Recap. We have embarked to Ghana on a project to document with video and photography the work of The Village Bike Project. The gist of the operation is as follows: 450 used and recycled bicycles have been loaded into a shipping container in Boston two months prior. See this post (Boss Town) for details. The container winds it’s way from Boston Harbor to Singapore and finally to Ghana, where it will be unloaded by a savvy team of Ghanaian bicycle importers named Samson and George. Most of the shipment will be sold off to various mechanics and bike shop owners around the country. (Some, we will later learn, will go to Burkina Faso). The remaining hundred or so bicycles will be set aside for use in workshops run in conjunction with a Moscow Idaho based NGO called The Village Bike Project. The workshops are the brainchild of former Peace Corps Volunteer David Peckham. David had been working in Gabon in the 80’s before coming to Ghana in the mid 90’s with an idea that he could sell low cost bicycle tools to Ghanaian mechanics that could help them do a better job. Around the same time he learned about groups like Bikes Not Bombs in Massachusetts and Working Bikes in Seattle who were collecting discarded bicycles destined for landfill and importing them to developing countries, where they were sold on the local markets. He created VBP with two guys he had met in the markets of Accra – Sammy and George. 
There are two types of workshop, basic and advanced. The advanced is aimed at anyone who goes through basic as well as the local village mechanics. Tools we’d take for granted are hard to come by here – Hammers and chisels are the Ghanaian equivalent of crank pullers, freewheel removers, headset wrenches and chain breakers. These useful tools are imported and sold at around 1/5th of the wholesale price to the workshop participants.
The basic program is an eight-hour seminar in which applicants have pre-registered through the Peace Corpsman stationed in their village. For the equivalent of between 15-30 USD (depending on the type of bike and the distance of the village from Accra), they get taught how to perform basic repairs, identify more technical problems before they become expensive bike spoilers and gain some basic riding tips. At the end of the day each participant gets a bike. Class size is limited to twenty and selection is left up to the Peace Corps rep in the village, usually working with a pre-existing group of community leaders. A mandate of the program requires at least 20% of the participants to be women, and for all of the participants to truly need a bicycle to help them in their daily lives.
For some perspective, in the villages we will be working with on this trip like most of the villages selected for the VBP, there is no running water, poor sanitation, limited electricity and the average per capita income is somewhere around a dollar a day. The bikes are sold rather than given for mainly the following reason; having to buy the bike ensures that the person receiving it will actually care for the machine. Each workshop ends up costing VBP around 300$.
Our filming in Ghana was expected to begin in the Songorniya Region, around two or three days after arriving in the capitol, Accra. Our original hope was to film the unloading of the container at Sam and George’s shop but we had been told that the landlord would not allow it, nor would the port authority allow us to film in the harbor. Of course, everything would change, on an almost daily basis. The following entries are culled from my trusty Moleskine.
Day one. After a few days layover in London, we arrived at the international airport in Accra at around 11pm. Entering any new destination after dark is never my first choice, but there really is no other option following the route we took, flying in from London. Our benevolent hosts Sammy and George met us outside customs holding up a color Xerox photo of ourselves, which we had sent as a way of helping them identify us. All the fragrances of Africa whistled through the car window as we rushed rapidly away from the culture shock – and sticker shock – of Notting Hill. Awkwardly edging through an impromptu roadblock, a few wrong turns extended our ride and our stress level – why didn’t the driver know his way? I calmed myself with the vague familiarity of similar first night discomfort in other worldly places born of dust and smoke and sweat. Trying to memorize the path into our new neighborhood, Fadema, became futile as the maze of Accra city planning revealed itself turn by turn. The roads became dirt and rock, narrower and twistier until we pulled up in front of Auntie Philo’s, matron of the compound that would become base camp for the next several weeks. Reeking of anxious excitement, we drank the proffered beer, locked down the cameras and tried for sleep.
Day two. Sleep did not come so much. More a distant waiting for morning and the unknown, finally shutting down the racing brain at 3:30am. Muted Muslim prayer chants from a nearby mosque began at 4. Birdsong next, overtaken by the rhythmic swish of a broom in the street and the washing of unseen pots, pans and bedclothes. To cross the road from our side of the compound to the main house, one must first traverse an open sewer. Treading carefully, we note that the small shop Philo runs in front of the house is called ‘He Cares’. Somehow, this offers protection and comfort to our otherwise atheist sensibilities.
