MSTS Journey Day 3: Jamestown

Another exciting day in Accra, Ghana! We started with a quick visit to the African Water Associations Science and Technology Convention where we met several key leaders in driving African water initiatives.  At this convention we also met Sun Kim and Doulaye Kone from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Both have been to the Crane offices in Kimberly and are key decision makers in Grant funding relative to this initiative. We toured several booths with various sanitation and water solutions before touring a fishing village named Jamestown on the Bay of Guinea.

Jamestown has a lot of history. The Portuguese, Dutch and British held strongholds before Ghana gained independence from Britain in 1957.  Jamestown was a source of slaves to the new world and continued this practice until the 1860’s around the US Civil War. In some of the attached pictures you can see a rock type structure going into the sea. This is the exit of a tunnel where slaves boarded ships from a prison up the hill and off the coast.  Both the prison and tunnel are still there but abandoned.

Jamestown was, and still is, a fishing village. On the north side of the beach there are several pens where livestock (cows, goats, and chickens) are raised on the beach. Not sure where their food comes from because there isn’t any green grass on the beach!

As we moved south we saw the lighthouse. We climbed up to get some great panoramic shots. Down the hill from the lighthouse is a school for small kids. The school runs on donations which we obliged at the end of the tour. This area is extremely poor but despite that, the kids all welcomed us with “How are you?” and seemed very happy.

As we walked towards the ocean we saw some unfinished boats for sale. They were cut from one very large tree and then hollowed out. After purchase, the boat is finished by adding higher sides, seats and a motor mount. The trees used to make these large boats come from the Ashanti region in Ghana.

All the fishing boats that weren't out to sea were on shore. There is a law in Jamestown that prohibits boats from returning from the ocean on Tuesday. Sometimes these small boats spend a week at sea.

The fishermen bring their catch to shore so their wives can smoke the fish in large smokers which we saw – needless to say no one ordered fish for dinner! Next to the smokers, were two piles of cardboard which someone comes to weigh and collect for recycling.

All other trash is burned on the beach. We saw several smoldering trash piles. There were bathrooms on the beach but they require payment, so open defecation is the norm. The areas where people defecated on the beach were marked with red flags. Unfortunately, the majority of ocean front was flagged off, supporting the 5000 people that live in less than a half mile along the beach. The extreme poverty made us all feel blessed to live and work where we do and provided a sense of urgency to get this project to work in Africa!

After the tour, we came back to the hotel where we discussed the requirements for the next phase of development. In a training session, I remember hearing that 60-70% of the projects that fail are due to not having requirements or ones that aren’t agreed to by all the stakeholders. For this reason, we are spending significant amounts of time to make sure we have them correct. We discussed the next trials on the unit in the shop. We need to prove the unit can run without issues ASAP. That will be a focus over the next couple of months.

Tomorrow is a big day as we will meet with several companies that make their living in handling waste in Accra.

By 2030, 74% of the world’s population will live in sub-Saharan Africa or Asia and these locations happen to be where water is the scarcest!

What does this mean? To me, it means the waste management strategy for these areas must not rely on water to transfer human waste and can’t be the medium for a biological system to treat the waste like the US systems. Our MSTS unit is one option to treat waste where water is scarce!