Water-poverty at Adenta and beyond

Water is life. Water has no substitute. Water has a soul. Water has a mind of its own. For those who live water-poverty lives, water is a luxury. I’m one of those people who live on edge as far as water goes, living a dirt-poor water life.

I’m writing this piece on this year’s World Water Day. For the past 18 years (since 1993), by a United Nations declaration, every 22nd March has been observed as World Water Day. The objective is to ensure that countries all over the world implement the necessary measures to protect water resources and promote activities that will make clean water accessible to all. I pray that this year’s World Water Day will bring a solution to Ghana’s water problems. Not!

Adenta’s Unique Story:

Let me introduce to you Adenta. It is a suburb of Accra, the capital city of Ghana. It is located in the far northern armpit of our sprawling capital, the city that seems to be ungovernable. It is densely populated because of the many estate houses and high-rise SSNIT flats. Adenta is inhabited by middle- to low-income folks, mostly workers. So of course, that includes lots of children.

Adenta used to be part of the Ashiaman/Tema Metropolitan Assembly. But about three years ago, it was hived off so it’s now a Municipal Assembly. With new demarcations and a re-birth, you would have thought that things will work out better. Not! Road net-work is pot-hole ridden. Water shortages are as they have has been since time immemorial, when Abraham was a school boy.

What is water-poverty?

You never fully appreciate water until you don’t have it. Water-poverty refers to the scarcity, insufficiency and poor quality of water. I’ve lived at Adenta for four World Water Days and have experienced nothing but water-poverty. I never know when the water people will decide to grace our taps with water. It could be once a week, once a month, or sporadically throughout the year. And it can flow for just 30 minutes, a full hour or a couple of hours. Periodically, the water quality looks so dirty that you wonder what you’re supposed to do with it.

And to insult the residents further, the Water Company folks religiously send monthly bills on paper that sneers at you and makes you realise that they don’t respect you.

Life in a water-poverty environment is lived very creatively, precariously and stressfully. Woe unto you if you have children and a water closet. Children, because they don’t fully get it; they just want to have fun with water but adults must control them by constantly preaching the gospel according to water-poverty. As for water closets, I wonder why we still place them in houses in water-deprived communities when a major ingredient in managing the funky contents of water closet is water.

Water-poor people get their water from sources that are holy and unholy, known and unknown. At Adenta, sale of water is big business. There are water tankers and ‘Tutu-tutu’ truck delivery folks who own the privileged right to grace us with water. ‘Tutu-tutu’ trucks are ugly un-photogenic contraptions, the closest to an Adenta invention of a motor vehicle. The site of them should make you wonder the source of their water.

I strongly suspect that the private business side of water at Adenta is at the heart of our water problems. Do these private business folks sabotage the public supply side of water? If the water problem is ever solved, they’ll be completely out of their thriving business. They won’t like that.

Another feature of water-poverty is the usual receptacles comprising of gallons, barrels, bowls and anything one can creatively imagine. I’ve asked water tankers and ‘Tutu-tutu’ truckers where they get their water from. They are so indirect and laughter-choked in their responses that it hurts me to continue asking.

And I worry about the quality of water I use. I fear when brushing my teeth (my family includes young children). My genuine fear is that one day (knock on wood!), we may contract a disease that is worse than cholera. A major challenge I face as a water-poor resident of Accra is taking a bath and washing clothes and cooking utensils.

Living a water-poor life is expensive. Water poor people pay more money for water than those who have the luxury of turning on their taps for water to flow luxuriously and effortlessly. The time it takes to search for water is annoying. The inconvenience of strategizing daily about how to ‘manage’ water takes too much out of time needed to think and to thrive and to just live.

Water is politics:

This is the frayed water-poverty ridden Adenta that unsuspecting President Mills, a resident of Spintex Road and now of the Osu Slave Castle, jumped into in his pronouncement during the state of the nation address to Parliament on 17th February 2011. He announced boldly that the Adenta water problem has been solved, clearly, posturing a bragging right over such a feat by his two-year old government. The NDC folks in Parliament applauded him.

At that very instant, an unidentifiable something in my stomach shifted position. Why? On that fateful day, I was so much out of water that my entire household used sachet water to bath; against everything I stand for because I advocate for the banning of single use plastics – plastics that will not decompose for some hundreds of years after I’m dead and gone.

