Water and electricity (with photos!)

Below is a picture showing how most people here consume water.  It’s called a sachet (pronounced “sa-shay”).  They are sold all over the city by headporters for 10 peswa’s ($0.04), mainly through the windows of cars and tro-tro’s.  Water sold in sachets is always safe to drink. In my house and office, there is always an open bundle of sachets in the refrigerator and many more stored away.  My guess is that the sachet uses the least amount of plastic and thus costs the least in a place where everyone wants access to cheap drinking water.

You simply bite one corner of the sachet and make a hole with your teeth and then suck out the water.  Or, you can avoid sucking and just squeeze it with your hand.  Unfortunately, Ghana is littered with empty sachets.

 

Note the piles of dirty dishes next to the outdoor tap in background - due to no water for 6 straight days

In Accra, most ”houses” have access to water.  In contrast, in Old Fadama slum (where there are no real houses), people rely on business to supply them with all their daily water.  People go to these places to pay to fill up containers of water to carry home and to use toilets and showers for a small fee.  I pass one of these when I go there and you pay 30 pesewas ($0.40) to use a toilet and 10 pesewas to use a urinal ($0.04).

A lot of houses have a single tap and then use buckets for kitchen use, showering or flushing the toilet.  Water does not run in the city all the time, or everywhere at the same time, so homes have all manner of water storage, from barrels to black “polytanks” that range from small to gargantuan.  Nicer homes have the tank elevated on the roof or a concrete tower, thereby creating water pressure for the pipes leading to kitchen and bathrooms, etc.  As a result of this system, whenever the water does run, everyone is re-filling their tanks and barrels at the same time, which create a huge draw on the water system. 

At my office, the water only runs on weekends and they have a man whose job it is to have the tanks filled on weekends.  My house has just 2 barrels because the water generally does not shut off for more than 24 hours.  Except that last week, the water shut off on Monday night and came back on Sunday.  The barrels ran out in 3 days.  We started using sachets to fill buckets to flush toilets and take showers.  Dirty clothes piled up along with dirty dishes.

Electricity is more regular, although we do get infrequent rolling black outs that generally last a few hours.  It’s bad at night because the fans stop and it’s too hot to sleep well without a fan.

My house has compact fluorescent light bulbs everywhere and no appliances, except for the refrigerator, a TV that is not used very much, and a few computers and phones to be charged.   One of the sons was telling me that they could afford more appliances but not the electricity to run them.  The little electricity they actually use costs on average 35 cedi’s (about $15) a week.  That’s a little more than $60 a month for very low wattage usage.  Less than what I pay a month for my house full of gadgets and appliances.  Imagine a house full of appliances here. 

Electricity is pay as you go.  When you hit the limit for what you paid, it turns off and then you have to go to your local electric company office and pay for more usage.  I went one evening after work with one of the son’s who feared the electricity would get turned off that night.  To his surprise, a lot of people were paying that night and we stood in line for 2 hours.  It amazes me how much Ghanaians put up with without complaining.  It is as if they do not expect more of their government services.

I have a few pictures of my house - exterior and interior

View from inside the gate and wall - two houses, one on left for host family, one on right for tenants

Kitchen of my house, most meals are cooked here.  The stove is the table top burners at far left.  There is no oven.  The sink is small, below the window.

Dining room/living room.  I eat my meals here.

Hallway with 4 rooms, leading to living room and then kitchen.  My room is to immediate left.  I live alone and another volunteer is in another room and a student from Gabon lives in a third room.

My room.  I usually straighten up before I leave in morning and it gets messy fast because there is little storage space.