That's a lotta water...
*****
There’s a dam in Burkina Faso that’s opened every year and floods the northern half of Ghana. People know when it’s going to happen, make preparations for it and the damage is minimal.
Rains have been heavy so far this season, coming at inopportune times (like now, when they’re trying to harvest groundnuts and things are getting waterlogged) and causing a lot of damage to homes, roadways and farms. And apparently Burkina has gotten a lot of that rain as well.
So much so that they reopened the dam again, adding more water to the north that’s already bogged down as it is. It’s overcast, so it’s not evaporating. The ground is saturated, so it’s not sinking.
In short, it’s a mess of recently created islands in my half of the country. I have to cross small streams that are steadily becoming rivers to get out of my village.
My road has become nearly impassable. I often say it takes three to six hours to get to Tamale. On a great day, I can get there in about two-and-a-half, which makes the seventy kilometers feel like nothing. It’s been so long since the rains have been here, that I kind of forgot why that six-hour ceiling even existed.
Now I remember.
It’s a crapshoot as to whether any lorries will even show up most days, even if they ran the day before. One pothole can knock out an axel like that (as we saw with the cargo truck on the way out the other day - side note: I had to tamp down a mild feeling of satisfaction when I saw that it was none other than the lorry that cheated me blind on the transportation prices of my rabbit cage materials, what goes around comes around, Yoo) and then you’ve got no 0530 bus to town anymore.
I rode in on a market lorry two days ago and it was one of the worst decisions of my life. I had to go into town for a PC meeting, so it wasn’t like I could put off the trip. I hopped in the back, sat down on a sack of corn, and did my best not to fly bodily into the air when we hit the holes (it’s fun to feel 0 Gravity, but the landing? not so great). And then we stopped for more groundnuts. And more corn. And then we stopped again. And by the end of it, we were packed mid-way to the top of the walls with sacks of goods.
And then it started to rain.
Hard.
They got the heavy-duty tarp rolled onto the top of the open bed in time for me to become soaked to the bone. The tarp covering fifty wet people held in just enough heat and exhaust to make me think that I had combined suicide attempts of sticking my head in an oven and stuffing the muffler on my car.
I felt like a wet dog. I smelled like a wet dog. I had a migraine in no time.
And then the truck broke down.
I couldn’t quite figure out what they were saying was wrong with it, but it was irrelevant at that point. Who cares why we’re not moving? Sometimes my Peace Corps-induced apathy is helpful.
Of course I had to go to the bathroom, as wet and cold as I was, so I spotted a nice bush in the near distance and took off for it, avoiding the puddles as best as I could. Apparently someone else had recently deemed that spot bathroom-worthy as well because I stepped in a pile of fresh human feces as I squatted to urinate.
In short, I was twenty kilometers from my front door, three hours later, and it was already the trip from hell.
We loaded up about half an hour later, still covered from the rain, and lumbered down the road toward pavement. Of course, everyone had to stop and unload their goods at every village we hit (sometimes numerous locations in the same village because they were heavy goods) and their stuff was beneath everyone else’s. All the bags look the same, but have some sort of mark on them that’s sometimes unnoticeable until you’ve taken the bag all the way out and discovered that you needed the sack next to that one. That’s always a joy.
When we reached Savelugu, I decided to pay the extra cedi and hop into a taxi. There were too many villages between there and Tamale that this bus was going to stop at. It took about five minutes for the car to fill and we were off, wind in my face, crammed only four to the backseat of a Honda Civic.
I was in heaven.
Less than a minute later, the car sputtered to a stop. We were out of gas. The guy ran back to town (about fifteen minutes walking distance) and got some petrol. Thirty-minute delay, tops. He starts the car, nothing. He turned the engine so many times, I know he flooded it, but that wasn’t it either.
An hour and a half later, the other four passengers and I were loaded into a new car and on our way to town. Six hours after I got into the first tro, I got out of the taxi, my forty-mile trip concluded. The market lorry? It beat us to town.
The entire point of this was not to lament my horrible travel experiences, but more to explain what happens to everyone during the rain. My situation wasn’t unique, it wasn’t even noteworthy for most Northerners (except for maybe the stepping in poo - their radar is better than mine).