In a developing country, water is highly political. Everything is political! About six months before the 2008 elections, there was evidence of the solution of Adenta’s intractable water shortage. Water, nice flowing water, began to flow from our hitherto dry taps. The experience was at once magical and heavenly. Flamboyant politicians came to the community for meetings and photo-opportunities, with the media trailing behind to offer cheap publicity. It was nice; really nice. We believed it. What we did not know was that we were being taken, badly.

Then, by February of 2009, suddenly, without the dignity of an announcement, the taps dried up and water stopped flowing for several months. It was as if draught had hit Adenta. It became apparent to us Adenta-folks that the pre-election water flow was meant to get residents to flock to the voting booths. That was clearly a case of water for politics!

Interestingly, right after President Mills’ laughable blooper last February, water begun to flow again – in the usual once a week gift. But for two weeks now, the magic has worn off; the taps have dried up again and stopped sneezing our water; just when the high-flying media attention ceased.

But on the bright side, my Adenta suddenly became news. Suggestion: if you want your community’s problem solved, find someone to plant false information in the President’s next major speech. With that mistake, your community should organize a media blitz to point out the error. With that pressure and the flashlight on the Presidential blooper, and therefore on your community, you stand a good chance of having the problem solved, albeit temporarily!

‘Definition of a miracle’: A book review

Farida Bedwei, author of 'Definition of a miracle.'

Last weekend, I met Farida Bedwei, an awesome woman. She is a miracle. Although young, she is an old soul, oozing wisdom. She ignited in me deep feelings of expansiveness, of the strength of the human spirit, and of the many possibilities. Without a doubt, Farida is the courageous pioneer of her destiny. Her life teaches that human ingenuity is such that regardless of your disabilities (which we all have in one form or the other), if you are resilient enough, you can transcend your challenges.

Farida is one of the top software engineers in Ghana!

Her novel, ‘Definition of a miracle’, presents a perceptive testimony of someone who knows about the subject matter she so expertly writes about: disability. You see, Farida was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was only ten days old; a baby who was not conscious of her existence on mother-earth. Her life journey was therefore solidly paved before she knew who she was. She got stuck with a disability that causes the average Ghanaian, suffering from the awful sinking sickening diseases of prejudice, ignorance and fatalism, to stare at her.

A must-read book:

Books are marvellous inventions of perceptive human intelligence; written pieces are. A good piece of writing can save you from yourself and provide a refuge that can sustain you. Good writing can connect the dots in the development of a society and show the path toward progress.

Farida’s novel is art imitating life; autobiographical. It’s a narrative about Zaara, an eight-year old girl with cerebral palsy who was born in England. Her parents are well-educated; her mother is a lawyer and the father is a crop scientist. The family’s relocation to Ghana lays bare the ridiculously profane depths to which even things that have scientifically-proven explanations are ascribed to spiritual causes. Before long, her mother jumps onto slippery pray-for-me gravy trains to find healing for her ‘sick’ daughter.

In this novel, the reader gets a front-row seat to the struggles of a person who lives with a physical disability in the rough terrain of our society. But the novel also chronicles the possibilities and the triumphs, as well as the positive outcomes if love and care is lavished on the disabled. Yes, disabled persons can lead productive lives, to their full potential.

The book challenges Ghana to wake up to some of the many knots in the strands of our national fabric. These knots include, among many others, the implementation of sound national policies that can provide a life of dignity for the disabled; a healing of our unproductive attitudes; and a halt to our unhealthy super-religiousness, pretentious Christianity, and fatalistic beliefs – especially witchcraft.

Soon after Zaara’s diagnosis in the UK, a friend of the baby’s grandmother claimed that whilst praying in Accra, it was revealed to her that one Auntie Dede, a widow with a pleasant demeanour, was responsible for the child’s sickness. Auntie Dede had used witchcraft to steal and cook Zaara’s legs to render her disabled. What a cock-and-bull revelation! A relative on the father’s side, who is a fetish priest, also came up with his own theory of the spiritual cause of baby Zaara’s sickness.

So regardless of medical science’s diagnosis of cerebral palsy that was caused by the Meningitis Zaara had as a baby, our ignoramus folks desperately sought solace in their own backward spiritual beliefs to explain the condition. But worse of all, an innocent woman was perceived to be guilty without any proof whatsoever.

