All over the place

Burj Khalifa, Dubai (true, not in West Africa)

It has been a very varied few weeks since I last wrote.  Last week I had R&R, which started with a couple of very mellow days in Dubai with Shiona, a good friend who has managed to keep in touch with me since my contractor days in Manchester.  The city is really quite incredible, especially from a construction perspective, and not just because it has the world's tallest building (pictured left).  It has to be the neatest, most organised city I've ever visited - and I've lived in Switzerland!  I think we were both impressed with just how well made everything is.  We differed on one point though - she thought it was really hot, and I was always freezing.

Shiona went back to work on Wednesday, but since I still had some R&R days I went on to Ghana.  I was happy to get back to the warmth!  It's a lot like Côte d'Ivoire, but in different colors, and in English.  There were the same roadside stalls selling pineapples and tomatoes and such, but where here lots of them are painted orange, there they have much more red.  The rhythms and ways of talking are kind of the same, too, but the language is different.  It was unexpected, and fun.

Female slaves' courtyard, Elmina Castle, Ghana

I got out of Accra and went along the coast a ways to Elmina, an old Portuguese trading post with a fort built in 1482.  Trippy to think that was before Columbus went to the Americas.  A few years later, once those who came after Columbus got settled, Elmina Castle was used to store slaves for the trans-Atlantic passage.  Apparently they held 1000 captives there at a time, 600 men and 400 women, and they could be there for two or three months.  It was quite a big place, but it's very hard to imagine what it was like with 1000 people there.  Especially with no plumbing.

Elmina continued as a slave trade hub for hundreds of years, first under the Portuguese and, from 1642, under the Dutch.  By the time the British took over in 1872 the slave trade had already ended, but this is just one of 20+ forts along the coast of Ghana alone.  I struggle to wrap my brain around how many people went through this system, and how many people it must have taken to catch and process and keep them all.  When young, bright-eyed Europeans went off to the Gold Coast to make their fortune, did they know what it would involve?  When a soldier from one African kingdom victorious over the neighbors caught and sold them to those same Europeans, did they understand what would happen to them?  Capitalism can be a scary, scary thing.

But Ghana isn't all depressing.  In fact the drive along the coast is really spectacular, lined with coconut trees and beautiful beaches, quaint, colorful towns and vendors of various kinds pursuing capital of their own.  I visited Kakum National Park, a bit inland, to tour their canopy walkway, some 30 metres up in the trees.  That was sensational too, even though I took the tour at 10 am and most of the birds and animals were already taking their siesta.  There were lots of beautiful butterflies though, which always make me happy, even when they refuse to pose for pictures.

Neighbors of an ONUCI camp showing us
the kitchen waste outfall location

I arrived back from R&R on Monday, just in time for a waste and wastewater management systems audit.  I spent the first three days of the week taking visitors from Italy to a selection of septic tanks in the sector. We are not supposed to be releasing untreated septic tank overflow from any of the camps, but 9,000 soldiers generate a lot of sewage, so wastewater management is a challenge, to say the least.  Kitchen wastewater, a form of greywater (used, but unlikely to be contaminated with fecal matter) is not as serious, but still not supposed to be going offsite untreated.  At one of the camps we found a bunch of boys who live nearby and were delighted to have their picture taken where the kitchen drainage pipe ended, near their houses outside the camp.  Fortunately (?) the pipe is broken inside the camp, so the waste is all draining out there for the moment (technically compliant!).  We have plenty of work in WatSan for the foreseeable future.

Daloa municipal dump

The audit included solid waste so we toured some of the municipal dumps, too - a first for me.  There tends to be a lot of garbage everywhere, since many people don't bother traveling far to toss their waste.  In most open spaces you'll see a pile or two of trash, usually being picked through by stray dogs or chickens or sheep or cows.  I particularly like the cows, who sometimes lie across the top of the pile, chewing philosophically.  Sometimes people pick through the piles too.  Plastic bottles are regularly reused, and you can see them for sale in the market.  There is value in all that stuff, and seeing it around all the time has really changed my perception of it.

