The Bad Side of Development

I have often talked about the best of people. The people who keep you waking up in the morning to want to go support. The people you are often in absolute amazement of – how can they be so strong? How can they think of others at a time like this? How can they not ever complain? Well, there are those people and those people are incredible. There is the odd time however you are faced with the other side.

I should not have tried to go back home to Saboba from Tamale. But alas, what this Ghana trip has not taught me yet is wisdom. I wanted to go back home despite knowing that buses were hard to come by. The rains had been coming hard and the roads had been often flooded. As a result, many buses did not want to travel back to Saboba (the town I live) past 2 PM. When I reached the bus station, it was about 1:00 PM. Luckily, there were others like me trying to make it back. We sat around for a couple of hours without any luck. No one wanted to go. Finally, we were able to convince one small motorcade, probably a capacity of 6-8, to take us. There were 15 of us but he was happy to get the extra fare. So off we went.

5 minutes into the journey we realized this motorcade’s top speed was 20 km/h and with the extra bunch of us, it was 15 km/h. Our journey would take us late into the night which did not bode well for the river crossing. We went on. Every 30 minutes our so we would jump out of the motorcade to push it up a hill. Still we went on. And then the inevitable happened. The motorcade broke down. We were in the middle of nowhere, almost hitting darkness, and we had nowhere to go. We were about 10 now. Around 5 had seen other motorbikes heading to Saboba and joined them knowing it was a better chance that they would make it.

After hiking 15 minutes up the road, a tractor rolled by with a bunch of people. They had obviously been coming from the farm and were heading home to Saboba. We stopped them and told them our desparate situation. We pleaded for them to give us a ride. The driver conceded and told us he was going to Saboba but wanted us each to give him 2 dollars to ride in the back cart. The ride from the beginning designation 50 km back was 1.50. The difference does not seem much to you and me but for many in Saboba, it is equivalent to a hard day’s work. Knowing we had no other option and seeing that we were in almost complete darkness in the middle of nowhere, we agreed with the driver.

Now, you know those stories or movies where riding in a tractor looks like fun. Yeah, they are not as good as they look haha. At least this one wasn’t. We sat in the back of the tractor, sitting on bags of fertilizer. The tractor ran through the road bumps with little haste and it was basically like that game where you press the bottom and the stuff in the box goes flying around. We were the stuff and it was not such a fun game. Add to it that water was flying everywhere (while running through the potholes of water) and it was a journey that we wanted to end quickly. Soon, one of the members of our crew, a visitor to Saboba, started to get quite sick from the shaking. We pleaded with the driver and his colleagues to take caution while driving. No response, just laughs. We went on trying to comfort the member of our group. About ½ hour in the journey, the driver stops and demands that we pay the money + another 0.50. At this point, it is complete darkness and we are still far from our destination. He threatens that we either pay or he drops us here. After pleading and pleading to no avail, we are forced to pay the fare plus the extra charge. He asks that we take out our bags so he can go empty his fertilizer first. So here we are, waiting in the darkness for him to finish his work before we head home to Saboba. After 20 minutes, we are back on course. The road gets rougher and our friend begins to get really sick. We ask for him to slow down especially on the bumps but again only laughter. It is as if he sped up. Just as we saw the light at the end of the tunnel and we approached the main road to Saboba, he inexplicably branches off to another road. We ask why but no answer. After 20 minutes of the detour, he stops and asks for a man from the farm. They begin speaking and from what we can piece together, he is doing business for his farming products. We were furious. Our colleague was getting more sick as time went, the journey in the tractor had taken 2 more hours then it should have, it was 11:30 and this man had stopped to do business. After doing his business, we got back to the main road to Saboba. We asked the driver to stop at a guest house a bit outside of town so we could drop the visitor. He said he would let off the other members in town and then we would go to the guest house. When getting to town, not surprisingly, he demanded that we all get off there. I could not look at him.

The sick visitor had no place to go and the town was almost empty (it was past midnight). We had to call up a kind friend to take the visitor on a motorbike down to the guest house. After dropping my bags off, I went to the night spot to get a bite to eat and there I see the tractor driver munching down on food.

Now, I know it could have been a lot lot worse. And things like that could have definitely happened back home in Canada. But here, the difference is that it happens more regularly. The corrupt people are able to do things like that and often take advantage of people who have no other options. And there is little accountability or consequences for anything. This was a small thing but it becomes a lot more significant when it deals with people’s jobs, money or freedom. The poor become poorer and the rich become richer at an even faster pace. Young people need to be able to look around and have the hope that if they are honest and work hard, that their dreams can come true.

Lately, I have been struggling with the fact that I can’t put myself in people’s shoes and I can’t judge. That it is tough to say how people would act if they are desperate and in real need of money. Maybe they are good people but poverty is just too much. How would I act? I don’t know.

I know this however, that integrity in tough circumstances is an incredible thing and is one of the main things that is needed to lead Africa out of poverty. It needs to be good people willing to sacrifice even though they are poor. And I personally know people here who could take money wrongly and live their life with no qualms and nobody saying anything, but choose to do the right thing even though it is much harder for them because they believe in it. It is their amazing courage that is making the small steps to development and whose spirit we pray spreads throughout.

“Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying” – Ralph Waldo Emerson