Zebilla is
distinctly different - much bigger, many more buildings of more modern
construction, fewer compounds visible from the road, and much more
infrastructure. There is a petrol
station (here they are fuel stations, pronounced “foo-ell”) before you reach
the customs barrier and another after it; at the barrier there is the
equivalent of a motorway service-station in the form of a large crowd of women
selling produce and food (freshly cooked on open fires under the trees by the
road), and girls with sachets of “pure water”.
There isn’t a loo though!
Also before
the barrier, you have passed the Bawku West District Assembly building (a
second three-storey construction in Zebilla!); and next to that, some modest
and rather uninspiring single storey buildings which are home to the Ghana Education
Service (where I work) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
It’s half a
mile from the customs barrier to the centre of town. You pass a private (ie NGO-funded) clinic
with adjoining internet café (which has in the past also housed a micro-finance/credit
agency but that seems to have run into the sand), a guest-house/motel, numerous
shops and businesses (as previously describec), the police station, and an
electricity sub-station. On your way out
the other side, you see a sign to the hospital (quite large, with three wards
for, respectively, women, men and children, and a laboratory where they run the
blood tests for malaria etc). There is a
rather nice-looking new building which says it will house the post office and
looks to be almost ready; we have been told vaguely that it might be open at
the end of the year, though the person who told us that didn’t think it was
actually going to be a post office in the sense we understood it! And there is a bank – which would be
impressive except that it isn’t connected to the internet and can’t do any
significant modern transactions for you (but this part of Ghana is almost
entirely a cash economy). You can at
least (and I suspect at most) put your money there in preference to having it
in a sock under the mattress!
You also
pass a small school, which on closer inspection turns out to be a private
kindergarten and primary school – it’s one of two private schools in Zebilla
alongside four or five similar state schools, three Junior High Schools (plus a
private one outside the town) and a Senior High School. Opinions vary as to whether private schools
are better than the state offering, but the people with money presumably think
they are.
So in terms
public infrastructure, Zebilla definitely has a lot more on offer than the
surrounding villages. People from the
surrounding area come into Zebilla quite frequently – the market is a major
draw, of course.
There are other
recognizable utilities. Public transport
is one. Jane has described to “tro-tro”
service that connects Zebilla with Bolga and Bawku. Having smiled at her description, you should
conclude that getting around by public transport is distinctly possible and
widely done; that the vehicles and the road they run on are dreadful and
dangerous; that people take their lives into their hands quite recklessly and
seemingly without protest; and that tro-tro operators and drivers needlessly
put their passengers at serious risk and really ought to have more of a social
conscience and be subject to some serious regulation.
There are
also buses, including some (a few each day) run by the nationalised Metro Mass
Transport Company – whilst they don’t go anywhere meeting the demand for travel
between Zebilla and Bolga, they are decent quality if somewhat basic. From Bolga you can get a luxury
air-conditioned coach to the main towns further south, at only slightly higher
cost than Metro Mass – which is very affordable (you can get to Accra, the full
length of the country, for under twenty pounds – there’s a direct bus which
apparently leaves daily at 4am). There
are no railways this far north, and the nearest airport is Tamale.
Zebilla has
electricity and many houses are connected.
The quality of the wiring in the houses isn’t great (for example, you
regularly have to jiggle the plug in the socket to get the electrons to flow),
and it cuts out when there is a heavy storm in the rainy season. This happens frequently enough for there to
be a bespoke term for it in Ghanaian-English (“lights-out”). Ghana actually does very well for
electricity, with most being generated via the hydro-electric infrastructure of
Lake Volta (which is the largest man-made lake in West Africa, lying on the
eastern side of Ghana adjacent to Togo) and distributed via a national grid. I don’t recall seeing any power stations and
I don’t know where the rest of the electricity comes from.
There is
also water. Outside the town there is a
small dam (one person told us there are crocodiles there but others have been skeptical
– one day we will check it out) and water is pumped from there to storage tanks
at individual houses. These are known as
“polytanks”, and they are black, generally a bit taller than a person, and
stand on elevated structures outside the houses. Where there is vegetation growing elegantly
around them softening their visual impact, this is almost certainly an accident
or adventitious use of a convenient place to grow pumpkins or water melons; it
has nothing to do with aesthetics. This
system of domestic storage tanks is needed because the water is only pumped in
the morning. In theory each tank has a
ball-cock system which should shut off the supply when the tank is full. Ours doesn’t work – I suspect it isn’t unique. Thus I have to open and close a tap/valve
(which is buried in the dirt) to ensure that we don’t run out of water, but
that water doesn’t overflow and run to waste.
It isn’t a big deal once you get used to it, but few people would put up
with it in the UK.
Not every
house is connected to the water - so there seem to be some communal polytanks
equipped with a tap, which serve several houses; and there are also quite a lot
of bore-holes with manual pumps. I
don’t think many people have to carry water more than a couple of hundred
yards. Before you conclude that all is
well, just reflect on how heavy water is and whether in a modern world anyone
should be expected to carry it even that distance. Carrying water is women’s work, and small
women start joining in at a young age.
