My Day in a Slum

This is a long one, and for that I am sorry, but there is so much I feel needed detailed descriptions. I won’t do it again!

On February 25 I saw one of the most incredible things I have ever seen in my whole life.

Up until that day I had felt nothing but vulnerable, lost and disheartened. I was seriously wondering what the hell I was doing in Ghana of all of the places in the entire planet that I could have been in! But on this day I found what it is that all travellers (not holiday makers but travellers) are in search of: That unique, raw experience of a life that is foreign to the one they are paying thousands of dollars to get away fromAnd that is what I found.

I was back from the beach and once again in the dirty throbbing heart of Accra. My bags were packed and I was walking to the central bus station to get a bus to the tourist town of Elmina where the old slave-trade castles still stand. On the way there, right in the centre of town I cross a bridge and am appalled by the site of piles of pollution floating on the rivers surface. I decide to brave it by taking my camera out for the first time in Accra. I snap a pic and before I know it there is a guy standing only centimetres away from me. It’s funny that so many men have stopped to talk to me and yet something in my gut with this guy was screaming ‘he’s just not right’, he felt creepy and I wanted to make a damn-quick escape. As I was unsuccessfully trying to manoeuvre my way around him, my internal alarm bells screaming ‘get away’ this other big black guy slides up behind me and snarls angrily. In a deep aggressive voice he says something to the creepy guy in words I don’t understand but I assume it was along the lines of “rack off”, it worked because the creep quickly slunk away.

The big guy keeps walking and I barely got to mutter my thanks. From behind me an Aussie accent asks “are you ok?” I turn and see a man’s friendly face and we start a conversation.

I ask him what he is doing in Ghana. The answer being that he is here alone to make a documentary film. He says to me “do you want to see what it is that I find so interesting?” Of course I do.

We follow a train track along the dirty rubbish-filled river and David asks me if I have heard of e-waste. I hadn’t but then neither had he until a few months ago. He explained that it is a kind of waste system where each year between 20 and 50 million tonnes of electronic waste is systematically dumped by so-called first-world countries like Australia, the US and Europe in to developing countries like India and Ghana.

David is taking me passed a place called Agbogbloshie. Essentially it is a slum and no, I won’t look for a more politically-correct name, it isn’t a town-ship it is a slum. Small shacks jumbled together made from pieces of scrap material like plywood and plastic and corrugated iron. Apparently 40’000 people live here. There were people everywhere, sitting in groups talking, or wedged between make-shift shacks asleep in whatever sliver of shade was available, there were children running in and out of the small dark dwellings. It was fascinating. Everyone would stop what they were doing to watch us as we passed. But some of them new David and would call out “hey white man!” and he would reply “yes black man!” I didn’t believe him when he said he had only been here three weeks, he glides through the place like he’s lived with them for years. We didn’t actually go in to thick of the slum (not this day anyway), we followed the river, and as we walked the place got noticeably dirtier and dirtier. The river was slowly flowing, but you couldn’t actually see any of the water through the layers and layers of rubbish. I can’t possibly describe it in a way that would conjure up an image even close to the reality of what I saw. It was a solid mass of plastic, paper, soft drink cans, and old pieces of broken furniture, old appliances and piles of decaying grey matter. I don’t know how deep the layers of filth were but it got to a point where the rubbish on the river was so thick that people were walking on it. I was ashamed to be human, the way we have trashed this planet is unforgivable.

I was grateful for David taking me here, I thought that this is what he had wanted to show me. I was wrong, there was more. The river just set the scene for what was really about to blow my mind and also give me another perspective on my always cynical attitude toward people.

He lead me on to a place with a vibe like the hectic market place, only here people were not selling anything, instead they were gathered around old electrical goods, car parts or piles of metal and twisted wires, and they were essentially destroying them. Tearing old fridges apart, banging away at old motor parts or sifting through small pieces of metal separating the bits they want from the bits which can then be tossed away.

At first sight it looks chaotic, but it’s actually not, it worked like a factory line, everyone has a spot and in that spot everyone has a particular job, as I hung around I found out it was very structured and even hierarchical.

It was explained to me like this.

Only fifteen or so years ago the people living in the slum started collecting the e-waste from the ships that arrived at the harbour. These days the rubbish is delivered to them by the truck load. Apart from these trucks it is also some peoples job to go around to houses in the city knocking on doors and asking the people there if they have any old appliances to be thrown out. They’ll take mostly anything it seems. You often see groups of boys and men pushing carts loaded with dozens of fridges or TV’s.

All the collected appliances and car parts get brought to one area where it is sorted in to various groups and the items are ripped apart. This takes muscle, these guys are trying to separate parts that were welded together with only basic tools. And let me remind you that it is HOT and there is zero shade to work in. It is the metal and electrical parts which are of value for these guys, the plastic casings either get thrown into the river or taken to a whole other ‘plastics’ area which I will go on to describe later. The people here know their metals, they can easily tell what is copper, what is bronze, what is aluminium, what is steel etc what is useable gets bundled together and the rest they pile together to be burned.

The burning is a job that no-one wants. Apparently those who have migrated here from Northern Ghana or Nigel will not tell their family what they do, and very few will let David film the burning process because of that shame. They literally set piles of metal on fire. I dread to think what this is doing to their health. To the health of the whole city for that matter as the thick black smoke-clouds visibly waft for quite a distance across the city.

