My Town I

My Town I

by E. Ofori Akyea

About a year ago my wife and I made the decision to settle in this little town on the Accra-Hohoe road. Our friends were at first surprised at our decision to leave Accra and settle in a little town of some 20,000 or so people. But we were determined to go.

The town has 36 schools including a Seminary that is shortly going to become the religious faculty of the EP Church University. There is a Senior Secondary High School, a Secondary Technical School, several Junior High Schools and innumerable primary schools.

The town has a lot of churches. This should not be news in Ghana. I could fill this page with the names of the churches. Apart from the usual Evangelical Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Methodists there are the various strands of the Apostolicism, the one person church and one that started the other week near where we live. The membership is made up of the man, his wife, three children, a neighbour and a curious man who usually watches from the window of this uncompleted house that the man and his family who are squatters in have converted into a church. The other thing is that the leader of the church is unable to read. He does everything by inspiration.

One of the churches is behind a much patronized Drinking Spot. Across the street from this drinking spot there are two churches. A curious sign has lately caught my eye. It says “Science of Spirituality”. There are meeting days indicated but I have not yet gathered the desire or courage to go there to find out what the whole thing is about.

In fact, the town is the first place that the Basel Missionaries came to in the then Trans-Volta Region which is now known simply as the Volta Region. The chapel there is about 250 years old and is full every Sunday with local worshippers. I go there once in a while to contemplate history. The first coeducational boarding school was started behind the church. The school is still in existence although no more as a boarding school.

The town is also the birthplace and the resting place of perhaps the greatest musician and culturalist that the country has ever produced. He is buried in the yard in front of his house, with his wife beside him. He died at the grand old age of 96. His house is to be opened shortly as a museum. There is a yearly lecture and concert series dedicated to him. The man who composed “Yen ara asase ni” in Ewe in 1929 and translated it himself into Twi two years later played Beethoven every morning on the piano for an hour or so to gather inspiration.

He revolutionalized choral and church music first in the Presbyterian Church and in the society generally. He invented a flute made from bamboo. The man who was thrown out of the church and the Training college for his uncompromising stand in wearing native attire became the pillar of the same church in his later years. In fact, at the time of his death he had become an icon and his country had heaped all sorts of honour on him.

This same town also saw the birth of the first modern woman entrepreneur and gender activist of Ghana. She inspired many of the women who are the leaders of today. She was the main inspiration behind the Association of Ghanaian Entrepreneurs and the Women’s Bank. Her tomb is being converted into a mausoleum in her honour.

The town also boasts a medium sized hospital which has been designated as the District Hospital. There are two distinguishing aspects to the hospital. First, it was built through thee initiative of the women of the town. In fact, they also contributed he bulk of the labour with which the hospital was built. The second distinguishing feature is that the hospital was designated as the cleanest medium sized hospital in the country some few years back.

Despite its reach there is only one resident doctor for the facility. He works hard and still is at his surgery late into the evening. The hospital serves the population from Anum all the way to Kpeve which is about more than 100,000 people. It is not, therefore, unusual to find the facility quite crowded but orderly at all times.

The town is connected to the national grid. Electricity is generally regular. Water supply is seldom cut if at all. Like everywhere else everyone has a water tank to store water, just in case. The utility personnel are quite friendly. I am still to experience or hear of the hostility with which the workers are known for in certain parts of the country.

The town has no petrol filling station. There are, however, two “Gao” petrol and diesel stations that sell their stuff from drums. It is quite a sight to see the men in charge pumping the fuel up the glass measure. The set up brings back to me my childhood in the mountains in Akuapem. I grew up selling petrol and kerosene in my father’s store. I was always awakened at dawn by the blaring of the horns of impatient drivers who were ready to leave with their passengers in their trucks to Koforidua, Suhum, Mangoase and the little towns in between and beyond.

We found out also that if we needed LPG gas we had to go sixty miles to Kpandu or go beyond the Kpeve mountains to Ho, the regional capital. When recently there was a general shortage we had to come to Accra to get supplies.

I have counted five Guest Houses in the town. One of them even has a web site. It means one can book a room from anywhere. In any case, there is no internet connectivity here in this town. Ghana

Ghana Telecoms (GT) is not present here. Each time I ask why we do not have GT services around here the officials and experts go into a long and convoluted reasoning why we are not able to be part of the national circuit. I get more upset when I read of the millions of cedis that are being sunk into ensuring that the National Football League or some such “enterprise” is promoted. Last year GT spent billions of cedis to support the Black Star effort at the World Cup in Germany. There is a Biblical injunction that asks that what it profits a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul. We here did not get to see the matches and we are cut off from the internet. Technical problems are meant to be solved. I refuse to accept any more GT excuses for those are what they are, excuses.

Right here I yearn to get on the IT superhighway. I know it is the way to the future. In my former life I used to coordinate the work of an international committee whose members resided in more than a dozen countries. I did this with my lap top. Here my family in Accra are unable to get to me for days on end.

We have MTN and TIGo represented here. For almost a month now I have had problems remaining connected. Either my number does not exist or the number I am calling is out of coverage area even if the person is sitting opposite me. I wish they could use some of their profits that are being used to give “fantastic” and expensive prizes to improve the services to my neck of the wood and by extension to throughout the country.

I am right now sitting in front of my television set trying to follow what is going on in the country and in the world. I also wish to be entertained some and also to be educated by the same television on how to appear, at my age in baggy trousers, slouching along, talking in an incomprehensible lingo and generally making a fool of myself.

All I can see on the screen are a lot of lines and a simulation of rain. The screen is supposed to produce colour. There are only black and white grains running across the screen and with screeches and an annoying beep from time to time to remind me that I am participation in the great show of the century courtesy of GTV. In this part of Ghana we do not have the luxury of changing channels. It is GTV or nothing else

We in this valley can tune in to GTV only. I am told that there is a transmitter at Amedzofe that is supposed to send the signals to the whole of our Region. Since I came here the signal seems to be more temperamental than anything else. It comes on at around 6 am and then there is the parade of religious programmes. The educational segment in Ghanaian languages is misplaced. Do the programmers really want or wish people who are going to the farm, to work and to school, for example, to sit through the programme to be followed by the German version of the world? We also are treated to a view of strange cuisines and lifestyles that bear little or no resemblance to our lives and culture. Why show me a restaurant in Europe that I need an 18 month reservation to eat there when our bread basket is under water?

We know what time of year it is by what the women are roasting or cooking by the roadside. Right now there is corn – roasted, cooked, grilled and in whatever form is all over. There are also groundnuts all over the place. It is nice to eat groundnuts in whatever form with corn. There are quite a few corn mills in town. They mill corn out of which kenkey and other produce are made. The size of the kenkey depicts also the season. For example, when there is the harvest of corn kenkey sizes go up slightly.

It was such a town that we came to live in. Of course, there is a Bank here but we quickly found out that there was no corporate entity in town. The only big institutions in town were the Teacher Training College, The Senior High School, the Seminary and the sub offices of the utility services. Although the bank is housed in its own magnificent building its core business seems like servicing the many retired persons that have come home. There is a crowd at certain periods of the month. Other times one can go and have an hour long chat with the employees. About a year ago the bank was put on line. Before then every transaction was done by hand and entered into several legers that were dog eared. Huge tired looking ledgers were all over the place. It was a wonder the employees did not get sick of the mustiness. Now, suddenly the place seems to be quite airy. All of them have their noses glued to their screens. One can access one’s account in seconds. Transfers can be effected in real time and hypertensions are definitely down.

Next week I shall continue to introduce you to my Town