BRIAN DEER:
TRAVELLING WHITE Page
3
It's a
Thursday morning and we are parked under a tree near
a mud-brick village called Busa. The location, maybe
200km north-west of Tamale, is picturesque enough for
Harrison to get out and expose a couple of rolls of
film. To a pale, shallow lake, stream a procession of
women to scoop and carry off basins of water. They
are dressed in maroon, blue, green and black, and
they soften their loads with turbans of coiled cloth.
In the distance are more, hauling bundles of
firewood. Yet others scrub clothes on rocks. They
gossip in Wali, one of Ghana's 72 languages. Today's
topic, I suspect, is us.
Busa
is home to around 3,000 people, living in extended
families of mostly a man, wife or wives, plus
children and maybe siblings, in mud-walled,
thatched-roofed huts. All the classical indicators
reveal absolute poverty, which you find throughout
Ghana's north. One doctor serves 54,000 people,
compared with 20,000 in the more prosperous south
(and 1,900 in England). One fifth can read - half the
average for the south. One child in five dies in
infancy.
We
are here to see the work of a British civil engineer,
nominated by VSO as a boutique example for its
anniversary media coverage. His name is Krish
Seewraj. He's aged 30. And like the 1968 nominee (she
of the hot baths and houseboy), hails from the county
of Hampshire. He holds a master's degree from
Coventry University and, before arriving in Africa 18
months ago, worked at a consultancy to London
Underground. His mother is a housewife and his father
an optician. He's slim, youthful, handsome and
articulate. To permit myself a style note, he looks
as good in khaki shirt and shorts as he does
barechested in a sarong.
He's
one of around eighty volunteers in Ghana. Nineteen
are in the Upper West region. Among them are Chris
Bryant, an electrical installation instructor, who
teaches at a vocational school. There's Sarah
Richards, a pharmacist, and her partner Malcolm, who
work at a health facility. And there's Peter
Glenfield, a horticultural adviser, working on
vegetable patches.
VSO's
idea for my time in west Africa was a kind of royal
progress, speeding us by Land Rover from one to the
next before darting back to Accra for the fashion
show. But although this might have given me a sense
of the organisation's breadth, it wouldn't do much
for the necessary depth, to see if their work did any
good. So again I changed the plan kindly offered by
my hosts, and zeroed-in on Engineer Seewraj.
Getting
to meet him meant a nightmare journey from the
landing strip at Tamale. After bidding adios to the
church-planters, we bounced, swerved and skidded for
five hours on dirt tracks, most of which we braved
after sunset. It was a bizarre introduction to rural
sociology, with the vehicles' headlamps picking out
huddles of natives squatting in pitch dark beside the
road. On a lonely stretch, far from law enforcement
agencies, we edged into the bush to get past a
burning tree, set light at its roots by scavengers.
Seewraj's
job is deceptively simple: to help design irrigation
schemes, such as at the 600-metre lake where the
brightly-dressed women scooped water. At Busa, the
centrepiece is an embankment of heaped orange clay
which dams a fragile wet-season river. It was
thrown-up in 1956 -a small thank you from the
retreating British - and marked a last colonial
bequest before the Duchess of Kent came in great
silver bird to grant the old Gold Coast independence.
There are crude dams like this one all over the Upper
West, and many are scheduled for improvement.
The
lake is the villagers' most precious resource.
Without it Busa couldn't survive. Each day is like
today, with its ceaseless procession of women. They
come to the shore, wade out 10 metres, fill basins
and load them on their heads. Each typically carries
35 litres (nearly 8 gallons) an average of two
kilometres in distance, approximately seven times
every day. Sometimes children help in this
extraordinary back-and-forth, but you are more likely
to see a female on a bicycle (which is never) than a
man lending a hand to this chore.
These
are among the world's 1.3 billion people whose water
supplies aren't healthy or secure. "There can
sometimes be a big difficulty with diseases, like
guinea-worm and bilharzia," explains Seewraj,
who, like other volunteers, is not actually employed
by VSO, but, in his case by Ghana's Ministry of Food
and Agriculture. "Then, as well, the water is
used very badly."
Seewraj
and his boss, a European-educated Ghanaian, also with
a master's degree, named Sin Tim, are leading a team
which is working at six sites to make better use of
this critical resource. At Busa, the plan is to
install a valve in the dam and construct a network of
irrigation ditches, allowing vegetables to be grown
in the dry season. The same is happening at another
village we visited, Karni, three hours north by Land
Rover.
The
Busa project is rudimentary, the technology
appropriate. Nothing, in theory, can go wrong. A grid
of cement trenches, two-thirds of a metre wide, are
being laid in front of the dam. Every 200 metres or
so there is a wooden block and a hole opening onto
the earth. The idea is that by manipulating water
through this system, tomatoes, carrots and lettuces
can be grown to complement yams, cassava and corn.
Similar
work is going on throughout the region, which is at
risk of ecological crisis. Although many parts of
west Africa are experiencing increased rainfall as a
result of global warming, in northern Ghana, which is
mostly arid savanna, it's diminishing or becoming
unpredictable. Satellites, meanwhile, reveal what
look like blisters, as each year more than 1,000
square kilometres of trees are burnt or cut.
But
if I'm getting to sound like I'm puffing VSO, there's
a snag with Seewraj's project. According to his
calculations, the lake's wet season catchment area is
so small that there's unlikely to be enough captured
rainfall for the scheme to be viable in summer. The
number of hectares under vegetables will not actually
increase, he says; the area slopes uncomfortably
steeply, so water may run off too fast; and when the
men open the dam's valve for dry-season cultivation,
the women who come to carry away their basins may
find themselves wading in mud.
"You
have to draw a line in your own conscience," he
tells me, explaining that an international aid
organisation got together with a local politician and
decided to implement the project. "Busa is a bad
scheme. I've said this all along. I prefer to put my
energies into those projects that are
beneficial."
The
scheme at Karni is one of his favourites, but when we
bounced, swerved and skidded up there I had to wonder
whether VSO would make the village happier.
Dry-season irrigation schemes are notoriously tricky
in much of Africa because they tend to attract
previously untroublesome pests and can make the soil
too salty or alkaline. And as we sat one afternoon
under Karni's acting chief's tree, one of the
community elders stood and sought our advice,
assuming we understood such things.
"We
are not technical people," he said. "Do you
think what they are doing is good?"
Since
our word would apparently be trusted by the natives,
Seewraj whispered: "Say 'yes', for god's
sake.... Please."
*****
