Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

A Wantugu Edit

Peter DiCampo for the Pulitzer Center

Kayayo girls in the "Sodomandgomorrah" section of Accra, Ghana, March 14th, 2009.

A few nights ago, I returned to Wantugu, the village in northern Ghana where I lived as a Peace Corps Volunteer, to show some Kayayo pictures as part of the current volunteer's Take Your Daughter To Work Day program. After blowing a tire (twice) on my friend Alicia's moto during the ride out, she and I stumbled into town around 8pm, apologized to a waiting crowd, and set up a projector facing one of the walls of the clinic in the center of the village. Alicia showed a feature film about Kayayo, which her Ghanaian friends wrote and starred in, with her assistance (see the Kayayo project page to link to an excerpt from the film). Afterwards, I showed about 40 photos from this project.

It was interesting to see which photos elicited a response (and by that I mean, which photos caused people to gasp, or to shout "oh!" or "woit!", common Ghanaian expressions of surprise). Many of the photos I had assumed they would react to, of girls laughing and joking with each other, were met with silence (I like to think this is because Ghanaians are used to laughter). Instead, people were struck by pictures of the work that Kayayo girls do and the conditions they live in, as well as scenes of Kumasi and Accra, large cities that many of the villagers have never and will never see. It occurs to me now, as I remember the uneasy quiet following pictures of northern boys smoking pot or girls out dancing, that silence is it's own reaction - who knows what people were thinking as they attentively looked on, listening to my descriptions of the photos...

Northward Bound

Peter DiCampo for the Pulitzer Center

Girls from Ghana's Northern Region sit together at the Assemblies of God Relief and Development Services center in the Agbogblushie Market area of Accra, Ghana, March 21st, 2009. The girls originally moved to Accra to work in markets across the city; many of them, unable to find a place to sleep, became part-time prostitutes in order to have a roof over their heads at night. The live-in AGREDS center offers them courses in hairdressing, sewing, catering, and other skills and provides them with safe living quarters before returning them to their homes across Ghana after one year if they wish to go back.

I'm in Tamale, capital of the Northern Region, an area that still feels like my second home whenever I visit. Later today, I'll hop on a bus to Tampion, a small village a couple hours away, where some of the Kayayo girls I've met in Accra are from. One recently returned home to get married, and another came back and, after arguing back and forth with her parents, has started to attend Junior Secondary School (she wanted to attend; they didn't see the point). Here, I hope to answer the questions that have been gnawing at me in Accra: Was it worth it? Did you gain anything by moving to the city? Do you still have any of the money you made? Or was it merely a brief interlude, at times novel and adventurous but at others difficult and dangerous, before returning to the north, and your previous life?

From Sodom and Gomorrah to Ink and Chalk

Peter DiCampo, for the Pulitzer Center

Alietu (pictured above) is a girl in her early teens from a village in Ghana's Upper West Region. She left home ten months ago to follow her older sister, Fati, to Kumasi, Ghana's second largest city, where Fati has lived for nine years. The girls' father is deceased, and their mother doesn't work - the family lives off of meager subsistence farming.

In Kumasi, Alietu works as a Kayayo, waiting with other girls at a market entrance for buses to arrive, and then chasing after with the hope that the passengers will need their goods carried home or to a market. On the weekends, Fati trains her to be a hairdresser. Fati worked for years as a Kayayo herself, while at the same time learning hairdressing so that she could earn more money.

The two work out of a small room attached to an old, abandoned building (formerly an ink and chalk factory) where more than 200 Kayayo women and girls sleep, crowding the floors and countertops of five rooms each night. I recently spent some time with Alietu, the girls she works with, and the inhabitants of the Ink and Chalk Factory - here are a few pictures from the experience.

On Myths and Poverty

Peter DiCampo, for the Pulitzer Center

The first time I went to the Agbogblushie Market area of Accra, the taxi driver did two things. He started by charging me three times the real price. Ghana had been my home for nearly two years at that point (this was last September), but I had spent most of my time living cheaply as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the rural north, with little exposure to the comparatively bustling and expensive capital city. I hardly knew where Agbogblushie was, let alone how much the cab fare should be. After a few weak attempts at bargaining, I agreed to the price and got in the car.

The driver's next move, on the ride over, was to warn me that I shouldn't be going to Agbogblushie at all. "It's a bad place," he said. "All the women are prostitutes, and all the men are thieves." He seemed genuinely worried about my safety, and uncomfortable at the thought of having to drive into the place himself. He referred to it as Sodomandgomorrah, which I didn't quite catch at first - in fact, it took me a few days of hearing what I thought was an African word before I realized people were saying Sodom and Gomorrah. Infamous for its supposed sins, the sprawling shantytown around Agbogblushie has been nicknamed after the fabled cities that, according to both the Bible and the Koran, God destroyed after warning the inhabitants to give up their wicked ways.

The driver slowed to a stop on the main road. I paid him and got out. It was getting dark and people were everywhere, but I didn't see the people who had agreed to meet me. I was nervous.