2-14-2012
Today we met briefly with Vida, toured the Street Girls Aid House of Refuge, and then went to the child care centers (creches) that S.Aid runs for girls' toddlers while they are working as porters, cook's helpers, etc in the overwhelming market next to the train station. The train station is where most of them arrive in Accra from the poverty-stricken villages in northern Ghana, sent by their parents with an adult, or they want to come themselves, eager to seek a better life. 95% of the street girls come from poor rural villages to Accra - 5% are Accra natives, which means it's pretty impossible to eradicate the street children problem until the poor villages have more to offer. Seeing the House of Refuge was really a wake-up call about how desperately they need money - they have room for 45 girls but can only afford to house 15 because they need to feed them, hire more staff, etc. There is no running water but they have beautiful fixtures because the water for that whole area - a relatively nice one - hasn't worked since a couple of months after they moved in 2006, so they haul their water 1/2 a block or use rainwater. Most residents have a water truck deliver it, but this is a way they can save money. We met some of the girls and their week-old babies, and I was shown "Kay's room" - one of the dorm rooms that can house 12 girls. The rooms demonstrated hard use and a tropical climate that is death to good paint jobs, but the girls seemed glad to be there. The shocking thing for me was that the girls were . . . girls. Young adolescents who remind me of playful 8th graders, but with week-old babies and no family around - it was a real reality check about how young they are, and what a difficult thing SAid is trying to do.
Then we went to the railway area where the girls live "on the streets" (or near the tracks, sleeping near the walls of the train station or by kiosks. I was guided by Fred, the SAid field worker who spends 5 days a week, 7 hours a day meeting girls, talking to people in the area, making referrals, informal counseling, etc. - he was really sharp, and the girls brightened tremendously when they saw him and came up and talked. I was surprised that the field workers were male, but they obviously are respected and are approachable. The girls are referred to stay at the House of Refuge by the SAid field workers when they find pregnant girls, as well as from the Dept of Social Welfare, hospitals, or police when they have victims of abuse. SAid pays for the processing fee to get them on national health insurance. Sometimes it is hard for the workers to persuade the girls to go for care in the hospital because the hospital workers embarrass them by saying, "Look at you, you're very filthy!" so sometimes the girls prefer to use traditional midwives . (Note about street girls’ finances: they make about 3 cedis a day (cedis are about 70 cents US/$1, so that’s $2.10 a day) - their daily expenses are renting a space on the ground to sleep (between 50 peswas and 1 cedi a night (there are 100 peswas in a cedi). A meal of rice with a little vegetables is 1 cedi (hopefully they eat 2 meals a day), bags of drinking water are 10 peswas. Buckets of water to wash their clothes cost 30 peswas and they need 3-4 buckets to wash their clothes. A hot shower at the public showers and using the toilet is 60 peswas (40 for a cold shower). You can see the problem with cleanliness if you do the math.
The creches (child care centers) are very modest dirt compounds with three rooms for about 80 children a day - 4 workers. They get two meals made there, and are safe from the frequent accidents of unattended children in the market area with open drainage ditches, fires, lots going on. Not a lot of toys at the creche, and kids were very eager for attention. Mothers pay 1 cedi a day, but there are some scholarships. See the photos in the creche child care compound and also field worker Fred talking to a street girl with 16-month-old who is a SAid "success story" - she now has her own business selling hair items from a cart instead of carrying heavy loads on her head.
I will close with a list of the items we saw sold by the street vendors who carried their wares down the line of cars creeping along the clogged freeway, as we were waiting to get on an off-ramp (about 200 yards): MP3 players, comic books, children tennis shoes, 2' x 4' gilt framed mirror, sunglasses, CDs, calculators, string bags, rosaries, hats , water, computer cases, eggs, belts, onions . . and one motorcycle driver with his buddy holding an auto muffler on the back, delivering it who-knows-where. We're going to make some vendor's day when we get some Kleenex in kente cloth-designed boxes. We need it because the harmattans (winds blowing from the Sahara that spread fine dust everywhere this time of year) really kick up itchy runny eyes and allergies.
Tomorrow we start our visioning, and strategic planning sessions with 5 staff directors - executive director Vida is really intrigued about having them come up with 20 second "elevator speeches" that they can tell people what SAid does, because they really need this as a beginning of their telling their story and for public relations here in Accra.
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