Vicky Wireko: Returning to Sodom and Gomorrah as more structures go down
The more I listen to the Chief Executive Officer of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) on the ongoing demolitions in Accra, the more I picture in my mind, the slum that I got so close to five years ago.
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Follow-up visit
And so as more structures were being brought down over the weekend, I made a follow-up visit last Sunday. This time, I took a very long walk on the other side of the Old Fadama Police Station, walking through the blowing dust to the yam market and into the settlement.
It was late Sunday afternoon, but the place was alive with buyers, sellers, some idlers and children running all over the place. Were these displaced individuals who lost their homes the week earlier?
As I continued with my walk deep inside, I realised that the demolition we saw in the media was targeted at the peripheries along the banks of the Odaw River and the Korle Lagoon. The Sodom and Gomorrah settlement is huge; it is a town. I walked on through public alleys created through private kitchens and lobbies with Sunday meals being prepared.
Queensland School
As if I was responding to a call, I soon came face to face with a storey building with the bold inscription, ‘Paulina’s Queensland School.’ Was this the same Queensland School I visited five years ago and which I mentioned in my article last week that it had been razed down? I entered, only to be greeted by this young man called Paul, a son of Madam Paulina, the proprietor I met five years ago.
As Madam Paulina walked in, she gave me a hug, having recognised me. The feeling was like two friends who had known each other for some time. I decided to settle for a chat with Madam Paulina.
I was delighted to see Queensland transformed from a wooden structure to a concrete two storey structure with tiled floors and a number of WC toilets for the children. More classrooms had been added. I saw some 70 children packed in the nursery. On the first floor, one of the classrooms also had the JHS Two students in class, apparently catching up with their syllabus.
Madam Paulina informed me that the school now had 350 children on roll, out of which 110 were in the nursery. She employs 16 teachers including a computer teacher. Impressively, the school presented their first batch of candidates in the just ended Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE).
The school has caught the eyes of some local and international NGOs who go in to assist them financially and materially, with books and learning aids. Some of the children have been awarded scholarships by some well-wishers.
As Madam Paulina went on narrating the achievements of the school and how it had come to be well accepted by the community, she kept interjecting our conversation with her fear about the ongoing demolition exercise. She told me she was worried that they might wake up one morning and find the school razed down.
Worries for 350 deprived children
The proprietor is worried that the investment made in the 350 children of head porters (kayayei), truck pushers, yam and onion sellers, who know of no other home but Sodom and Gomorrah, would go to waste with the demolition. She did not think that paying for those who had lost their homes to go back to the North was going to be helpful because according to her, some of them came from tiny hamlets. Going back with nothing to do could become a potential problem.
She worried much about the children in her school whose parents had lost everything. Some of them did not show up at school last week; she suspected that they may have left with their parents to go back to the North. She wondered what was going to become of them if they go to the hamlets they never knew and where education is so far removed.
The thought of the demolition exercise is no doubt haunting those whose homes and businesses are still standing. They are taking each day at a time. For 12 years, Madam Paulina has, as a professional teacher from the North, tried to contribute to education in a deprived community which she sees as home, through her own efforts.
For now, her dream of raising future queens and kings, with a school motto, ‘Where Zeros become Heroes,’ hangs in the balance. Would the entire Sodom and Gomorrah settlement be razed down? That is the question bothering Madam Paulina of Queensland School for 10 days now but no answer is forthcoming, she told me.