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”