the drowned city

Yes, it's another JHR foreign correspondence article, posted here for your viewing pleasure. The longer I'm here, the higher I climb onto my soapbox. Sorry.

The rainy season has once again fallen upon Ghana. Part of me is loving it. Twice this week I've woken up to early morning thunderstorms and rain hammering my window. The air, for once, gets cool, and I wrap up in a blanket and am lulled back to sleep by the noise.
For other residents of the city, however, this season brings the same kinds of problems over and over again. Drains become flooded and the resultant mix surges up and out into residential areas. People's homes become flooded with the dirty water. Property gets destroyed. People get sick from living in sewer water. This year the National Disaster Management Organization announced that they had put together a team of heavy hitters to provide relief to flooded areas, consisting of no less than the Navy, the Air Force, the Police Service, the Fire Service, the Red Cross, Civil Aviation, the Ghana Health Service and the Accra Metropolitan Assembly. This is because last year, five people died in floods in Accra.

I don't know what's been done previous years - I wasn't here. But my colleagues say every year the same areas of the city get slammed with downpours and floods, and every year both NADMO and the AMA say they're going to do more to stop it - to unclog the drains filled with garbage so the rainwater might pass through, to provide support and supplies to those who have lost property, and assist with "prevention."

Most people know about the floods that tore about the northern region of Ghana last fall. Nearly half a million homes were destroyed. Around 20 people died. A lot of crops were destroyed. The international press was all over it. I wonder if people would be surprised to learn that even in the country's relatively developed capital city, people's homes are rendered uninhabitable due to flooding. I was.

The city's drainage system seems to be a big part of the problem. As I went out with JOY FM reporter Peter Mensah to check out parts of Accra a day after a serious rainfall, we ran into a contractor working on a drain in the city's Odorna area. He told us what was wrong with the city's drain system, how it overflowed during floods, and what needed to be done to fix it. We invited him onto JOY's NewsNite programme to explain it for listeners. Of all the politicians and disaster officials that have appeared on JOY FM since the rainy season began, his explanation was the most concise - and seemed to have some viable solutions.

But government still needs to act when it comes to the people who have to live in areas near drainage ditches because they have no where else to go. Although no one's died yet, people in the city are still sitting in waterlogged homes with their belongings piled on the roof. Young girls wade through knee-deep water just to leave their houses to go to school. People can't eat the food cooked in their compounds because it may have picked up some of the sewage that has spread all over the ground.

The worst part of all of this is like so many other stories in Accra, it's nothing new, and every year, very little changes. As we walked through a ruined compound in Odorna, we met one woman who smiled widely at us. When we explained why we were at her house, she began shouting at us. "You journalists, you come take pictures, then you leave!" she screamed. "Every year this happens and we are tired of it! Why don't you people help us?"

Part of her tirade is included in the report posted below. At the time, I felt unfazed. I've heard those kinds of jibes many times as I've been out with JOY's reporters. In Accra, just as in Canada, there are those same stories that come up year after year. You know - Christmas shopping season is here! The first big winter snowstorm has arrived! Parts of the city are being submerged in sewer water! And a lot of the stories that recur are - woefully - related to human rights abuses, like the overcrowding in Accra Psychiatric Hospital. People see reporters coming around and documenting their misfortunes every year. When it doesn't inspire any immediate change, they understandably become frustrated. I can't blame JHR nor JOY FM for this particular problem. It's so heartbreakingly rare that journalism actually changes policy. I didn't take this job with JHR to save Africa; I didn't choose to become a journalist so I could spearhead massive social change and win a Pulitzer Prize. But it's still upsetting to see people so disheartened - with government, with both foreign reporters and journalists in Ghana, with themselves - and to know that they have been telling the same stories of their soaked clothes and dirty feet and water up to their knees, year after year after year. And right now the rains have only just begun to fall.