11/17/2013 8 Comments Out of the city and in to Ga MashieBy last Saturday, I’d grown a bit tired of city life: spending Tuesday evenings at Venus drinking wine while acoustic music permeated the night, listening to taxi drivers beep their horns constantly, being surrounded by fancy buildings such as the National Theatre. I decided to join some members of the African University College of Communications Journalists for Human Rights chapter on a trip to a place just outside central Accra. As I traveled around the poor, overcrowded area known as Ga Mashie, I was reminded what it felt like to actually do journalism. And I wasn’t even really doing the interviews, just taking the photos and adding a question here and there. My friends were working on a story about housing: the structures in Ga Mashie are quite poor, and, often, up to 10 people will stay in one room, which forces some of them to sleep outdoors. They spoke to locals, sometimes in the local language, learning that the people knew their housing situation was bad, but, they said, “what can we do?” It reminded me a lot of the stories I found when traveling through Misisi Township — know as one of the worst slums in sub-Saharan Africa — with the Times of Zambia. That’s not to say they’re helpless. Again, just as in Misisi, Ga Mashie was self-sustaining in a way. Want bananas? The lady down the road sells them. Need a new shirt? Take your pick from a number of tailors in the area. And, being located next to the ocean, the fishing industry there is huge. We from the United States and other nations like to come to places like Ga Mashie and point out all the issues, but if the world were to go dark, the people in Ga Mashie would make it, not those in the United States. While we were in the middle of an interview with a family that lived close to an open area, where chairs were sprawled out under tents and music shook the ground, a commotion arose. People began running into the space, including us, although we weren’t sure at first why we were following suit. In a few moments, as a group of men carrying a fancy, colorful casket on their shoulders emerged, it became clear: we were witnessing a traditional funeral. One of the JHR students explained that the men will run haphazardly all over town with the casket, until its spirit, which is guiding them, is ready to be laid to rest. Crowds of people — including women who’d stripped off their shirts — followed the men, like an angry mob without the anger. That’s not how all funerals are in Ghana, of course, but even the regular ones boast loud music and happy faces, and seem to be much more a celebration of life than a mourning of death. And, by the way, the funerals are held all over the city, literally. I can’t tell you how many I’ve already inadvertently walked through. Eventually, we popped out of Ga Mashie and into James Town, an area with an oldlighthouse and a lot of history. We paid an admission fee to a lady at the bottom, climbed the lighthouse’s spiral staircase and arrived at a shady, almost vertical ladder placed where the original, final few steps had disintegrated. After a moment’s hesitation, we each decided to attempt the ladder, quickly emerging at the top of the lighthouse, built in the 1870s and restored in the early 1900s. When in Ghana. As we took in the amazing view, a guy who may or may not have worked there gave us all kinds of information: how, to the left, James Fort was used as a trading post and then as a prison; to the right were the slave quarters, roofs now caved in, and, behind us was the oldest hotel in Ghana: Sea View Hotel, also built in the early 1870s. I thanked him as I began the long descent down the staircase, praying he wouldn’t try to charge more than the 10 cedis we’d already paid since he’d given us information and took a few photos for us. You never know what may come at an additional cost here. I learned that when I first arrived, unfamiliar with the currency, and had to pay some guy at the airport about $7 just to make some calls for me. Fortunately, the light house “guide” just wished us well and sent us on our way. Although we’d already been out for hours, we followed the shoreline farther, to a place popularly, albeit strangely, known as Lavender Hill. Every day, trucks on trucks full of human feces travel to the hill to dump tons of the untreated waste directly into the ocean. Down the coast, about 100 – 200 meters either way, kids swim in the water and fishermen sit in wait of their day’s catch. The stench was almost overwhelming, but I sneaked closer to snag a few photos. The practice seems unbelievable; that the government is aware of it is even worse. Supposedly, a “scientific liquid waste recycle plant” was built so Lavender Hill could be closed, but that was supposed to be completed last year, and then in June of this year. Although the new “plant” — consisting of six anaerobic digesters — is being used, it’s only able to handle about half of the 120 trucks that arrive at the hill daily. So, Lavender Hill endures. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the government here in Ghana, it’s that its members make a lot of empty promises. But, I suppose that applies to governments worldwide. My friend and I ended the day in comfort with a salad at Osu, but the dirt on our legs and the sunburn on our shoulders served as reminders of the place we’d visited earlier that day, the way some people live each and every single day.
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February 2014
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