Notes from the Road Less Traveled

In Ghanaian english, the word “road” has many meanings.
A “road” can be a tarred, flat, maintained stretch of pavement, over which traffic of all sorts travels from one place to another. A “road” can also be the beaten dirt space between two distances only kept free of vegetation by the passage of trucks, motorbikes, and hoofed animals. A “road” could be the sole open path through country foliage, grazing land, and difficult terrain, big enough only for foot traffic and stretching for miles. The distinction of “road” means only that travel is possible, but never specifies what means are possible to cross the distance with.

For example.





















The 2 roads to Tamboku, one of our CIFS beneficiary communities, contain every kind of hazard possible on a road--2ft square rivets cut by rainwater in the road bed; a choice of wheels slipping on pea gravel, mud, clay or sand; thrilling opportunities to puncture tires or brains on large jutting rocks, bash engines on metamorphic slabs, or smother and drown motive power in the 4ft deep, 16 ft wide rivers spontaneously breaking over and through the “road”. Goats, debris, heavily laden pedestrian groups, motorists and other obstructions bar the way through the ten inches of “road” just wide enough to squeeze a moto tire into, throwing doubt and fear about the safety of continuing at speeds in excess of 70km/h. Hands quickly become raw after gripping the bike to counteract the violent cantering, bucking and tipping of the two-wheeled metal-with-momentum propelling you. After the first 45 minutes of travel, your joints and muscles are jarred enough to require serious recuperation time. After the first 60 minutes, traveling in this way stops being fun. This sort of transit is essential to work with a Community Based Organization like PARED. If development was conducted only where roads were auto-accessible, the most vulnerable populations—those who cannot access markets or health care during the rains due to washed out roads, those passed over by NGOs due to inaccessibility—would be completely overlooked.
I am told by the Regional Planning Unit that the cost to build what Canadians would call a road of minimum safety requirements is 10,000 Ghana Cedis per kilometre. For District Assemblies with tiny annual operating budgets, not only is this impossible, but it is almost laughable. Most of the community development and infrastructure—boreholes, water and sanitation projects, clinics, school feeding programmes—are all funded by NGOs. Unfortunately, it is rare for transportation infrastructure to be included as spectacular and sensationalist enough for attention from international funds. As a result road building is often contracted to Chinese companies in for-profit industry that import all their materials and labour, draining money out of Ghana without any re-investment. A difficult problem to solve, in a country where contractor quality control is unheard of.
In the meantime, we laugh as our motorbikes get shaken into components, jarred into sputtering messes, and soaked to the carburators in river water. It is certainly an adventure, speeding across East Mamprusi. And it is better than walking—what so many around us do every day.