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.