At the end of this gruelling process the valuable parts are taking to another area to be weighed and the boys are paid an average wage of 5cedi (roughly $3.30) for their 12 hour day is 5 cedi. The valuable metal bits are put back on the boats and shipped back to the West.

I find out that the food they buy costs 3cedi a day which really doesn’t leave them with much money, especially considering most of the boys and men are there so that they can save money for their families back at home. They work seven days a week. On Sundays the Christians will take some time off to go to church. The Muslims take their prescribed prayer breaks each day. It is refreshing to see Muslims and Christians living and working together in peace.  Also on Sundays everyone buys new clothes, they will wear this new outfit for the rest of the week until it is so putrid with oil grease, dirt and sweat that they need to get more. The clothes are also a by-product of the West. All of those clothes that you have donated to local charity bins…. it too ends up here to be sold to poor locals. It was quite a contradiction seeing these poor people in the slum and streets doing such dirty work whilst wearing Von Dutch caps and Gucci t-shirts.

We kept walking, I still had my 18kg pack which David and I shared the load of, and we passed an onion market. Millions and millions of onions, no exaggeration, piled high in an undercover area the size of a football field. I have never seen nor wanted to see that many onions in my life!

Then we get to the plastics area. This is the domain of the women, where the metals area is men’s work only. All forms of plastic end up here to be washed, sorted in to colours and types of plastic and then it gets shredded and re sold.  Groups of women sit hunched around bath tubs scrubbing old bottles and containers with rags and their bare hands. The women are delighted to see David, it is obvious that he has made a few admirers. The first thing they ask is if I am David’s wife, when I say no we are just friends, they seem to be happy again and I am liked more for it. The plastics area runs just as smoothly as the metals area, though I think the women here give it a much calmer vibe. I am astounded at how easily these women can tell the different types of plastic, I didn’t even know there were different types of plastic! The other thing I find interesting is that on the way to this work area the women come dressed in their best clothes. They change into work clothes while they are here but then to go home again they put their best back on, even though home is the slum just a five minute walk away. People in Ghana do take great pride in their appearance that is for certain.

Back along the river on the edge of the slum we stop to see one of David’s new friends, Abdur-Raheem. He fixes broken mobile phones for money. He is a chubby eccentric guy who made me laugh. With him is a young girl with tribal scars on her cheeks and a boy who spent the entire time teasing a bright blue comb through his hair, they all seem to be in their mid-twenties. When I asked people’s ages most didn’t know how old they were, especially those who came from small rural areas. They said they could potentially work it out if they asked their parents how the crops were the year they were born. The three kept saying that they want us to take them to Australia to make money. When we ask them what they would do in Australia they say fix mobile phones. David explains people don’t fix phones they throw them out and get new ones. We tell them that there are poor people in Australia too and they simply don’t believe us. They say God will get them money if they keep praying. We asked them about life in the slum. There is a school in there, shops, bars and brothels. Apparently the bigger the sex workers bottom is the more money she costs.

Just ten meters away from us, on the dusty banks of the pollution-filled river children have congregated to do acrobatics. My jaw drops as I watch them do triple-flips and summersaults and back-flips and always land on their feet. I can not see much difference between the skill of these 10 year olds and what I see at the Olympics. The kids here are clearly fearless. David does some hand-stands to the squealing delight of the kids. Abdur-Raheem says he is too fat to do it now, but that he will practice and in a few days we should come back so that he can show us his hand-stand.

From there we attempt to head home, I am obviously not going to Elmina anymore but have instead decided to get a room at David’s hotel. We are stopped on the way just one more time. Sitting amongst a pile of car tyres is another group of guys who have already made David’s acquaintance.  The guys give me a seat in the shade of the tyres and they ask the usual questions about whether I am married or not. They are fun guys though and we have a laugh. Eventually the topic of immigration comes up. The guy who seems to be the leader of the pack tells us that he has taken the route that most immigrants take to escape to Spain. As he talks he draws a map on the dirt. He explains that people from Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Mali and other parts of West and Central Africa use smugglers to hitch through Libya and the Sahara. Apparently there is only one smuggling truck a week to pick you up from and take you through the desert, if you miss it you are stranded there, if you are stranded there you die. He said he was lucky enough to get that truck, and as he drove through the desert he passed over 80 dead women, children and men who were not lucky enough to have gotten that one weekly truck. He believed that once in Spain you are held in detention but only for one week, then you get your papers and you are free. I don’t know much about Spain’s illegal immigrant policies but if they are anything like they are in Australia these people are screwed whether they make it there or not.

I am truly fascinated by the people here, their stories, their dreams their resourcefulness in regards to making a days earnings. They are working themselves to an early grave, they live in filth, and breathe toxic air and yet they still laugh and chat and have hope. They work together in relative peace while their children do black-flips. As a collective whole they taught themselves how to transform trash into a day’s wage, how to fix mobile phones and sell used car tyres. They help each other too. When one guy was explaining to David that he buys his parts for 10 cedi off that guy over there who buys it for 5 cedi from that other guy just over there, David interjects and asks him why he doesn’t just skip the middle man and buy the parts directly for 5 cedi. The man is confused and replies “but what about the man in the middle, if I did that then he would earn no money”. These people have very little, but they welcomed me in, they gave me their seat, they watched my bag when I walked off and three times that day I dropped my sunglasses and each time someone picked them up and gave them back to me.

I feel a this strange rush, like an addiction to the place and I cant wait to go back!