Digging for gold

On Sunday the lot of us packed up and headed out for the mining town of Tarkwa with our reporters in tow. It was a week of ups and downs, as usual. We had decided to head out to Tarkwa to meet up with a WACAM rep who would take us to various villages and introduce us to the locals and help with interviews and translations. We were hoping to see some health effects, some environmental impacts and some galamsey mining. What we got was a frustrating, exhausting day of disappointment and setbacks. Problems started early in the day when the transportation the WACAM rep had arranged failed to show up. No problem, he bundled us into a cab and promptly took us to the most remote village I’ve been to in a long time. We were grossly overcharged, then Mr. Mensa sent the cabs away, knowing full well that it would be a long, long time before the cabs returned.

The village itself was destitute. A gaggle of children, all looking to be under eight, gathered around to gawk at the obrunis. Who knows where the older children were, maybe hawking on the streets of Kumasi or Accra. The chief pulled up some benches for us outside his home, which was a ramshackle mudblock hut that was falling apart. He told us that the children don’t go to school because the mining operation had blocked the footpath to town, meaning instead of walking four miles to get to school, the children would be forced to walk 25 miles to school each day. The company, Ghana Australia Goldfields, gave the community a small van, which promptly broke down and now sits unused in a nearby village.

It was hard to believe that beneath our feet ran a river of gold ten times the size and value of the California gold stake.

A few women paraded by to show us their rashes and the rashes of their children, something they attribute to the drinking water, which they say has been contaminated by the mining company’s activities. We took some snaps, had a completely disjointed and not entirely fruitful interview and then headed for a look at the stream.

Well, lo and behold, the town had a full-scale illegal operation underway, with the run-off seeping directly into the muddy brown stream where the women did the washing, the town did their bathing and where children brought buckets every morning to collect the day’s water. The water was oily and slick, contaminated with oil from the antique machines pumping water and laced with mercury, which the miners use to bind to the gold and remove it from the rock. We didn’t realize how precarious the ground was around us, but there were holes and tunnels all about, in an elaborate and somewhat poorly planned attempt to sift through every morsel of sand. The boys, who were about 19 but looked closer to 13, told us they work to pay their school fees and help their families. We were there on a Monday, however, and no one was heading off to school. Some of the boys tunnel, others sift through the sand. The women carry the sand on their heads, the men run it through the makeshift mining operation and a few who speak English well take their wares to town. One particularly obnoxious man offered to take me to his hut to show me the necklaces and bracelets and earrings on offer and if I hadn’t found him so creepy, I would have happily checked out just how much gold the town has extracted illegally from the GAG concession.

We made our way back to the village, waiting rather impatiently for Kristy to finish up her photography. Kristy is both very mature and incredibly young. She’s obviously got talent, but she hasn’t got a lot of skill. She’s got more than enough arrogance and self-assurance to make up for it. We were all feeling frustrated that as soon as we started asking questions, she would wander off. So whenever we needed her to take pictures of things like rashes, destroyed farms or otherwise, she was impossible to find. Prue was fit to be tied because at one point she refused to take a shot of a hand-pump at the borehole, claiming she could only do it if everyone moved away, then she wanted to wait around for someone to legitimately come to the pump and use it. She even led away the mum and children with rashes and posed them in an awkwardly lit pose that made it seem as though the baby’s head is on sideways.

Hot, tired, frustrated and mildly dehydrated, we decided to start walking to the next village in the hopes of meeting a cab somewhere along the way. Several hours and many kilometers later, all the while my head filled with various cruel and terrible ways in which to inflict a type of vigilante justice on the dickwad from WACAM, we came to a fork in the road and a cab pulled up. We were all terribly pissed off, completely dehydrated, dirty, frustrated and tired. And we still didn’t have enough for a story.