One of the ridiculous and tense moments of the novel was when Zaara’s mother, a lawyer – who should know better and set a good example, hit the pray-for-me path in hot pursuit of healing for her daughter. In the process, she tied herself to a con-artist female pastor, entrusting her with inconsequential details of her life. Such contradictions make you wonder if our culture, the basis of our belief system, is not just a trap waiting to ensnare the many gullible – literate and non-literate alike.

‘Definition of a miracle’ is not a booklet like the many hollow books that are increasingly piling up on our book stands. It is a whopping 389 page well-plotted, well-written book. In this novel, you’ll come across creativity at its best. The dialoguing is superb, rendering it very much alive and real to the point that you forget you’re reading a work of fiction. Undoubtedly, Farida is a deep thinker and a master wordsmith.

So who is a ‘sickla’?

Cerebral palsy robbed Farida’s body of some of its ‘rightful physical functions.’ Despite that robbery, Farida has excelled. Yet, in our society, people who live with disabilities are regularly referred to as ‘sick persons,’ handicapped or ‘sicklas’. These are inappropriate adjectives, loaded with negative connotations.

A disabled person is not sick. Disability is just a limitation – physical or otherwise. Disability simply means an inability to do one thing or the other. Aren’t we all plagued by one disability or the other? What do you say about people who suffer from terminal laziness, swollen-headedness, over-blown egos and the many who are not law-abiding? Don’t all these amount to some sort of handicap and disability? Who has a God-given right to define what is normal? Normalcy by whose standards?

Fact: Ghana is not disabled-friendly. If you fall down tomorrow and break a leg (Knock on wood! Tofiakwa!), you would know how deeply true this statement is. Ghana is unprepared for you and your broken leg! Where there are pavements, many are cracked and pothole-ridden to render them unusable. Many public buildings cannot be entered by the physically disabled. How do you climb a stiff stair-case with a broken leg or no legs? So we might as well just put up screaming signs at many points to announce: ‘The Physically Disabled Are Not Welcome.’

At the launch of ‘Definition of a miracle’, it was suggested that the book should become a text book in the school system. I completely agree. As our country dreams of becoming a middle-income economy, (lavishly greased with crude oil), certain things must change.

Fact: Middle income societies give regard to the disabled; they’re not left to their fate to sit in second-hand wheelchairs, or crawl on all-fours or skate boards by busy road-sides as full-time beggars. Middle income people are not fatalists, as a rule. Middle income people do not hand over their lives to pastors and fetish priests. Middle income people take charge of their destinies, and work toward enhancing their progress and quality of life.

Another plus of the novel is the humour that will get you cracking up in your rib cage as you realise that laughter is truly the best medicine. Even the author’s honesty is at once shocking and refreshing. Farida boldly describes her physical condition as: “…..when I walk, I sway about like an alcoholic at the helm of his drunken stupor.’

‘Definition of a miracle’ is a ‘non-put-downable’ sort of novel. It challenges the reader to interrogate deeply-held prejudices that are steeped in our culture of ignorance and backwardness.

However, despite the beautiful writing, an unfortunate weakness of the book is that it suffers from poor proof-reading. There are sentences with missing words. Punctuation marks are not always placed properly. In some cases, where there should be ‘full-stops’ or commas, they are absent. Such weaknesses must be fixed before a re-print. Mediocrity must not be allowed in Ghana’s burgeoning book publishing industry.

A gaze into the eyes of the fruit seller’s daughter

I asked the fruit seller’s daughter: ‘How much is one pineapple? Oh, and four large-sized mangoes.’ Her mother was away and has left her assorted-fruit stand for the girl to manage. She hesitated in answering, and offered me a grand display of timidity. She brought me a watermelon. I repeated, ‘I want a pineapple and mangoes.’ She stammered and absent-mindedly, brought me two pineapples. I repeated my request for mangoes. She returned and brought me mangoes and bananas. I said, ‘I did not ask for bananas.’

With the drama that unravelled from my attempt to buy fruits, which we’re told are good for our health, I decided to probe into her life story. She’s Abena (not her real name, of course). She is 12 years old and is in class three in a neighbourhood ‘Cyto’ primary school. My attempt to speak some really rudimentary English with her fell completely flat. Basic questions like ‘What is your name?’ How old are you? What school do you attend?’ drew out timid grins and zero response back in English, which clearly seemed to be a very foreign language to her.

