Sukula

On Saturday I had the pleasure of visiting the Sukula neighborhood again here in Accra, my second time to check up on the two brothers - lets call them Frank and Stan - who I met through a friend at grad school. My grad school buddy and his girlfriend are sponsoring the education of Frank and Stan, who they met through a program for street children Accra, Ghana.

Since that program, Frank and Stan's family life has improved - the program for street children provides advice to their mom and family, and checks up on them from time to time to make sure all goes well with school and work (Frank is a barber) etc. I will attend Frank's graduation on 2-Sept as he departs Junior Secondary School (JSS). He is still awaiting test results to see if he has achieved the scores necessary to enter Senior Secondary School (SSS) and later to university. Frank's dream is to study, build, and work on airplanes (aerospace engineering then?). Stan's dream is bifold: to be a footballer (he leads the team that took a JSS league championship) and/or a doctor. Hear Stan was similar to hearing from kids at a program primary school I once gave a speech at say "I want to be an NBA player, but my backup plan is XYZ."

The Neighborhood
The people in Sukula are mostly from migrated from the Northern region of Ghana. Northerners are predominantly Muslim, and the style of dress is also influenced by by this. I saw many more of the boboos (traditional long flowing robes worn by men, often white or other light colors) than I usually do in Accra. There was also the characteristic loud speakers outside of some buildings for announcements of calls to prayer.

Sukula is known as a less than pleasant area of the city. It is a very busy area, with lots of very small stalls of people selling some garden crops, tee-shirts, food - you name it. As is standard for Accra, there are open sewer ditches, that form a moat in front of every building. The streets tend to have two lanes with a ditch on both the outer sides of the road. Every building has a little bridge across the moat.

For some reason, Sukula's sanitation problems seem worse than the rest of Accra, even though the sewer issue is a very common phenomenon in the city (and I encountered it in Timor as well). The dust-dirt of the area, and the garbage throughout are not a pleasant sight. One image that stuck in my mind was that of two huge yellow trash bins with the words "HIPC Benefit" on a label of the trash dumpster. The quote is a public relations sticker from the government to convey that it has properly used the money it has saved through the HIPC debt relief initiative. If sanitation is to get any better though, I think there will need to be a lot more of these big yellow bins, and an entire waste treatment system to make life healthier in Sukula and throughout the Accra region.

But then again, maybe Accra - being the capital - is getting too much focus and we should all be more worried about the countryside communities? Serious dilemmas...