I still wince when one of my team throws trash out the window as we're driving, but I can't really complain.  Even the official dump is just an open area, and I wonder if it's really worse to distribute garbage around the countryside than to collect it all in one place.  I'm not sure, and I still won't throw plastic out the window, but it has made me much more conscious of what I use and what I throw away.  I'm not convinced that burying all our trash, like we do at home, is a better solution.  Maybe it's best for these things to be exposed - we might be encouraged to change the behaviour that generates them.

So it has been a thought-provoking few weeks, which I like.  Still, I'm looking forward to relaxing this weekend!

View out of the "door of no return", Elmina Castle, Ghana

- By the way, if you're interested in reading about the West African slave trade from a very personal perspective, Maya Angelou wrote All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes about the years she lived in Ghana in the 60s.  Among other things, she deals with trying to find a connection to her African roots, and her relationship to those Africans whose ancestors weren't sold into slavery.

Now I'm reading A History of West Africa 1000-1800 by Basil Davidson which, notwithstanding the super-colonialist sounding name of the author, talks less about the slave trade than about all the empires that thrived in the region from trade with the muslims to the north.  It's really interesting, and a big change from the euro-centric history I got in school!

A short one

Yellow Bizness Center, Tabou

It has been a long exhausting week with a lot of travel. Now it seems very unfair that it's Sunday night already and it all starts over tomorrow.

Here are a couple of pictures from this week's trip to Tabou. The beach and lighthouse were very pretty but I particularly liked the Yellow Bizness Center near the ONUCI camp, which kind of epitomizes the creative entrepreneurial spirit I see all the time here. They do photocopies, laundry, men's hair styling, car and motorbike insurance, and school documents. And all with a fabulous yellow paint job.

Cash only

Found next to the checkout at a recent supermarket visit

Buying here is a bit different than in other places I've lived.  You pay for everything with cash. Mobile money (essentially using mobile phone credits as currency by transferring them to someone else's account), which is really widely used in Kenya, exists for transfers between friends and family and is beginning to catch on for paying power or water bills here, but less for goods and services. Credit cards are totally useless, except to withdraw cash from the cash machine at a bank, and the banknotes you get from the cash machine are 10,000 CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine) francs, worth about $20. Around here that will buy you a lot of just about anything.



Stock photo of mine from a market stall

It doesn't sound that different, but it has some unexpected consequences. For one thing, small change is really valuable.  You would happily accumulate your weight in coins if only you could wait the half hour after paying your bill for the waiter to go down the street to all the other restaurants, bars and shops until he finds someone who can break your $20, and brings you back the change and the chewing gum or pack of Kleenex he had to buy to get it.  Instead, you usually unload your precious shrapnel and hope to be able to pick up some more at the supermarket.

In the street market, where they set their own prices, they can make them nice and round, or give you a discount, throwing in an extra papaya, like a fruit stall vendor did for me this morning.  The papaya sold for about $0.20, and it brought the total of my purchases (half a kilo of onions, an avocado and a pineapple) to $2.  And if you have to break a big note there's usually a bench nearby they'll invite you to sit on while they go around to all their vendor colleagues to get your change.



Official cobbler of the Man football club

Places you go to regularly, like the corner boutiques that sell powdered milk and dried goods and soap and stuff like that, may give you the old-fashioned kind of credit. They'll write down that you owe them so much or that they owe you, and next time it gets added or subtracted from your total.

The fancier the place though, the more complicated it gets. Supermarkets and pharmacies have prices just like in supermarkets and pharmacies all over the world - 1,990 CFA francs for a box of cookies, for example (almost $4 - yes, the supermarkets are also quite a bit more expensive than the street markets). You can probably pay with credit card in Abidjan, where they set the prices, so they don't really care. Here though you end up adding whatever random items they have at the checkout until it comes to a number that the cashier can make change for.  Sometimes those items are pretty special though, like the Obama Biscuits (about $0.05) I found this week.