Our
training with VSO put a lot of emphasis on not jumping to conclusions, and on
being aware of our own culturally pre-determined expectations and
prejudices. We have only been in the
town for 8 weeks. So there is obviously
the risk that we will fall into these traps.
Partly for that reason, but partly also because most of the time I feel
genuinely positive about the place, I’m going to concentrate mainly on the
positive aspects and the things which, sometimes contrary to all expectations,
you actually can do.
Zebilla
functions as a town and as a community.
People go about their daily lives and rub shoulders with their neighbour
and generally get on with things. The
day starts early – the muezzim’s first call is just before 5am when it is just
beginning to get light, and over the course of the next half hour you can hear
that a few people are up and about. Occasionally
you can hear a heavy lorry passing along the road. There is an excellent practical reason for
making an early start here. By 8am it is
getting hot. An hour later it has got
hot. It gets progressively hotter still,
peaking around 4pm, and it’s still hot as the sun goes down. So if you can get stuff done early it is more
comfortable.
Let
me insert here that the animal population gets on with its own thing. Cocks crow, pigeons coo, guinea fowl – I
don’t think there aren’t words to describe what guinea fowl get up to but let
me tell you it’s noisy – pigs, sheep and goats rootle and gruntle and trample
around giving the impression that they are 20 times their actual size. But it seems to be the case that those
creatures which aren’t nocturnal make an early start too.
Every
third day is market day, which gives rise to more traffic of all types. By the time we set off for work (a bit after
7 if we are going into a school, or around 8 if we are going to the office),
the streets are distinctly “in action”.
Building work is usually already going full swing. The women who run the many roadside shops are
there, and those who cook have their fires going and something boiling or
frying in a pan. Roadside businesses –
be they vehicle repair, bed or furniture making, metalwork of various sorts,
tailoring and seamstressing – are getting ready for action but are mainly not quite
out of the starting gates yet. A key
activity is greeting – people here stop to pass a few words with their
neighbours before they get on with the business of the day – and the air if
full of “do-awela” (how was the night?) and “lafubay” (I’m fine, I’m healthy)
(plus plenty of other things that we can’t translate – note that life at the
local level goes on in Kusaal).
Outside
the police station there will be at least one officer in uniform surveying the
world, probably another cleaning a car; likewise at the customs barrier on the
edge of town, the official personnel are in evidence. The road is busy with a lot of motorbikes and
bikes, plus tro-tros (see Jane’s blog – janehartleyghana.blogspot.com ), a few
cars and the occasional bus or lorry.
There are children on their way to school, though we understand that a
lot are at school shortly after 6 (we haven’t quite worked out why). At
school, the ladies who cook food to sell to the children and teachers are at
their stations and preparing their wares.
Especially on market day there are many women and a few men carrying
things to sell – the women carry heavy things in tubs on their heads, the men
generally exert themselves rather less. Among
the heaviest things they carry are firewood and water. I have an aspiration to take a photograph of
a woman carrying a load such as this (and another aspiration to post it in my
blog…), because seeing is believing and without a photo I don’t think you
would.
Zebilla
doesn’t have what a westerner would recognise as commercial buildings –
factories and warehouses. This work
happens mainly in the open air. There
are what you might describe as awnings with corrugated iron or zinc roofs,
which keep the rain off and provide some shelter from the sun. A carpenter’s workbench will be under one of
these. Things are put away at night but
there isn’t exactly high security. We
haven’t heard that there is a need for greater security, though we have been
told that there is quite a bit of theft of livestock (pigs are apparently an
exception because they make an infernal noise if you try to grab them, but
goats and sheep seem easy to rustle).
Shops
are small, square (cuboid) structures without windows, which lock securely at
night. They contain the stock on shelves
and, once again, have an awning at the front where the shopkeeper resides. To buy, you join her under the awning and
either tell her what you want or point.
Each individual shop carries a fairly limited stock and seems quite
specialised. One we use quite regularly
sells soap and washing powder (but washing-up liquid was a special order which
generated enthusiastic positive noises but hasn’t materialised yet); mosquito
coils and fly-spray; a narrow range of tinned food; cartons of fruit juice and
cans of soft drinks (including some cold stock in the fridge); dried milk;
digestive biscuits (a luxury item, twice the price of the UK). She also sells phone credit, which I will
explain later. Once you know where to
find it, you can buy most things that you need for daily life. “Need” is perhaps the operative word; one
thing about Zebilla is that it teaches you quite quickly what you can do
without.
There
are more specialised shops. There are a
couple of “cold stores” which are basically big freezers, which sell
deep-frozen items, including meat and fish but also some other delicacies – one
we were shown recently is frozen yogurt (yum).
There are mobile phone and accessory stalls, and you can buy electrical
goods – the stalls which sell these tend to have big speakers and blare out
quite horridly distorted music (a rather bland brand of reggae which one could
easily allow to get on one’s nerves).
Another
“shop” sells auto parts. We haven’t had
call to go in and see what they have.
There aren’t all that many private cars here but there are a lot of
tro-tros which are minibus-type vehicles.
These all seem to have been bought second-hand from Europe, probably
with six-figure mileage and usually with their previous existence still painted
on their sides– I imagine that they might be a ready market for all sorts of
car parts. The various NGOs
(non-government organisations), and also the public institutions have chunky
4-wheel drive vehicles which are in good condition; I don’t know what the
service contract arrangements are but they must also need parts.
I
don’t think you can buy a whole car here.
However, you can buy a motorbike – new or second-hand - and also those
African special vehicles which are motorcycle at the front and two-wheeled
trailer at the back. We have heard that
it’s cheaper to cross the border into Togo to buy a motorbike, and since we
have been here we have heard of one young man who did just that, then was
involved in an accident on the way back, and died. (We haven’t heard what happened to the bike…)
You
can also buy a bicycle – which we have done.
There are a lot of bikes here, and there are a couple of bike sellers
who both carry a surprisingly large stock of basically identical machines. Large (I mean really large) lorries come
past, piled high with bikes. Ours are
Chinese imports. Bicycle repairing and
maintenance is another street-side business.
The repairers seem to be busy, and I have the impression that tools in
general are expensive, and good quality and specialist tools difficult to
acquire – so most people get someone to do their maintenance and repair for
them. I also have the impression that
bikes, and indeed cars and motorbikes, and probably everything else come to
that, are run on a regime of breakdown rather than preventative maintenance.
A
final observation is that prices here are pretty low. It’s easy to understand why – most people
here don’t have much money so you don’t have much chance of selling anything
expensive. As a consequence, the things
you can buy are not particularly good quality.
Your kitchen knives have flimsy blades and won’t stay sharp. You eat off plastic or melamine plates and
bowls because you can’t buy decent china or pottery. The electrical goods are all bottom end of
the market. There isn’t any sense of
branding – there are no fancy trainers in Zebilla (but there are some hilarious
counterfeit articles – we spotted an ahmahny recently). I don’t mean that there aren’t people with
money here – our impression is that there are, and there are certainly
televisions and satellite dishes, washing machines, fridges and such. But there don’t seem to be enough of them to
support shops that sell higher end goods, so presumably their finer possessions
come from elsewhere in Ghana. Given our
experience with the internet (and also from talking to people) I don’t think
they are bought on-line…
There
is lots more to tell, so I’ll come back to this topic.
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