We drove off to Teberebie, a village that had been moved after a massive cyanide spill ruined the town’s water supply. The chief of the new Teberebie awoke one morning to find his 20 acre farm buried under rubble dumped in the dead of night, he claims, by men working for the GAG concession. With no warning and no compensation, a farm that had been in his family for generations, that fed roughly 10 people, including his children and sisters, vanished. The community has terrible relations with the company, which painted each house in the village with a big bright red X, to keep them from erecting new structures that may one day have to be moved again. Initially the villagers were told they would be compensated for each of their plants, depending on its maturity and its market value. So a small pepper plant isn’t worth as much as a pineapple plant, which in turn isn’t as valuable as a cocoyam or plantain tree. Once the assessments had been done and the farmers had signed off on compensation forms – they had virtually no choice, as Ghanaian law dictates that any land that’s found to contain gold automatically belongs to the state, the company is only required to provide “adequate” compensation -- the company changed its policy, saying they would no longer be paying out based on the value of the contents of the farms, but would instead pay based on the acreage. Farmers promptly saw their values plummet to a third of the initial prices. A standoff between the company and the community has waged ever since, with farmers refusing to accept a raw deal and the company steadfastly saying that the community and the farmers don’t deserve more. It was horribly sad and, what made it worse was the feeling that even if we wrote reams and reams about the situation, no one cares enough to make sure the farmers are taken care of. It all seemed so final and wrong. Once that land is mined, it’s useless.

We trudged out to the GAG office to request an interview, then made our way back to the hotel, where I heated up some water and sat in the bath for a little while, letting little rivers of red mud run off my arms, legs and back. My eyes felt like the Sahara and my hair was wadded up like a cotton ball. Poor Sheilla, my reporter, was so sore from the walk she hobbled down to dinner and bought some mentholated cream to rub on her sore joints.

After a fruitless morning searching for comment on the water situation and trying to get a doctor to confirm that the rashes were indeed caused by contaminated water, likely from the GAG concession, we bought tickets for the Kumasi tro-tro and piled in. A woman descended from Jabba the Hut climbed in next to me and promptly sat on top of my thigh, her hot fleshy arm and elbow digging into my side. It was, quite possibly, the most uncomfortable ride I’ve had yet.

We got out in Kumasi, phoned Tanya and made arrangements to meet her at her house, where we would be staying for the night. Kumasi is a much older, more colonial city, and we decided that Kristy was right when she said Kumasi was like an aging showgirl after a long night, when her once-pretty face starts to sag and the make-up starts to smear. It was chaotic and busy, with drivers lining the clogged streets, their hands firmly on the horn. I found it too busy, too much. There were almost no other obrunis to be seen.

Tanya’s apartment was disgusting. We had heard that she was half-heartedly searching for another place to live, having decided that although her family was amazing, her accommodations were just too dirty to be habitable. We all thought she was overreacting, until we got there and saw it for ourselves. The place was filthy, one of the filthiest places I’ve stayed. Even dirt floors were cleaner than her floors. Carpets in the bathroom and kitchen looked like they hadn’t seen the sterile side of clean since they were purchased 15 years ago. The linoleum was a hodge-podge of mismatched patterns, held together by ugly lines of duct tape. The whole place had a slightly fetid smell, which turned out to be buckets of yeast. Tanya’s mum is a baker, who cooks all her bread out on the balcony, then piles it up around the apartment. The kitchen was piled with dirty dishes, there wasn’t even room to turn around. The fridge was smeared with hand prints, grease and dirt. The bathroom was crawling with cockroaches and the toilet seat was cracked. The “shower,” which rarely has water, contained a few stagnate buckets of murky water on a dirty, slimy concrete floor. Prue braved it; I couldn’t bear it. The only surface I felt comfortable sitting on was the bed in Tanya’s room. Outside the apartment wasn’t much better. Her building was totally ghetto, like something you’d see out of a bad 70s movie depicting a terrible slum somewhere in Rio. Neighbours lived practically on top of each other, balconies were separated by inches. If the family next door belched, I was fairly certain we’d hear it. In fact, the morning was one of the loudest yet, which is saying a lot. As per usual, the sweeping started good and early, this time at 10 minutes to five in the morning, when the sun was still straining to wake up. There was no water snaking its way upward in the apartment, so bucket upon bucket was being poured a few floors down. People were belching, snorting, spitting, peeing, all in surround sound. Ugh. I put the moldy pillow around my head and asked myself for the umpteenth time, how does anyone get any sleep in this country?

