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.

Cookin'

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Yesterday, after a long afternoon of work at the house on my computer, I made myself a lonely dinner. Ari and Kathie, you should be proud of me for this! Chickpeas and tomatoes and onions and curry all stirred together, along with rice. It even lasted until tonight, which is quite exciting, because I don’t think I could have managed much more than a peanut butter sandwich in my current state of exhaustion. Ari, you will be less proud to hear that I got ripped off by the friend of the mango/pear girl down the road. I intended to buy a pear (avocado), but she didn’t have any good ones by the time I got there. So I bought apples from her friend instead. I won’t tell you how much…it was embarrassing.

This morning I went back to Nima to meet Fatah and begin taking measurements of the gutters. I got there early, which was unfortunate because there was a man in the tro-tro who was really bothering me. I have to say that there are a lot of times in Accra where I wish that I was less obvious. It’s impossible to walk here without drawing attention to myself, and I wish I was better at dealing with that attention.

I wasn’t sure if he would get off at the Nima overpass as well, so I decided to go straight to one of the houses where we did measurements last year. I was there quite a lot last summer—usually to grab the big rickety ladder out from behind one of the buildings and scramble up on the roof to check on our equipment. The family(s) living there is large, and there are always a ton of kids in the yard. But three of them, siblings, for some reason are much more outgoing than the others and they are the ones that I was looking out for. I was mad at myself for having to go there right away, because I really wanted to grab some donuts or something for them on the way. Mary, the eldest, ran right up to me and jumped into my arms, which was really sweet. Nene and Baba are still really young, and I couldn’t tell if they remembered who I was.

After work I went to visit Fatah’s wife and their new baby. Fatah tells me that the baby has been sick frequently since it was born, but it seems to be alright now. She is still so tiny, and adorable. We also went to visit his friend Rashid and Nazar was there, so I got to see him as well. His friend was in the Multinational Forces in Iraq for the past two years, but seemed pretty cheerful about it. He showed me his photos from his time in the Gulf.

Favorite tro-tro signs of the day:

“Stay Firm”

“Pray for your Life”

“Power of [Driver’s Name]” (made all the better by the fact that this car was stalled in the middle of traffic and three people were pushing it trying to get it moving again)

A Rather Long Update

Friday, July 11, 2008

The past two days have been quite busy, so I haven’t had much time to write. Yesterday morning, after waking up early, eating breakfast with Raph and Comfort, I traveled to the internet cafe close by to mail some emails and post my last update. The connection isn’t exactly fast, but it works pretty well for email.

When I came back, it was already late morning, so I ended up deciding to hand-wash a few clothes with Comfort. Even though the power situation is pretty much resolved now, I still don’t trust that washing machine. Last year, some clothes went in and didn’t come out for nearly nine hours! Anyways, I think I am getting better at hand-washing, and it gives me some time to think and talk to Comfort.

After laundry, Comfort and I went across town. Comfort was getting her hair done, and I ended up deciding to chop mine off as well. (Actually, I really shouldn’t say chop, because the haircut I got is actually really nice.) It’s shorter than I’ve had it in a long time—just a bit shorter than shoulder-length. Hopefully I will be able to post a picture at some point. Unfortunately, everyone here, particularly Comfort, is appalled that I have cut it. The irony was that Comfort was getting this really crazy thing done to her hair where they braid it really close to the scalp, and then sew fake hair onto it. Not kidding. It looks like her normal hair, except a little longer and much neater. Apparently this “wig” lasts about a month, which is enough time for the hair underneath to grow longer so that it can be trimmed. Anyways, the hair cut is much more comfortable in this weather, and easier to clean in a cold shower without much water pressure.

While Comfort was getting her hairdo, I met up with Raph and we went back across town to the new shopping mall that they put in near Shashie (really close to the East Legon house) to buy groceries. Traffic horrible as per usual.

Comfort and Raph left early this morning for their honeymoon, so now I find myself alone in the East Legon house. I’m finally starting to get to work on research. I realized yesterday when I was walking to the internet cafe that I had to go look at the walking paths in at least a few of the neighborhoods before I start any real measurements. I think I’ve walked all of the paths at least five times (except Asylum Down, which I only did once). But I was never focused entirely on the gutters, and I realized that I needed to see them before I finalize my protocol. Since I’d already seen parts of East Legon, I decided to go to Nima today to re-familiarize myself with things there.