A situation that’s already no good is made worse by decisions like allowing the dams in the north to be reopened. It’s only hearsay, but I’ve heard it a lot. Burkina supposedly pays the Ghanaian government to do those releases. And how much of that money actually makes it up to the people who’re affected by it? Virtually none.
Especially for this recent, unscheduled one. People’s entire fields of groundnuts, yams, corn and beans - acres upon acres worth, their family’s livelihood for the upcoming year - were flooded by this release. You just…don’t do that. Who opens the floodgates on farmland in the middle of farming season?
At some points, when you’re on a hill on the road to Tamale, you can see the White Volta River. I live nowhere near the Volta, but that’s how far its banks have spread. The road is slightly elevated, like a levee of sorts in some places and if we get another few days of heavy rains, the water level will cover the pavement. At some points along the river, villages have been overtaken by the water, people have died, washed away by the currents or crushed by the collapse of their mud houses.
But there’s no outrage coming from the government. Why? Because they allowed it to happen. That’s not a political statement or supporting one government over another - that’s the simple fact of the matter. The top half of the country is under water because Accra deemed it acceptable to let the water rush in.
It’s very frustrating for me to have to sit back and watch all of this happen. I want to speak up on behalf of the people I’m working with, but what can I say or do that will change anything? I’m sure they feel much of the same thing most of the time. They’re the forgotten groups by most politicians unless it’s an election year. Then, all it takes is a little bit of money and a new pavilion at the lorry station so people have shelter when waiting for the bus. Bam. He just won that sub-district.
It’s just another reminder of how, even though it’s a different country on the other side of the world, things can operate the same way as they do back home.
A man spoke up in one of our mango meetings the other day about the bush fire that took about forty farms this dry season. Someone from another village called him out saying that it wasn’t even his farms, so why was he worried. That man went on to say that there are two groups who largely ignored - the women and the poor. The people whose farms were destroyed fell into those categories. If he didn’t speak for them, who would?
Sometimes I wish men like him had the courage to speak louder, to a broader audience because if they don’t speak for themselves, who will?
There’s a dam in Burkina Faso that’s opened every year and floods the northern half of Ghana. People know when it’s going to happen, make preparations for it and the damage is minimal.
Rains have been heavy so far this season, coming at inopportune times (like now, when they’re trying to harvest groundnuts and things are getting waterlogged) and causing a lot of damage to homes, roadways and farms. And apparently Burkina has gotten a lot of that rain as well.
So much so that they reopened the dam again, adding more water to the north that’s already bogged down as it is. It’s overcast, so it’s not evaporating. The ground is saturated, so it’s not sinking.
In short, it’s a mess of recently created islands in my half of the country. I have to cross small streams that are steadily becoming rivers to get out of my village.
My road has become nearly impassable. I often say it takes three to six hours to get to Tamale. On a great day, I can get there in about two-and-a-half, which makes the seventy kilometers feel like nothing. It’s been so long since the rains have been here, that I kind of forgot why that six-hour ceiling even existed.
Now I remember.
It’s a crapshoot as to whether any lorries will even show up most days, even if they ran the day before. One pothole can knock out an axel like that (as we saw with the cargo truck on the way out the other day - side note: I had to tamp down a mild feeling of satisfaction when I saw that it was none other than the lorry that cheated me blind on the transportation prices of my rabbit cage materials, what goes around comes around, Yoo) and then you’ve got no 0530 bus to town anymore.
I rode in on a market lorry two days ago and it was one of the worst decisions of my life. I had to go into town for a PC meeting, so it wasn’t like I could put off the trip. I hopped in the back, sat down on a sack of corn, and did my best not to fly bodily into the air when we hit the holes (it’s fun to feel 0 Gravity, but the landing? not so great). And then we stopped for more groundnuts. And more corn. And then we stopped again. And by the end of it, we were packed mid-way to the top of the walls with sacks of goods.
And then it started to rain.
Hard.
They got the heavy-duty tarp rolled onto the top of the open bed in time for me to become soaked to the bone. The tarp covering fifty wet people held in just enough heat and exhaust to make me think that I had combined suicide attempts of sticking my head in an oven and stuffing the muffler on my car.