I had been experiencing some low grade stress over where we were going and how we would get there, so Prue and I headed out early to eat breakfast and check my email in the hopes that my contact had sent directions. We stumbled onto an egg sandwich place, literally a little hut off the sidewalk, where men were perched on barstools and the chief cook and bottle washer handed out sandwiches, buttered bread and sickly sweet Milo from behind a wire cage. The eggs were greasy, the bread was stale, the plates weren’t washed, the cups were rinsed in a basin of grey water under the counter. We marveled at how low we’d sunk and how little we cared.

The directions didn’t arrive – big surprise – so we printed out a map from the Internet and hopped into a cab, where the driver assured us without looking at the map that he knew exactly where we were going and would drive us happily for c150,000. We rolled down the window and soaked up the drive, talking all the while about our families, our careers. I adore Prue, she’s just fantastic and I was so so glad that she decided to come on this leg of the trip. It was nice to have someone level headed and experienced to bounce ideas off of.

After an hour and a half, we pulled up into the Tetrum and tried to arrange some interviews with miners and farmers affected by the closing of the mines. The driver did the talking, he cornered a kid who offered to find the local Assemblyman and we took off on foot, darting through alleyways looking for this man, who, in the end, had left for his farm. No matter, there was another assemblyman we could speak to, so we piled into the cab and headed for the school, then to his house. Outside the locked house, we ran into some teenaged boys, who finally clued us into the fact that there are two towns called Tetrum in the region and that we were in the wrong one. We were stunned, but didn’t get angry, amazingly enough. We just shrugged our shoulders, laughed without humour and climbed back into the cab, resigned to the idea that we’d wasted half the day and c150,000. We debated whether to bother going out to the other town, apathy and fatigue wearing down our journalistic senses.

In the end, we managed to get my contact on the phone, who assured us it would only be a 45 minute drive out to the mine from Kumasi and we could easily do it in an afternoon. We hired another driver, stopped at a royally disgusting public bathroom (picture two obrunis emerging from a grotty toilet, each holding her breath and immediately dosing one another in antibacterial handwash), picked up some street food and started on the journey. Two hours, many towns and some seriously rutted roads later, we arrived at the mine site, not knowing what to expect.

We completely and totally lucked out. In the usual way, Ghanaian karma dictates that after a horrible, frustrating day featuring a two-hour walk up dusty roads, followed by the bonus of a misguided taxi ride, the result should be pure gold.

And in fact, it was. When we pulled up to the mine, security greeted us with a big smile, then took my business card up to the office and invited us in. A PriceWaterhouseCoopers representative was there combing through the books and although he said he couldn’t speak with us until we’d cleared it with the registrar general, he proceeded to talk for about 20 minutes, mostly about the process of liquidating and how the media had got most of the facts wrong.

We then asked for a tour and they happily agreed, offering to send us out with the environmental officer, who was a complete and total God-send. He was refreshingly honest and slagged the company to no end. He took us around on a guided tour, stopping to point out the waste water, where people have drowned, and pulling the car over to talk with some galamsey miners, mostly women and children who pan for remnant gold in the piles left behind by the company. He told us that the day before we arrived, two women and a five-month-old baby were crushed to death when one of the piles they were panning near collapsed. It’s dirty, dangerous work and really not that profitable. One woman stopped with a tiny smattering of gold – picture the spray off a pixie’s sneeze – and told us it would be worth about 72,000 cedis, which she would split with her panning partner, meaning they each earned about 50 cents that day.

By the end of the day, we were exhausted, overwhelmed and completely into the story.

The driver took us to a hotel in Kumasi because we couldn’t imagine spending another night in Tanya’s apartment, and it ended up being a fabulous find. It was a little on the expensive side – about c150,000 each, or $22 – but it was the quietest night I’ve had in Ghana, so quiet in fact that I had to get up and turn the fan on just to have some noise! We each had a shower even though the water was lukewarm at best, and the water ran off red. (We didn’t shower the previous day, because Tanya’s place had no water, but after four hours driving down dirt roads, I had the worst dirt tan yet.)