OUR YOUNG PEOPLE- OUR FUTURE

Our Young People – Our Future

By E. Ofori Akyea

There is an area in Ghana where every Easter a group of women living in a neighboring country hire buses and come home ostensibly to celebrate with their folks back home this popular Ghanaian festival. In most of Ghana the Easter season is an occasion when the cities get empty. People head home where development meetings, durbars and other festivities are held thanks to the long holidays. Often ballroom dances take place and local belles are crowned “Miss Beauty of Our Town”. The celebrations end on Easter Monday with a Church sponsored picnic preceded with a route march with the local Brass Band providing the melodious accompaniment.

Now, the women come, as I said, to celebrate Easter. For the week or so that they are in town they carry out a continuous fashion show. For two or three times in a day they change their dresses and parade through the town decked in all the finery that they can make their bodies carry. They spend time at “Spots” amid the slapping of thighs and to loud music with smatterings of the language of the place from which they came to show everyone that they are on top of the world. Money, of course, is splashed around and they are the toast of the town.

Come the time to leave, they are accompanied by a contingent of young girls who also hope to come back next year to show off too. The sad part of the story is that these poor girls who abandon their schooling leave with the blessing of their parents. The mothers look forward to receiving money and pieces of cloth from their daughters who have joined the sad trade of prostitution.

The stories of these poor girls are often harrowing ones. Once they leave the shelter of home they are tossed literally on a most tempestuous sea of uncertainty, cruelty, and sheer misery. Some of them are sent to women who run local restaurants known as “chop bars”. They do all the menial jobs that they are assigned to. The problem is that they are neither paid nor have regular hours of work. Their pay goes to the women who brought them over. They claim to be saving the money on their behalf. Come the time to sleep most of them curl up in any corner and in the shacks that serve as eating rooms and a general purpose area without any privacy. In certain cases they eat the crumps that are left by the clients.

Since they have no money and they are hungry these 14 or so years old girls are easy prey to the men who visit the “chop bars”. Generally these men are also strangers struggling to make ends meet in the big city. They could also be lecherous men out for a thrill. In search of companionship these individuals drift together. Both the man and woman enter into the relationship for different reasons. The man needs sexual satisfaction. The girl thinks she has found an emotional anchor. No one has ever mentioned contraception to the couple. They give in to their instincts and the inevitable like sexually transmitted disease including or pregnancy may result. It is known that when the girl becomes pregnant one of two things happens. The owner of the joint begins to beat the hell out of the poor girl for being a bad girl to become pregnant.

The most frightening aspect of the situation is that the poor girl might have contracted the HIV virus. Since the woman she works for has no intention of taking care of the girl and her pregnancy she proceeds to make life as unpleasant as possible for her. The man who impregnated her has no fixed address. She does not even know his name apart from the nickname “London Boy”. He manages to vanish into thin air. The girl is then left to be on her own in this great wide world. She goes through her pregnancy without ever visiting any Health facility.

The desperate girl tries to abort the foetus. In comes the horde of medical advisers – her friends and acquaintances who begin suggesting all manner of ways and things to use in order to terminate a pregnancy. More often than not the bizarre treatments could end up killing the poor girl. She may also end up developing full blown AIDS and die a slow painful death far away from her home and alone.

Those of her friends who were sent directly to the brothels would fare no better. The Madams waste no time. Thy have virile young men around or their pimps who they call husbands. It is the task of these men to break the neophyte in to what she would be facing during her tenure. She is provided with a bucket, a hard bed in a small room and a piece of cloth that she may cover her midriff with. Soon after being set up her clients start arriving. The majority of these are men who have migrated from neighbouring countries and the hinterland to seek their fortunes in the city. They are men in their prime who end up doing menial work and being labourers in town. There are also sexual deviants and thrill seekers who come along.

The men come to relieve themselves of their sexual tensions. For a small sum they can have a session lasting between ten and fifteen minutes with the underage girl. Extra time has to be paid for. The money is collected at the entrance by the madam. The girl has no other option but to submit. After each session she sits on the bucket to wipe off. She is then ready to receive the next client. The time of day does not matter. She is on call for twenty four hours.

The standards of hygiene being so low the girls become infected in no time. It is at this point that the lucky ones find their way to the Ghana Embassy. On many occasions they have to be carried to the Embassy. They often arrive wearing nothing but a wrap around cloth and exuding unbearable odour seeking assistance in order to be repatriated home. These girls have spent not quite six months in the place and their lives are destroyed for ever.

Now we turn our attention to the young men who are determined to seek their fortunes anywhere but at home in Ghana. Some of these young men are often already doing some lucrative work here at home. Yet when the travel bug gets at them they sell the tools of their trade and pack off to Europe or wherever to make their fortune. Young men and in some cases women, have been known to write to relatives and acquaintances with preposterous ideas on toughing it out overseas including sleeping on one’s floor while working.

The media is full of stories of the harrowing experiences of our young men and now women who go through the Sahara Desert to get to Europe. Since many of them do not tell anyone of their intentions many die en route with no one to mourn them.

The route they take are mind numbing. Some of them go north to Burkina Faso and then cross over into Niger or Mali and head north through the desert towards Libya, Algeria and Morocco before negotiating to enter fortress Europe. These days the preferred route is to go by boat from the Senegalese coast to the Canary Islands. The other aspect of the problem is the amount of money they have to expend in order to reach their goals. In my estimation they could have used that money to set up respectable businesses here in our country.

Others go as stowaways and no one knows what becomes of them. The rule is that any stowaway is handed over to the judicial authorities at the next port of call. The rules keep on becoming stricter and stricter so many ship Captains find other solutions. The real desperate ones have been found dead in the wells of aircraft undercarriages. Someone who deals with some of these problems told the story of a twenty one year old who managed to stow away to an European port. He was discovered and handed over to the police who promptly deported him back to Ghana. He told the official “I shall be back”.

It is clear from the above that many parents are not fulfilling their parental roles. They talk of poverty as being the driving force that leads them to treat their children as chattel that one can use to one’s advantage. I watched a documentary the other night where mothers were giving away their children to child traffickers for money. The women got themselves in to debt through spending money on funerals. The most terrible part of the documentary was the fact that the community knew what was going on but everyone kept silent.

The youth, on the other hand see no future before them. Is it the life spent on chasing cars in traffic to sell handkerchiefs or shoes or whatever that they should be aspiring to? One day while sitting in traffic between Obetsebi Lamptey Circle and Graphic I recorded sixty four different items being sold between vehicles. That was more than one could find in a small Supermarket.

As a nation we need to come together to find a solution to this problem. The more we who are supposed to lead keep on finding ways of scoring points against one another the more the destiny of our motherland will remain one of points scored with nothing tangible to show for it. Is this the legacy we are leaving for the next generation? Let us think again.