (taps) are barely contaminated, but water that has been stored is quite alarming. Unfortunately, a majority of people in Nima and other poor neighborhoods have no choice but to store their water while the taps are off—often for more than three days at a time.

P.S. Funniest moment of the day: as I was going to work this morning there was a bus driving in front of the tro-tro with a lot of luggage on top of it. I looked up, and I saw a goat tethered to the rack. For a goat fifteen feet from the ground on a vehicle driving thirty miles per hour, he seemed pretty chill.

Michael Arrives

Friday, July 18, 2008

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time and energy to write. On Wednesday morning Michael arrived from the States and that evening Raphael returned from his honeymoon. Things have started to pick up in speed and until this afternoon I’ve had little time to myself. I went to get Michael at the airport and had to negotiate a taxi to get us back to East Legon. I forced the driver down to the still ridiculous price of 6 cedis, and as we were going to the house the driver started giving me grief for saying the house was near the eye clinic (it is!) and told me I should give him 7 cedis instead. I stayed firm and when we got to the house the driver didn’t have (pretended not to?) have change for 10 cedis, and I forced him to wait outside while I went in to get him exact change. The result: Michael thinks I am ridiculously hardcore. Ha.

Raphael and I spent the evening setting the schedule for the next few weeks. It looks like I will be able to finish most of my indoor water sampling and gutter surveys before then, and still go on a short trip with Michael while he’s here. This will leave me some time to count trash and anything else I decide to do before I get back. We also scheduled “Religious Activities” for Michael and Raphael on one Sunday as a joke to my advisor, Majid.

Yesterday morning I began the indoor sampling in Nima. Fatah was acting as my guide and Michael was tagging along for his first visit to Nima. The sampling consisted of wandering around visiting houses and asking for a small sample of water. Most people were amazed I would go to so much trouble just to ask about their primary source of drinking water, collect 12 mL of water from them, and observe where/how they store it. But it was interesting to actually visit houses in Nima (I had only really been inside the few compounds where we worked last year). I wish that I understood more Hausa.

Alison, at the moment I am hoping and praying for spots. Only you would truly understand…

As we walked, Fatah told me that he’s been getting in trouble with the authorities (!) because of his work raising awareness about the situation with the Al-Hamdu gutter that runs through the middle of Nima/Mamobi. Apparently he was even getting death threats because his organization, the Federation of Youth Clubs (FYC), was organizing a community protest in Nima for July 1^st (Ghana’s Republic Day). There were two law students interning with the Legal Resource Center (LRC) coming to speak with him/several others in the FYC that afternoon and to see the part of the gutter that badly needs improvement. Michael and I decided to tag along.

The meeting was informative, although mostly we discussed the political battles and lack of government response to community initiatives to improve/cover the gutter. We also speculated on some of the possible reasons why the sanitation issues are so acute in Nima/Mamobi. It is difficult to tell if the problem is a lack of education about how to properly dispose of waste, or rather a lack of viable alternatives to throwing waste in the gutter or street. People in Nima/Mamobi, almost without exception, depend on public dumpsters for disposal of solid wastes. The dumpsters are located in various places within the community and are emptied by the city government. But according to Fatah, the dumpsters are only emptied once every three to four days. Kilu has also told me that sometimes they fill again within an hour of being emptied. Although it is illegal, some people will charge residents a fee when they come to dump their waste.

At the end of the day, we went down to the place where the gutter flows from Kanda into Mamobi, under the Kanda Highway. Here, the gutter was never actually constructed, although Fatah argues that the original plans called for it to be constructed from this point. The cement construction does not actually begin for another four hundred meters, where the gutter crosses under the Nima highway. For this distance, the gutter is a roughly hewn chasm in the landscape, running between houses that threaten to collapse along its littered banks. Fatah brings us by the house of a friend. His bedroom crumbled into the gutter sometime last year.

Signs of the Day (with a common theme):

“Good God?” (taxi)

“Don’t Rob God” (taxi)

“God’s Own Grocery Store”

Small Battles

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

This morning, I woke up late, with the intention of doing my laundry. I was unfortunately (fortunately?) interrupted by Kobi’s mother, who insisted on helping me (i.e. doing) the wash. Moral of the day: I am a pushover.

After the afternoon’s work, I feel like I need to pay back some kindness, and so I bring some of my early dinner outside with me and insist on sharing it with her. I’m actually quite proud of myself. The dish is a curry stew of chickpeas, peas, tomato paste, tomatoes and onions—my most ambitious to date. Oh, and I don’t have a can opener, so I’ve gotten pretty good at opening cans with really big knives. Beware when I return to Boston!

I tell Kobi that his mother is very determined, although I’m thinking stubborn, and he laughs and throws his head back. “Yes,” he tells me, “she is a very hardworking woman.”

I ask if the rooster that has been startling me awake each morning belongs to him. At first this leads to some confusion, so I flap my arms and let out a cross between a yelp and a shriek.

Kobi walks over to the tree, and tugs away some branches so that I can see a bright ball of feathers hidden among the branches. Suddenly, he grabs a skinny leg, dragging the cock squawking violently to the dirt at his feet.

He points at it, tossing me a toothy grin.

Lonely

Monday, July 14, 2008

Currently in my room trying to enter data on my computer. Unfortunately the single CFL in my room doesn’t make for excellent reading light, so I have my headlamp out just like the old days without power last summer.

It’s been a lonely few days. With the exception of the few hours a day I have been spending in the field, I am sometimes at a loss as to what to do with myself. Everyone from the team is still busy doing traffic counts in Jamestown (counting cars), and Raph is off on his honeymoon, so the hours when someone can work with me this week are kind of erratic. Yesterday it was in the morning from 6:30 – 9:30 AM. Which meant getting up at the glorious hour of 5:30 AM, to met Nazar and finish the gutter classification in Nima. Today it will be in the afternoon, working in East Legon. It’s good though, because this way I can finish gutter stuff in two neighborhoods this week. Then I will have a few weeks to do indoor water quality sampling and then the rest of my time to count trash piles! My work is so elegant…

Good news is that I am supposed to meet some other Harvard students who are in Accra tonight for dinner. I found out that the summer school is actually running a program here in Ghana this summer, so in a week or so that crowd will be back in the city and I may have a little company. For now I am making friends with Kobi’s mother, who is here to take care of the baby while Kobi’s wife is sick. It sounds as though, if all goes well, she will be back from the hospital in a few days. The baby cries all night and I hope that his mother gets well.