Ghana 3. Water

The water supply has been back on this week, although it’s been coming out of the pipes accompanied by a large quantity of brown silt. This makes ‘washing’ and ‘cleaning’ possibly two different things, but so long as my developing layer of topsoil keeps on replacing the sweat, I’m happy.

On Sunday evening last week we returned to the house from a weekend away to find the water still off – day five without. According to Joe, one of the local shopkeepers, it was because of engineering works just around the corner where they are building a new water treatment plant. Other neighbourhoods further away still had water, and locals armed with buckets could be seen heading to the nearest working tap to fetch in water for cooking and cleaning.

By the end of last weekend our house’s meagre reserves had run very low – the huge plastic bin in the bathroom was now empty – and the volunteer coordinator said that we had to all stop washing until further notice. This, in a country where you can be sweating by the time you step out of the shower. Unsurprisingly there was a lot of grumbling at this and many people headed round to Joe’s to buy the last of his drinking water just so they could have a wash.

Thankfully I was pretty clean at that point. We had spent the weekend at Ada-Foah, part of a delta of around twelve islands at the mouth of the Volta River, where it meets the Atlantic. The coast of Ghana sports some impressive beaches, but most are plagued by rip tides that make anything more than paddling a life-threatening undertaking. In contrast, the gently lapping lagoon beaches along the river are perfect for swimming. I spent a lot of time in the water, mostly rescuing toy boats that local kids were racing from a tiny inlet out into the lagoon.

Back in Accra, sod’s law had it that on Monday, only hours after The Organisation paid for a tanker to come and replenish our supplies, the water came back on. This was just one of several recent episodes that have made us very grateful to have a running shower at all.

The week before we had travelled four hours east of Accra to get some footage of a rural orphanage where one of the volunteers has been working. To describe the place as a one-horse town would be overdoing it. It’s just not that developed. Accordingly, the washing facilities were the ubiquitous ‘bucket shower’: an outdoor cubicle into which you take a bucket of cold water, a bar of soap and a strong constitution.

The orphanage is home to around thirty young people, mainly boys, ranging in age from eight to twenty. The situation is complicated by the fact that at least seven of them appear to be the children of Pastor David, the guy who runs the place. Fran, the eighteen year old volunteer who has been working there, was understandably a bit taken aback to discover on arrival that many of her new charges were the same age as her if not older. Yet after ten weeks there she had become both councillor and friend to them all, and was genuinely sad to be leaving.

I hate to say it, but 48 hours there was enough for me. In the rural evening (it’s dark at 6pm) no one can hear you scream. There’s little electricity and even less to do, so most people go to bed around 8-9pm, as did we. Which was a good thing, because at 4.30am we were woken by a knock on our door. I struggled out from under my blanket of mosquitoes to find Pastor David standing outside; he announced with a beaming smile that he was ready for his interview. Having not been there when we arrived, he had travelled four hours by tro tro back from business in Accra to be filmed by us, but had to return there early the following morning. Accordingly he’d caught a few hours’ sleep then got up “a bit earlier than usual” (!) in order to speak to us. Under the light of a 12W bulb and through the fog of sleep it was all going at bit Heart of Darkness, although our Mr. Kurtz was impressively lucid. In contrast I am not, nor will I ever be, a mornings person.

Rustic quirks aside, it was great to be out of the city, and the orphanage did have some plus points over our usual metropolitan wasteland. For one thing, the drinking water tasted better. In Accra, as with everywhere else, you have two options: bottled or bagged. At around 1 Ghana cedi (about 50p) for 500ml, bottled is ten times more expensive, so most people drink the plastic-tasting Bell’s water bags that can be bought from cool-boxes on nearly every street corner. The same volume, these are tough, clear plastic bags that you bite the corner off then suck. It’s rather like drinking from a breast implant.

Alongside eating spare ribs or flossing, drinking from a plastic bag ranks as one of those activities at which it’s impossible to look sophisticated. It’s a gamble trying to put a bag down mid drink, and if you do, it’s easy to forget which corner you’ve opened. I often find myself sucking fruitlessly at an unopened corner while water trickles down my leg.

Speaking of legs, today was both the Accra international marathon and half marathon. Quarshie, one of the Organisation staff, was running the full distance and several Canadians that we’ve met were doing the half, so we went along to watch. In a bid to avoid the heat of the day, both races were due to begin at dawn. However, this being Ghana, both started late. Consequently the full marathon runners were only beginning to cross the finish line at around 10.30am by which time it was beginning to bake. Several Ghanaians ran barefoot or in flip-flops; one of the runners was an eight-year-old Ghanaian girl who did it in a swimsuit. Although there were several dramatic collapses across the finish line, it was astonishing how many runners seemed largely recovered within an hour of finishing. As we left the eight-year-old girl was running around, playing happily with a friend.

After a strenuous morning spectating we deserved a rest. The race finished down by one of Accra’s few bits of tamed beach, so we paid the entry fee to go and sit at one of many bar-restaurants competing for custom on the sand. Alongside basic amenities, the entry fee to the beach pays for a team of litter pickers to continually sweep the sand, gathering the vast amounts of rubbish washed up by each tide. This is a feature of all beaches in Ghana, where the sea appears to be the final destination for much of the nation’s waste, organic or otherwise.

By far and away the most common item to litter the beaches are discarded drinking water bags, washed up in their hundreds. At the beach resort in Ada-Foah the local kids made their toy boats, origami-style, out of them. I’m sure there’s a point to be made here about the cycle of materials et al, but it’s too hot right now to try and be profound and I’ve just upended my water bag down my leg, so I’m going to sign off and take a shower. Just a little more silt and I’ll be ready to sow a new crop of cassava in my armpits.