Later. It’s still the first full day and we’ve been here weeks. The sky goes in and out of grey blue, punctuated with the smells of smoky cooking, cooked carburetors, smoldering trash burn off and reactive streams of sewage flowing through trenches of various depth and width along the roadsides. Food is folly, a preponderance of prefab yogurt snacks and politely offered fishfoul soup, politely forced down with plenty of rice and a double dose of acidophilus. Somewhere across this swarming mass of city is the sea. Between here and that distant shore are buildings containing easier means of replenishing nutrients and communication connections. Our secondary mission will be to find them. Our immediate task is to roll out for George and Sammy’s shop on La Pas road.
La Pas. Along this chaotic bramble of tarmac exists a reminiscent pattern mirroring every other downtrodden municipality of the globe trying to bootstrap itself into second world status. Languages may vary and the tonal hue of sun-baked skin may range widely but some things are indelibly, inexorably the same. To wit: mid-traffic hawking of toilet paper, chewing gum and bags of purified water proffered by young men clutching greasy wads of local currency. Row after row of unfinished cinderblock and rebar two story buildings, skirted at the ground floor by steel folding doors painted to reflect the goods and services provided in each cube. This set back from the sealed road and buffered by a dirt and debris no-mans land dotted with delivery trucks, swerving drop taxis, hire phone stands, clapboard shanties plying warm sodas of unfamiliar name, the odd grill of corn or dried fish, fly ridden rotting fruit, polyvinyl water cisterns, furniture on pallets and the occasional darting goat or clucking cock. Before each slab and steel cube sit half a dozen young men chatting over television entrails, copper fittings or a selection of cel phone faceplates. Shop signs are hand lettered mis-spelled aberrations of western pop references or out-right hieroglyphics, unrecognizable beneath layers of soot even to born and raised denizens of whichever Gotham we’re discussing. In this case, the Gotham in question is the Abeka region of Accra, but it might as well be Lopburi, Managua, Georgestown or Guernavaca. Homogeny is the price paid by the mollified corners of the world trying to look and act like everything is okay; as seen on TV. Globalization is the race to the bottom of the barrel, or looking down the barrel of the long gun, or both. The shop-keeps all shod their feet the world over in closed-toe sandals of dubious leather and staff their stores with dusty kneed men in baggy denim shorts and bootleg sports team kit. Doesn’t matter if it’s Africa, Mexi or SE Asia, everyone somewhere needs a pink clip-on cover for last year’s Nokia nock-off.
Accra, and Ghana as a whole, is unique in that most of its people are fairly well educated (by relative comparison). Primary education is a state mandate. There are more bookstores than cinemas in Accra, and most residents speak at least three languages – their native village tongue (there are 60 languages spoken in Ghana), English and Twi – the accepted universal dialect of the big city. The potential, one can easily fantasize, is certainly pointed in favor of the hopeful public. There seems to be two things working against them. They are taught both in school and at home under strict discipline of the switch, the lash and the fist. This renders the concept of thinking for yourself a rather mute point. Status quo is to be content to wait and be told what to do. Or expect a free ride from a passing NGO or rich uncle. The other obstruction is good ol’ Yankee materialism. Folks here seem to live just a hair-in-hand beyond their means, in a perfect impersonation of our indebted Western society. Ghanaian economics offers no credit cards, but wealth is still measured in the goods you possess. Even without the aid of Visa, the man on the street needs his Beckham jersey and the latest knock-off footgear to put on proper appearances.
Back to the business at hand. The shipment of bikes we loaded up back in Boston two months ago is stuck somewhere at sea, on it's way slowly to the port at Tema. Customs here can predictably be unpredictable, difficult and possibly a bit jumpy. After receiving some good news that we will be allowed to film the unloading of the bicycles at the shop, we get the balancing bad news that it could take a week or more for the goods to clear the harbor. Other developments include the revelation that our host in the village where the bikes are intended to be distributed will be traveling up country for the next six days, out of communication range. It would appear that our mission is stalled in Accra for at least a week.
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