February 7, 2014

I’ve now been in Ghana for 5 or 6 days.  It feels a lot different now.  What used to amaze me or just seem so different is now feels regular.  Again, everything is different here, so it is impossible to attempt to say what Ghana is like. 

One overwhelming thing here is that most people are either poor or extremely poor.  You are reminded of that everywhere you look.  For example, you cannot travel about the city without seeing everyone working so hard to make a little money selling anything they can possibly sell.  It is rare to find a store inside a building with a door that you walk inside to do business, and it is a sign of it being upscale.  Overall, commerce is done on the sidewalk and in markets and often in the street between lanes of cars.  There is a small army of women who sell from trays of goods on their heads.  You see them wherever traffic is heavy and slow and people buy goods through the windows of cars and buses.  The goods are cheap and people pay for what they need at the time.  You do not see people carry grocery bags or other bags from stores.

The head porters can carry anything and everything on their heads.  At my office, a woman comes around selling fruit in the morning.  I’ve been there twice when she comes and I buy a huge delicious mango that she peels and cut-up for us.  I am the last to buy as I must help her put the platter of stacked fruit back on her head.  I am surprised by it’s weight, it feels at least 50 pounds.

I would like to photograph in the streets so I can show you these things, but I need to get more comfortable with my surroundings here before I can do that.

Many of the headporters live in the Old Fadama slum, where I will be focusing my work for now.  I work out of an office in a part of Accra near the ocean where there can a little relief from the heat when the wind blows off the water.  (Inside we have one room with air conditioning that people crowd into with their computers to work.)  Old Fadama is on the other side of the downtown area where there is a large market that ends with the slum.  The market is huge, blocks and blocks of stores with wares spilling out into the street that ends with a free for all mish mash of stalls. The slum is on the far side of the open market area.  Everything is for sale.  It is not like the movies.  It is dirty, hot, noisy and smelly.  The food will not entice you other than the fruit.  Cars, taxis and motorcycles swarm through and miraculously miss everyone.  On one street, I saw trucks with containers from ships that were unloading bales of clothes- used clothes from America and Europe.  This is where it goes in huge quantities.

I have been meeting with the director of a community center in the slum.  We have come up with a plan to train mediators who can help people resolve disputes and create written agreements.  Lack of money keeps people here from access to the courts and health care.  (The community center's first project was to create a corp of nurses.)  There is some excitement about the mediation training and my goal is to start next week and see it through to actual mediations and coaching them through those until a core group is skilled enough to teach others.  The laws I need to be familiar with are not that different from what we have at home when it comes to domestic violence, child support, landlord tenant and inheritance.  Although the inheritance laws take into account "customary law", which means tribal customs.

I have been to Old Fadama twice now and do not know how to describe it.  Think of 100,000 people living on top of each other on a few acres of land.  The streets are made of mud and what appears to be crushed concrete from torn down buildings.  Accra is very dry, but in the slum the ground is always wet with garbage ground in.  The homes are mostly one story and they create a confusing maze of streets.  There is a lot of street commerce here.  There are a number of charcoal sellers and most lights use kerosene.  I saw a nursery school and a bar where you can watch the soccer matches from England (very big here).  And there are people everywhere, out and about, just like the rest of the city.  I thought it would have a strong affect on me to come here, but everyone is so full of life, carrying on with whatever they are doing that you do not feel any sadness here.  On my first visit, I was with two other young women from my office and kids heading to the nursery school, grabbed our hands and could not stop laughing as they walked with us. I don't know yet how to describe Old Fadama, because you'd think it would leave you emotionally drained, but you don't feel that here.  Please go on google and look for images of "Old Fadama Slum Accra".

It must be added that the slum borders a river/lagoon that I'm told is included on lists of the 10 most polluted waterways.  All the cities' pollution goes in upstream and then the slum adds it's own.  Plus this is a place where many of our used electronics end up, to be repaired hopefully, but more often, stripped apart for scrap.  I'm told that this creates an even more toxic mix for the lagoon.  I have walked by shops where men are pulling apart TV's, computers and engines.

You see it everywhere, life is so very hard for so many people here.