We are told
that the water from the dam is treated and is ok to drink – but I don’t know if
the local people actually do drink it. I
haven’t been told that the borehole water is safe to drink, but neither have I
been warned by local people that it isn’t.
When we arrived, the VSO doctor advised us to filter and boil our water,
regardless of where it came from – and that’s what we do. People here seem to consume a lot of “pure
water”, which is bought in polythene “sachets” containing half a litre. You can buy these everywhere, and they are
cheap (about 3 pence each). People drink
quite a lot of water because of the heat here and my impression is that most of
it comes in these sachets. There isn’t
running water at work, or in any school that we have visited.
The other
end of the water infrastructure is rather less satisfactory. Waste water from the sink and bath runs out
of the house and drains into the ground, as often as not into the “street”
(most of which you will recall, are not paved).
In the rainy season this water mingles with whatever has fallen from
heaven – when there are puddles on the ground, the household effluent adds a
slimy consistency and vaguely unpleasant odour; but when it rains after a dry
day, the effluent is diluted and washed away leaving the place cleaner than it
otherwise would be. In the dry season it
drains away quickly, but the pong never quite disappears. In Bolga and Tamale there are open gutters
down which this effluent flows (or stagnates, as the lie of the land
dictates). Mosquitos don’t actually
breed in stagnant water but I must say I struggle to see that this system isn’t
a health hazard one way or another.
In our
house, the toilets are connected to a separate septic tank. Other people’s toilets are either similarly
connected or compost directly in the ground – so mercifully it isn’t the case
that raw sewage runs through the streets as it did in our country in mediaeval
times. However, toilet infrastructure
doesn’t seem to be well developed in Ghana (no doubt Jane’s blog will cover
school toilets at some point and I might treat you to a description of the
facilities at the office). For entirely
understandable reasons, there is plenty of evidence of people “doing their
business” outdoors. It’s clear that
toilets have been added fairly recently to some houses (possibly shared between
several) – they are outside the “compound” at a respectable/sanitary distance
from the house. I don’t think I have
seen any public conveniences in Zebilla (or Bolga, or even Tamale – about which
more another time; it’s the largest city in the northern half of Ghana with a
population well over half a million people, and we have just spent a week there
doing motorcycle training). There are
well-established means of minimizing the health hazards associated with all
this, one being that people eat with their right hand and wipe their bottoms
with their left – but diseases such as typhoid are quite common here and whilst
one should acknowledge the progress that has clearly been made to date, there
is definitely scope for further improvement in this particular aspect of public
and domestic infrastructure.
Another
piece of infrastructure which doesn’t work well here is disposal of
rubbish. I have hinted before that
relatively little goes to waste here and that’s a blessing - there seems to be
a lot of re-use and recycling driven by poverty and scarcity of resources. In Zebilla there are no rubbish collections
and no communal or public infrastructure for dealing with refuse. There is litter everywhere. One of the two main components is the black
polythene bags in which you buy your goods from the market (and from
shops). These are provided liberally and
people seem to expect them – and they then end up on the ground or blown in
trees. The second component is empty
water sachets, which are also polythene bags, quite robust and made of quite
thick polythene. Being heavier they don’t
blow about as much. We’ve heard that
some people make beads from them (presumably by melting them down); and a
nearby entrepreneur who has a tree nursery plants his seedlings in them. But activities like these barely make a dent
in the litter problem.
We have
heard from VSO volunteers elsewhere in Ghana that there are rubbish collections
where they live. Be that as it may,
Bolga, Tamale and Accra are as litter-strewn as Zebilla. Everyone drops litter, even the educated and
well-paid. It may be a cultural relic,
since presumably in the past everything was organic and would compost away (or
be eaten by the goats) – whatever it is, a significant culture change is
definitely overdue.
We have been
told that we should burn any household rubbish that is burnable (and this seems
to include polythene); and that we should throw vegetable waste onto the
fields, where goats and pigs will eat it (this seems to be a system that works
better in the dry season when vegetation is generally scarce and the animals
can’t afford to be picky). We haven’t
had a fire yet and we have quite a collection of burnable rubbish waiting for
the day. We also have cans, nicely
washed and ready to be recycled…
To finish on
a positive note, the mobile telephone infrastructure here is excellent. Several networks compete, and Ghanaians join
in enthusiastically and quite often seem to have a phone on each network (so
that they can benefit from any intra-network offers!) We understand that this has all come about
over the past five to ten years and has transformed this aspect of
communications – there is either virtually or absolutely no fixed-wire
telephone infrastructure.
There isn’t
a postal service either – if you want to send something you first have to take
it to Bolga, and you can receive stuff there poste restante. Ghanaians don’t appear to be great
letter-writers though! But there is
local and national radio, and you can get both satellite and terrestrial TV.
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