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).