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.