For the whole project, we have done work in four major areas: East Legon, Asylum Down, Jamestown and Nima. East Legon is our “wealthy” neighborhood, Asylum Down we consider “middle class” and Jamestown and Nima are both “low income”. I’m always fascinated by the differences between Jamestown and Nima, however. Jamestown is right along the ocean, and is the old, colonial part of Accra. Some of the buildings there are quite old, and it’s actually listed as a site in some tourist guides. However, Jamestown is, to put it bluntly, dirt poor. The people there are Ga, and, I was surprised to find out, few of them are actually migrants. The households we surveyed there are much older than those in the other neighborhoods. Nima, on the other hand, is a Muslim area, and the people there are primarily Hausa. The people in Nima are generally more reserved than in Jamestown, and I feel like I draw less attention, which makes me more comfortable. Also, most of our field workers come from Nima, and it was also our “control” neighborhood for the air project, so we are more familiar there as well. In any case, I decided to go there today for a few hours and meet up with Kilu, one of the “Nima boys” who works with us. All the “Nima boys” are a fair bit older than me and most of them are married, so I’m not sure why we call them “boys,” except that they work with Fatah at an organization called the Federation of Youth Clubs (FYC). We walked the Nima walking path—the air quality project last year had a series of paths through the area where we used mobile monitoring to study air pollution at the sub-neighborhood level. The paths are all around 10km, so our walk was a little over 2 hours long. But it was good because I had a lot of time to ask Kilu about water/sanitation issues, and he, like all the Nima boys, is very knowledgeable about the area, and vocal about the issues facing his neighborhood.

I first asked Kilu about the Al-Hamdu gutter, which runs through the central part of Nima/Mamobi. The area is at a lower elevation than most of the neighborhood. Along the walking path, the gutter is about five meters across, five meters deep. The water right now is not high, only a few centimeters. Bridges for walking access run every 20 meters or so across the gutter—most are fairly wide but none have rails. The gutter is also clearly used by some for solid waste disposal. It runs all the way from Airport Residential through Nima/Mamobi, then to Asylum Down and then flows into the sea via the Korle Lagoon (I have to check on this, but I believe it). Kilu claims that when it rains, the water will sometimes rise above the gutter level and flood the nearby street. When the gutter was built (sometime around 15 years ago) the plan was to cover the gutter and have it as underground sewage, but it has remained above ground since it was built. He claims that local politicians often make it a campaign issue when they run for office, but nobody has ever followed through.

We also discussed drinking water, because I’m trying to get a better idea of which households to sample. Comfort told me that the majority of Accra’s water comes from a common source, a reservoir which is to the west of the city. Some of the water for the eastern part of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Region (GAMA) still comes from the Akosombo Dam (at the base of Lake Volta). However, Kilu claims that some areas (East Legon and Airport Residential maybe among them) get water from Akosombo as well.

Kilu also tells me that the water supply to Nima/Mamobi is infrequent and irregular. Usually piped water is available once every 3-4 days. Most residents take the giant cartons that can be bought with cooking oil, and wash and recycle them for use as water storage. Each carton can hold about 4-5 gallons of water, and this is the water that is used while the tap is off. Kilu also tells me that often people will use the water more than once—for bathing, and then for washing clothes or dishes. I think that our piped water is also irregular, but we also have the huge storage tank and drink the purified sachet water. So storage is clearly important, which is making me more fond of the idea of measuring water quality both from the local source (indoor/neighborhood pipe) and at the point of consumption (give me a glass of water, please!).

I’m a little nervous about taking all these measurements after today. It’s hard not to be self-conscious here, and I get many strange looks already just walking around the areas where I work. Raphael thinks that the work I will do here may be interesting and important, but that I will still be recognized by everyone in Nima as the “girl who is researching the trash”. Oh well, best get at it…

Finally back in Accra.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

The flight, as usual, was long. The wait in Amsterdam was really long, with nobody to keep me company. I realized that this is the first time that I’ve really traveled by myself. All my worries about airport security and measurement equipment were for naught, considering as I wasn’t even asked for my declaration card at customs.

I was worried that nobody would be there to get me, because of some miscommunications before I arrived, but Raphael picked me up at the airport (he’ll leave for his honeymoon today). The flight was delayed for over an hour, so I arrived much later than I expected. It’s great to see some familiar faces. He and Comfort (his wife) have been staying at the East Legon house for a few nights, because they celebrated part of their wedding reception here with family on the weekend.

Kobi, the caretaker, has also been around, but unfortunately his wife is staying for a few days at the local clinic. She just delivered their first child (they got married while I was here last summer) and needed to have a caesarian. Now she is having complications from that, and we are hoping that she will be alright. Raph is mad at the pastor again, because he refused take Kobi and his wife in his car to the clinic when she was unwell yesterday. Raphael has been borrowing a car from a friend during his wedding, so he and Comfort brought them there, which was a good thing because she has an infection from the operation. It sounds like she is going to be coming home again today. I have to say, I am excited that there will be a baby around the house this summer.

Otherwise, not much to report. Ari, you will be pleased to hear that the your friend the goat has been replaced by a rather loud rooster. Or was he around last summer too? Anyways…I had no trouble waking up this morning!

I’m hoping that I will be able to start some measurements tomorrow, but I have to get everything in order first.

p.s. Pineapple for breakfast was amazing. Can’t wait to get my hands on a mango.