I felt like a wet dog. I smelled like a wet dog. I had a migraine in no time.
And then the truck broke down.
I couldn’t quite figure out what they were saying was wrong with it, but it was irrelevant at that point. Who cares why we’re not moving? Sometimes my Peace Corps-induced apathy is helpful.
Of course I had to go to the bathroom, as wet and cold as I was, so I spotted a nice bush in the near distance and took off for it, avoiding the puddles as best as I could. Apparently someone else had recently deemed that spot bathroom-worthy as well because I stepped in a pile of fresh human feces as I squatted to urinate.
In short, I was twenty kilometers from my front door, three hours later, and it was already the trip from hell.
We loaded up about half an hour later, still covered from the rain, and lumbered down the road toward pavement. Of course, everyone had to stop and unload their goods at every village we hit (sometimes numerous locations in the same village because they were heavy goods) and their stuff was beneath everyone else’s. All the bags look the same, but have some sort of mark on them that’s sometimes unnoticeable until you’ve taken the bag all the way out and discovered that you needed the sack next to that one. That’s always a joy.
When we reached Savelugu, I decided to pay the extra cedi and hop into a taxi. There were too many villages between there and Tamale that this bus was going to stop at. It took about five minutes for the car to fill and we were off, wind in my face, crammed only four to the backseat of a Honda Civic.
I was in heaven.
Less than a minute later, the car sputtered to a stop. We were out of gas. The guy ran back to town (about fifteen minutes walking distance) and got some petrol. Thirty-minute delay, tops. He starts the car, nothing. He turned the engine so many times, I know he flooded it, but that wasn’t it either.
An hour and a half later, the other four passengers and I were loaded into a new car and on our way to town. Six hours after I got into the first tro, I got out of the taxi, my forty-mile trip concluded. The market lorry? It beat us to town.
The entire point of this was not to lament my horrible travel experiences, but more to explain what happens to everyone during the rain. My situation wasn’t unique, it wasn’t even noteworthy for most Northerners (except for maybe the stepping in poo - their radar is better than mine).
A situation that’s already no good is made worse by decisions like allowing the dams in the north to be reopened. It’s only hearsay, but I’ve heard it a lot. Burkina supposedly pays the Ghanaian government to do those releases. And how much of that money actually makes it up to the people who’re affected by it? Virtually none.
Especially for this recent, unscheduled one. People’s entire fields of groundnuts, yams, corn and beans - acres upon acres worth, their family’s livelihood for the upcoming year - were flooded by this release. You just…don’t do that. Who opens the floodgates on farmland in the middle of farming season?
At some points, when you’re on a hill on the road to Tamale, you can see the White Volta River. I live nowhere near the Volta, but that’s how far its banks have spread. The road is slightly elevated, like a levee of sorts in some places and if we get another few days of heavy rains, the water level will cover the pavement. At some points along the river, villages have been overtaken by the water, people have died, washed away by the currents or crushed by the collapse of their mud houses.
But there’s no outrage coming from the government. Why? Because they allowed it to happen. That’s not a political statement or supporting one government over another - that’s the simple fact of the matter. The top half of the country is under water because Accra deemed it acceptable to let the water rush in.
It’s very frustrating for me to have to sit back and watch all of this happen. I want to speak up on behalf of the people I’m working with, but what can I say or do that will change anything? I’m sure they feel much of the same thing most of the time. They’re the forgotten groups by most politicians unless it’s an election year. Then, all it takes is a little bit of money and a new pavilion at the lorry station so people have shelter when waiting for the bus. Bam. He just won that sub-district.
It’s just another reminder of how, even though it’s a different country on the other side of the world, things can operate the same way as they do back home.
A man spoke up in one of our mango meetings the other day about the bush fire that took about forty farms this dry season. Someone from another village called him out saying that it wasn’t even his farms, so why was he worried. That man went on to say that there are two groups who largely ignored - the women and the poor. The people whose farms were destroyed fell into those categories. If he didn’t speak for them, who would?
Sometimes I wish men like him had the courage to speak louder, to a broader audience because if they don’t speak for themselves, who will?