The first person I talked to was Madam Adwoa Oparebea. She is 66 years old, has seven children and many grand children. I asked her: “What happens in this village when the sun goes down?” She replied: “We see nothing. All we have is darkness. No night activity.”
“You see nothing at all?” I probed. “So don’t you do anything at all at night?” I continued. She smiled and said: “I cook, we eat, we bath, we sleep. We wake up, sweep, go to the farm, we fetch water from the borehole, we cook again, we eat, go to the farm and that cycle goes on.”
Bamboo torch
My next question was: “What type of light do you use since you don’t have electricity?” At this point she enters her room and comes out with an invention I have never come across anywhere in Ghana before: - a bamboo torch.
She sits by her husband and says to me: “This is a bamboo torch. Kerosene is expensive so we have stopped using lanterns. A certain young boy came to this village and he invented this. Today, it is used miles and miles around. What we do is break open a torchlight light. Take out the light system, connect wires to it and then we remove the old batteries from our radios, arrange them into a plank of bamboo and connect wires to it. At least this way, when you wake up at night, you don’t stumble.”
’Electricity never comes’
Madam Adwoa Oparebea cannot understand why the government has not given Tekyikrom electricity. “They say it will come but it never comes. They’ve been promising us for the past ten years so we don’t know if it will ever come, but we’ll appreciate it when it comes.
Twenty three year old Teacher Mercy Peprah’s story isn’t any different. After lecturing me about how they all have to crawl into their shells once night falls, I asked her: “So how do you prepare your lesson notes?” “I always have to finish that before 4:00pm. At least if we get electricity, I can study more to improve myself as a teacher”.
Expensive kerosene
Josephine Kwafo is a fourteen-year-old student of Aburi Amanfo L.A Primary. She actually lives in another village but she’s here to help her grandmother, Madam Adwoa Oparebea, who has hurt her finger and toe. She’s in class six and preparing for the exams that will take her to Junior High School. She said: “Even though kerosene is expensive, my parents manage to buy some for me so I can learn at night. But I put out the light immediately I finish learning.”
Tekyikrom is a village of farmers. One of them is Kwadwo Ambulley. He is twenty-six, married and has a pineapple farm. With a smile, he answers my question: “Darkness is all that happens here. When it is full moon, it is different. I asked: “Do you think you need electricity, what will you use it for?” He replied: “At least, we can find our way to the toilet when we have electricity.”
Snakes
In Ghanaian villages, toilets are not in the home. They are normally on the outskirts of the village or some distance away from where people live. A journey to the toilet in the dark means one risks being bitten by snakes and scorpions, stepping into traps set by hunters or falling into ditches.
Grace Ackonnor is twenty-three years old and married with two kids. She trades in maize. She told me she always keeps some kerosene in her “Patash” (a tin with a wick in it) for the nights when she really has to bag some maize for the market-day morning. “I light Patash and I work hurriedly with it because kerosene is so expensive.”
Sleep early
When I asked her why she thinks they need electricity, she said: “When we have electricity, we can sit outside and chat for longer and not have to sleep so early.” Seeing that the age difference between her two children won’t be more than a year, I knew what she was driving at.
Village life is so boring, most of them resort to sex for entertainment; and with that comes a streak of children who often find themselves caught in a futile cycle that places on them a fate that’s no better than their parents.
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