To the question, ‘How much is the pineapple, and oh, the mangoes?’, she could only respond in the old cedi currency, by telling me the cost in the thousands. Apparently, at age 12, she is unfamiliar with the new Ghana cedi and would be one of the many Ghanaians who will forever operate in the old currency, because to them, ‘The value is (and will always remain) the same,’ regardless of the large-scale effort of the Bank of Ghana by way of public education campaigns to switch over from the old to the new currency.

A peep into Abena’s soul:

My chit chat session with Abena left me wondering if I was witnessing a classic case of low IQ. But then I thought, if she was that stupid, her mother would not have left her entire fruit stand in her care. So I concluded that Abena has been short-changed at her Cyto elementary school.

I wish I could peep into Abena’s soul to find out what bothers her, what sorrows are brewing deep in her soul, what tears are lurking behind her tender eyes, what she desires for herself, what she obsesses about, what she rebels about, the specific thoughts that flourish in her stream of consciousness, what gives her joy, and..... Does she ever think that nature has given her a lowdown dirty deal or that she is very lucky to be living in Accra and going to school, any school?

Later that night, I went on a trip down my own memory lane to my early days when I collected shreds of old newspapers, the throw-away rejects from my 'bofrot' aunt’s entrepreneurial venture. I used to put the pieces together to form my main reading material. Now, with plastics replacing old newspapers as wrappers, there would have been nothing for me to read. But most importantly, just a few decades ago, pupils from ‘Cyto’ schools, including timid little me, could still qualify to attend one of the three universities in the country. It was a matter of working hard, with a few strands of luck in your stars.

Better questions to ponder over are: What could have become of Abena if the public educational system had not become sub-standard in our 54 year-old Ghana? Abena could have become a lot more in life if she had been dealt a better deal in education. What happened to all the rhetoric about the girl-child? We even have a Ministry of Women and Children, yet issues of females and children continue to lay flat and deep in the gutters of national agenda.

Wasting the lives of our youth:

Cyto education of today is a guaranteed recipe for the youth to get stuck at low-level jobs and in lives with little hope. These days, how many young people who begin life in the middle-of-no-where-Ghana would become anything of essence in society? Specifically, how can this fruit seller’s daughter dare to aspire to become anything beyond a fruit seller? How can she dare to aspire to become a scientist, a medical doctor, the president of Ghana or at the barest minimum, to become a teacher, a nurse, a secretary, let alone a parliamentarian?

The next few days would be March 8, International Women’s Day. As I think of the fruit seller’s daughter, my mind continues to go haywire, fast and furious, imagining several possibilities for the fruit seller’s daughter. Straight up and simple, she might become a trader of some sort in future. That is a no-brainer. It’s also likely that some bloke will give her a romantic knock-out of some sort before she graduates from the teenage years. And with that, we’ll have another teenage pregnancy and the fruit seller’s daughter, she herself still a child, will give birth to her own child.

A Million Woman March:

In the provisional results of the 2010 Population and Housing Census, females came up tops, constituting 51.3 per cent of Ghana’s population – almost twelve and a half million (12,421,770). With females outnumbering males, it’s about time we revisited the matter of the dilemma of gender inequalities and inequities. Abena is only a slice of our social history; of a lousy public education system, of youth who are being wasted.

How does a country develop and thrive when females, the fifty-plus per cent majority, sit on the side-lines to cheer on the minority male population to run affairs? The paucity of women in the national space must be troubling to everyone. A cursory look at the economic geography of the world reveals to even the most unsophisticated observer that countries caught in the thorny throes of stinky poverty and underdevelopment are the ones with the majority of women operating on the fringes.

This phenomenon makes perfect sense for after all, how does one work productively with one arm tied behind the back? How do you bath well with only one arm? You do so unless you absolutely have to because you have only one arm. Females constitute that second arm. Everyone has at least one of these: a mother, sister, daughter or aunt.

So in the spirit of what is happening in northern Africa and the Middle East, where citizens who are fed up with oppressive regimes have taken to the streets to demand their rights, the females of Ghana, the fifty-one plus majority of our population should also take to the streets for a ‘Million Woman March.’ The march should be attended by both men and women who are pro-women. This is an admission that not all women are necessarily pro-women. There are men out there who believe in the cause of women more than some women do.

President Mills and his government promised a 40 per cent appointment of females to public positions. It’s past two years into his administration and he has not delivered on his promise. A key demand from a Million Woman March will be to insist on cashing the president’s promissory note. Women will not be asking for too much. It’ll be a very reasonable demand to ask for a fulfilment of a promise. This will be absolutely magical.