HOW MANY HENS WILL TRUMP NEED
TO REPLACE OBAMACARE? - Part 4
Continued from... Part 3 |
| Wide plant beds with furrows around it |
The next morning, I was led to some vegetable fields near Bolga, irrigated by dammed water, as we were in the middle of the annual dry season. My guide, the secretary of its water users association, was able to gather over a dozen irrigating farmers for a chat, despite it being the city's market day. Their first request was for funding to raise the dam, to store more water, though the chances of getting more rain here is close to nil. I flipped the coin: "why don't you try to make the most of the water you have?" No windbreakers in that vast expanse to reduce soil water evaporation. In this heavy clay, they plant the same crop at the edge of the furrow as well as in the middle of the plant bed and irrigate till the latter gets fully wet. Unfortunately, in rainy season, other farmers use the same lands for rice. So, one has no incentive to add manure or even lime to reduce the stickiness of soil, and any tree planting will bring conflicts. They need to review the land use rules before addressing water shortage.
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| He is more than a chief, is the owner of the village! |
They suffer heavily from pests and diseases. After hearing about South American practices, they promised to re-enact their own traditional ceremonies to control those. Two days later, the owner of all village lands (the rest simply have the possession), in his full ceremonial attire, explained to me a series of ceremonies that congested cropping season in the past. Apparently, the area's majority religion, Islam, also resists continuing these traditional practices.
Seems like the power and the resolve of a local chief determines how long these 'animist' ceremonies will survive in these communities. At another community, slowly being devoured by expanding Bolgatanga, the leadership explained to me the ritual they still hold to end a long drought: they would simply put dry corn flour in the ceremonial dish for the ancestors. The ancestors are forced to get water from the sky to prepare the porridge! It reminded me the tradition of the Peruvian town of Comas of hanging ancestral skeletons from a bridge and the South African practice of beating ancestors' tombs, for not doing their part in ending a drought.
Further south, in equally bone-dry Tamale, I heard about the existence of some experts who have the ability to make the clouds gather overhead and the thunder to threaten, when needed to prove that somebody is lying. Similar stories were mentioned in a 1972 PhD research among Australian aboriginal water experts. An anthropologist claimed that the indigenous of Sierra Nevada de Santa Martha, in Colombia, did not have to build irrigation canals in the past because they simply asked the gods for water when and where it was needed. I did not insist on meeting and recording the Tamale experts because revealing those secrets are considered taboo in many places. Has China forgotten about its own rainmaking traditions that they are wasting millions on spraying its north western sky?
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| pumping water |
Most of my time in Ghana was spent in local homes, in rural and urban areas alike, though I knew none of the families beforehand. They did not shun taking this stranger into their homes, despite the lack of basic facilities: water had to be fetched from boreholes; electricity was non-existent or unreliable in many homes; and sanitary 'facilities' were out in the open. I got to know firsthand how they survive in this harsh environment. While helping the kids extract water from unmaintained hand pumps, chasing away pigs at early morning 'outings' and getting baked alive inside mud brick rooms, I thought of solutions to their problems.
In one Bolga community, I was asked to help find a stable water source for its vegetable farmers who now dig holes every year in the dry riverbed. I suggested tapping the old river channel and tackling its low water yield with solar or animal-driven, long duration pumping. I hooked them up with a local NGO to implement the idea. Here, I had more than enough time in my hands due to an accident. In discussions with local youth, we cooked up innovative ways on how to present some solutions to poor villagers.
Rainwater harvesting from the numerous roofs in each family compound will help reduce by half the time they pump drinking water by hand (all 4 rainy months and at least 2 more when stored water is used). This lets the boreholes recharge and recover the phreatic level. In addition, it reduces the cost of pump maintenance. If they modify a bit the way they cultivate around the boreholes to increase rainwater infiltration, the recharge will be more effective.
Open-air defecation is considered an unhealthy practice by well-off populations and by the 'civilized' poor. Many rural folks do not consider so, probably because they step-on fecal matter of many animals, many times a day. A latrine is never an economic priority to most of them. Urban poor are pressured by the lack of open space and the 'decency' rules. However, they would prioritize a TV or a sound-system even when they have money, probably because they hate sharing their tiny space with the nauseating smell of an overtopping latrine, as they know that sewage collection systems are not reliable.
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| No-man's land in Apam |
The urban poor of Apam, Ghana, had found a unique solution. While searching for its 16th century Portuguese fort, I followed the 'castle street', which continued towards a rocky beach. First, I noticed some uneasy looks from the women coming from the beach. When I saw a woman sleeping by the path, that early in the morning, I was concerned. A brave one then confronted me: I was stepping into a no-man's land, literally! There was no sign, but every man in the know, except me -the rare tourist, respects the exclusive area for women. This solution is much better than what my friend's mother, in San Lorenzo, Ecuador, suggested when inquired about a latrine: "You just have to wake up a bit early in the morning!"
India's Modi is using the 100+ year old woman who sold her goats to build a latrine as the poster girl for his campaign, but that will convince very few. My Bolga village youth asked for an economic incentive, instead. You do that by designing the latrine as a manure and biogas production factory. The new recruit can be welcomed with the gift of a sack of manure until his first latrine load decomposes. Then, even the kids would be forced to use it, to get more manure and gas, I was told. To make the transition easier, we should design the latrine space to have an open-air feel.
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| A modern village compound |
Cement and zinc have destroyed the rural architecture all over the world and made those homes unlivable. In West African Sahel Belt, rural compounds consisted of a series of single-roomed, grass-thatched, 3 to 4m diameter mud houses. When thatching gave way to zinc, they built rectangular houses, occupying almost the same space as a roundhouse, now divided into 2 or 3 tiny rooms. Mud bricks make up most walls still, but those with more money, add cement to the mud or use solid cement mortar blocks. Earlier, mud wall was low but the roof was very high in the center. Now, to cut down on costs, they keep the roof-supporting sidewalls also low. Because of regular dust storms, they tightly seal the roof to the walls, making the result a perfect oven after midday. The brick wall transfers the outside temperature in with a 4 to 6 hour delay and the 'baking-house' stays so till 10pm even on a normal day. On a 40+ oC day, with no-leaf-moving, I can't imagine how one could sleep there. Like in Paraguayan Chaco, all souls seek refuge long into the night under whatever tree shade around 'the civilization-on-fire'.
Solutions to this debacle? The other man-made debacle -'modern economics', makes any solution extremely hard. Dump zinc? The carpentry is so expensive that only tourists can afford to sleep in thatched cabins. A conical zinc roof with a hot air escape at the center will bring back the roundhouse, only if we can make somebody produce such sheets cheap. If we can design a way to easily attach a plastic sheet to the bottom of rustic, grass-thatched roundhouse roof, we may be able to convince the folks that grass roof is still cost-effective. Doubling the wall thickness will sufficiently delay the heat transfer-in, but the cost factor blocks this solution. Bringing back the thick stone-masonry for the bottom-half wall may help delay in heat transfer. That also reduces the humidity and erosion problems mud walls face in the rainy season. But, people don´t use the stones even where they are freely available. Skilled masonry is too expensive?
Kashyapa A.S. Yapa
March 2017, Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa.
kyapa@yahoo.com
