You live in a FILTHY COUNTRY!
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| Filthy, a common sight throughout Accra Picture courtesy of: http://edition.radioxyzonline.com/pages/news/05302013-0818/12395.stm |
I live in a residential estate in Teshie/Nungua, a nice,
relatively clean and quiet suburb of Accra. A few weeks ago, at the height of
the rainy season, I woke up feeling particularly 'green thumbed'. The earth was
calling to me and my garden tools and I was going to oblige. Prune back some
trees, de-weed the lawn, transplant some seedlings and generally give
the foliage a good once-over. Besides, gardening was the one activity
that kept dearest wife and overly energetic kids away from me for fear of being
roped into performing some horticultural activity. Ceres herself was
on my side today and nothing was going to get in my way. All suited and booted
up, I stepping outside the house and was immediately and
brutally assaulted by the putrid smell of decaying flesh. Something
had died…very close by!
I went outside and saw my neighbour, Kofi, standing outside
with a shovel, bucket and a very perplexed look on his face. Without speaking,
he pointed to a spot not 15m from our houses. There was a black, bulging polythene
bag stuffed into the gutter, blocking it and causing the sewer water to dam on
one side. We both slowly made our way in that direction expecting the worst.
The smell was almost unbearable. We carefully liberated the stuffed bag from
the gutter and gingerly made a hole in the side of it to check the contents. I
was convinced that we may have to call the police.
Fortunately we didn’t. Some IDIOT had stuffed a bag full of innards, heads,
feathers and all other inedible parts of several chickens/roosters. I guess the
moron didn’t have two brain cells to rub together to come up with a decent way
to dispose of this so waited till everyone in the neighbourhood was asleep and
then, without a shred of common sense or decency, simply dumped it into the
nearest gutter he could find. Retarded you say? I beg to differ, I’ve come to
find that this is very common behaviour in this country.
I could go on about several other cases involving dead pets
carelessly tossed onto rubbish heaps or simply left by the roadside but I’ll
spare you the ordeal.
Ghana is a dirty country. It may sound harsh but I dare you
to challenge that statement! And don't come back with some asinine comparison
of Ghana to an even dirtier country like Chad, as if relative dirt is supposed
to be okay. Let me be clear. Less dirty is not a valid argument. What's
maddening about the dirtiness in Ghana is that most of it is completely
unnecessary. I'm talking about an entire nation that thinks it's okay to leave
our sewers (gutters) uncovered, build latrines over said open sewers and
allow people to urinate in them for a small fee. Shockingly, the same people then wonder why an entire area stinks to high heaven. Someone please
tell me why this is necessary. On separate occasions, an African American,
Zambian, Kenyan and South African have all asked me, and I quote;
'...Osei, why
do you have open sewers in the capital...?'
Not knowing how to respond
to this unwelcome but sincere question I simply shrugged on each occasion and
said;
'We've given you Azonto now you're asking for covered sewers too?
Ungrateful foreigners...'
In Ghana we seem to have a chronic unawareness of the
environment. The very few that actually know that something called the
environment exists are so bloody apathetic in their regard of it that they may
as well not matter. I mean the number of times I've driven through town and
seen people confidently walk out of their houses only to empty the
contents of a chamber pot into the...wait for it...open gutter! If you really
want to see how careless and completely moronic Ghanaians are about our
environment, I beseech you to take a swim down the in the Odaw River towards the Korle Lagoon and see if you don't emerge
from the other side as some sort disfigured mutant with super powers. We have
completely killed off this river with the sheer amount of garbage and muck
tossed into it over the years. It's ironic that the area around the Lighthouse
and Korle Lagoon is locally referred
to as Lavender Hill.
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| Swim anyone? State of the River Odaw Picture courtesy of: http://www.dvafoto.com/2013/07/valentino-bellinis-bit-rot-project/ |
Oh, and our local markets, well they're completely environmentally deplorable too.
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Agbobloshie
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Makola
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Salaga
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Kaneshie
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Madina
They're built with absolutely no regard for order,
cleanliness and convenience. Agblobloshie on a rainy day anyone?
Didn't think so. Almost all of the organic, not-so-organic and God-knows-what-else
waste is conveniently dumped into the River
Odaw that flows close by. The least of all the evils mentioned above in my
opinion would be Madina or Kaneshi market but even those are a far
cry from anything resembling clean. These major markets are built in an
extraordinarily cumbersome way so that they are unable to cater for the
convenience needs of both vendors and shoppers alike. To compound the problem,
they have been allowed to grow and sprawl uncontrolled, like a cancer. There
are very few, and in some cases, no access to public toilets and so the vendors resort to
‘clever’ ways of relieving themselves and disposing of said relief, usually in the River. It’s
actually quite remarkable that more of us don’t end up with dysentery, typhoid
or some other such food/water borne disease.
But with all that said, at least Ghanaians appear to dress
nicely and claim to live in clean homes. Thank God for small mercies.
