Glefe: A settlement invaded by filth and a violent sea
There is a long curve of water and, as far as the eye can see, there are shacks, ramshackle structures, scraps, piles of refuse, dead rats and a dozen children chasing a worn-out football. The water is greenish with multicoloured plastic litters, wood and uncountable worms.
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Away from the nauseating stench from the greenish pool, a group of shirtless boys are busy at the beach, digging a pit to throw in rubbish tied in plastic bags.
Less than 50 metres away from the shore, there are dilapidated buildings whose owners have abandoned them to seek life’s prospects elsewhere.
This is not a fable but rather a real life situation at Glefe, a waterlogged slum near Dansoman in the Accra Metropolis.
The neighbourhood finds itself an unwelcome neighbour of the violent sea and trapped in filth because city authorities have not done much to manage the waste in the area.
History
While its environment is stomach-churning, the meaning of its name is also on the scary side. A habitation for snakes known in the Ewe language as ‘Gle’, the name of the community, according to the Chief of the Ewe and Ada community, Nii Amega Amedor II, means the “place of puff adder.”
Puff adders are venomous snakes that live in arid regions, swamps and dense forests. It is said to be common around human settlements.
There are different accounts of how Glefe began but almost all the tales have the fact of a group of fishermen who were the early settlers in the 1970s and 80s.
Sanitation
A bustling hive of people living in a seemingly unending patchwork of decaying cement houses and roten wooden structures on the wetlands, Glefe appears not to have had any clean-up campaigns with its breath-taking mounds of refuse.
The refuse dump, sandwiched between a public toilet and the lagoon, is the first sight that greets the visitor.
Sanitation is a major problem in the community. There is no proper means of disposing of refuse. At almost every turn, there is a pile of rubbish in dug-out sewers, behind houses and along the beach.
The situation is worse when it rains and the rubbish ends up in a pool of water.
It leaves almost the entire community in a perpetual stench. Pipelines also run in dirty gutters.
“The refuse comes under the cover of darkness. You never know who brings it.
When we collect it and sweep the place, the next day, it returns. In the end, some people just give up sweeping and collecting it,” Mariam Issah, a tuo zaafi seller told the Daily Graphic.
The only road that runs through the community is a dusty undulating path filled with debris from broken walls. On a rainy day, it gets muddy and sticky for both cars and humans.
On a bridge that is about a metre wide, a boy with a rubber bucket pours out what looks like human excreta into a drain that is already filled with plastic waste and murky water. Just like most slums in Ghana, majority of the homes in Glefe have no toilets.
Drains
A major concern of most residents is the absence of drains, which means that when the heavens open and the rains come pouring, residents are always vulnerable. For Glefe residents, the beginning of the rainy season is a moment they pray to the heavens for just showers and not downpours.
According to the residents, the rainy season is a period to plot an exit plan from the community or simply play into the hands of nature.
“Because there are no proper drains here, it’s very difficult to prevent the running water from getting into our homes.
Whenever this happens, we spend hours scooping the water,” lamented Ms Diana Aryeetey, a resident who poured her heart out to the Daily Graphic.
For a community that has more than an estimated 1000 houses, it is ironic that there are no constructed drains.
What looks like a storm drain overflows with garbage and is invaded by weeds, while the ones dug out by the residents are shallow and choked with sand.
Health
“Almost every week, somebody gets sick from malaria here. If you come here at night, you’ll be surprised to see the mosquitoes around here,” Ms Pat Tetteh, a seamstress in the community said.
Glefe is without a single health facility. According to the residents, the only health post in the area had been shut down because whenever it rained, the clinic also got flooded.
In the absence of a health facility, sick residents seek medical attention at Dansoman or Korle Bu, some 10 to 15 minutes’ drive away.
Apart from malaria, typhoid fever among residents is also high, a source who asked for anonymity at the Karikari Brobbey Hospital, one of the health facilities patronised by residents at Dansoman, said.
Education
Glefe has no public school but a number of private schools. During the rainy season, school is suspended because the floods that sweep through the community turn the community on its head. Whenever it rains heavily, pupils and teachers struggle to pass through pools of water to make their way to school.
“When it rains, most of the children stay at home for three to four days. We have to spend a lot of time cleaning before classes resume,” Mr Christian Sherriff Avafia, a teacher of Debest Academy, said.
Mr Avafia would not comment about the effects of that on the school but stated that the nature of the environment affected academic performance.
On sanitation, he said it impacted negatively on teaching and learning, since heaps of refuse and, sometimes, human excreta were left around the school.
A pupil of the school, Isaiah Ofori, shared similar sentiments.
“There is dirt everywhere. It is very disturbing living in this community. Whenever it rains our houses get flooded. Here in school, the last rain destroyed almost all our computers. I think it is because there are no gutters.”
Ofori, therefore, appealed to the government to construct gutters to solve the perennial flooding in the neighbourhood.