Christmas and New Year Wishes for Ghana: No More Open Gutters

For the past few weeks, this column has been dense. Mighty toes have been stepped on, pushing some soft buttons of society. So in the spirit of Christmas, and as is the tradition of this column, we break for a soft issue – gutters. Here are two gutter tales.

Man meets woman. Man and woman wait – for love to happen. Then, boom, it happens. In the early days of love, they hold hands to walk. He holds her hands delicately. Reason: she is delicate. She needs protection. When crossing a road, she is shepherded, lest she hurts herself. Is it happiness? Yes, it is nirvana. In our world of gutters, you need protection from gutters to get to nirvana. Your legs, my legs, our legs are in constant danger, with gutters staring threateningly. So man holds woman’s hands to cross the smallest of gutters. He says, “Darling, watch the gutter,” long after woman has crossed. Well, she is an experienced gutter-crosser. She knows the ways of gutters.

Then, time passes. Love grows dim. Rust sets in. Love fatigue looms. Love wanes. Hand holding ceases, left firmly in the distant past. Now, man and woman simply walk, crossing gutters on waned love’s journey. Baby gutters, grandfather gutters, mama gutters, uncle gutters, cousin gutters. Woman walks slowly, pained from many life’s ordeals. Then it happens. One day, man walks with woman. Man walks past hurriedly from woman. Woman trips, falls in gutter. Man continues to walk on. Then looks back and yells at woman, “You fool! Have you gone blind? Didn’t you see that big gutter?”

Man continues to walk away, into the gloomy distance – dulled antennae reigning supreme. Clueless! Woman drags her sore self out of gutter – mud and all. Woman continues walk, limping on, deeply hurt. She leaves remnants of love behind – in the gutter. A severe love body-blow has just occurred – a watershed moment with gutter as principal witness. Gutter is also the smoking gun.

Another gutter tale. This girlish woman I know was driving a pack-of-tin, an engineering feat called a car. Her cell phone rings. She picks up. The caller was a very close friend, a sort of boy friend. He needs to talk, so badly. She needs to talk, for no particular reason. Smoothly, she drives on, yapping, not paying attention to the world around as if a vehicle is nothing but jelly. Soon, the conversation settles in a place between the devil and the deep blue sea. Meanwhile, she was dodging pot holes, baby coffins, bounces hunch-back speed bumps, and sidesteps several careless but confident road-crossers and many other categories of predators in-built into our roads. She slows down, wallops and gallops on.

Then suddenly, it happens! She drives car into a muddy gutter. In the cell phone distraction, she did not notice the accident so kept accelerating, wheels spinning, until yells and teasing laughter from youthful passers-by brought the message home. So she got off the phone to see to the predicament. It took more than a dozen men and a gutter engineering feat, with planks, to yank car out of gutter. She thanks helpers with some cedis and speeds off, still yapping on the phone. Within minutes, car begins to lose power. Then, yells from a new batch of onlookers bring another message home – the car was puffing out smoke, almost burning. She parks the car, shaken.

What are the lessons from these gutter tales? It is plain folly to drive and talk on the cell phone. It could even be suicidal. But more so, there are too many monstrous gutters waiting with smiles, to suck us into their gaping mouths. And, there is no one to sue if you become a gutter casualty. Decentralized assemblies? Let’s explore that!

Open gutters are a prominent canvas on our landscape. Gutters here, gutters there, gutters everywhere! Gutters have drawn battle lines between humans and nasty falls. The battle rages on as more gutters are constructed with cement cast firmly into the earth. The more our development and civilization take shape, the more roads we construct. And wherever there are roads, gutters with gaping holes appear.

What makes our gutters unique is that they are open. In developed countries, gutters are not seen. Well, gutters are not meant to be seen. They belong in the underworld. So I asked a gutter expert, Engineer Kofi H (he begged me not to disclose his surname) why our gutters are not covered but left open to stare at us rudely, teasingly and dangerously. If our goal is to become a middle-income country by 2015, when will it show in our gutters?

His responses were instructive. He said bluntly, “We’re not ready for covered gutters. We’re not there yet!” In shock, I exclaimed, “What!!” He explained: “What we call gutters are ‘drains’ constructed for storm/rain water. There are roadside drains (small gutters) and storm drains (large gutters). But our gutters are choked with garbage and silt. Covered gutters are so difficult to clean.”

I retorted, “If gutters are covered, the bad people of Ghana will not be tempted to dump garbage into them.” He responded, “Some bad people go to the extent of lifting slabs of covered gutters to push in their garbage!” He insisted that until behavioral change occurs, our gutters will be left uncovered! So I’m left wondering – how about enforcement? Set example with some culprits through arrests, stiff sentencing and publicity. Let’s name and shame the bad people, consistently.

It is Christmas and we are on the cusp of a New Year. Yet, I’m grumpy about open gutters! You should too! They are inelegant; no, they are ugly. And, they are stinky, spewing out nasty leachate. Gutters are dangerous. People, animals and vehicles fall into them. Besides, gutters are at the heart of our sanitation dilemma because they are receptacles for strange things including obnoxious ‘take-aways’ of people who live in homes without toilets. When it rains, gutters become turbo-charged and gush out water and the numerous things stashed in them. Choked gutters cause floods which lead to misery and death.

I’m terrified of gutters. They stare at me menacingly and with such intensity that I suspect they beckon me to enter whether I’m driving or walking. I suspect that gutters are living beings with eyes, ears, mouths and brains. And souls too! And, living beings breed and/or live in them. Gutters provide comfortable home for insects, frogs, weeds, germs and many despicable creatures of the underworld.

A little gutter psychology. When you go through life seeing the insides of gutters over and over again, and they stare right back at you, how does that experience affect the way you think, your world view and your very psyche? Are open gutters messing us up psychologically in such a deep way to the point that we don’t find much wrong with overwhelming our environment with filth? Could it be that open gutters have become like tumors on our national conscience? In Les Miserables, Victor Hugo said: “The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers…. The sewer is the conscience of a city.” Wherein lies our collective conscience? Chew on this. Merry Christmas!

dorisdartey@yahoo.com