And so Sunyani too has its slums. Certainly not the number found in Rio de Janeiro or in Nairobi, but the living conditions are similar to those Fr Zanotelli describes when speaking about Korogocho.
In Sunyani it is called “Zongo”. It is an area between the old town-market and the “Wednesday market”, the local market held naturally every Wednesday. As long as anyone can remember it has been the rubbish dump for both. Zongo grew on those piles of rubbish.
It grows because naturally there are no local regulations to organise life for people who don’t come from the place and who adapt to anything because they are already escaping from even worse conditions than they find here.
The majority are of Muslim origin and Islam is the style of social, religious, school life in Zongo.
A couple of kilometres away is “Don Bosco Boys Home”. In Sunyani there aren’t crowds of street children hounded by the police, but there are lots of youngsters left on their own, reflecting problem families or none at all. “Boys Home” is their home, where about thirty of them, sometimes more sometimes less, live permanently; many others go there with problems connected with school or health or especially because they have a desperate need for someone to be their friend, to look after them to treat them like individuals, like sons.
It was them the youngsters who like a magnet drew the Salesians to Zongo. Already two years ago, a young woman, a volunteer from Poland who had lived for two years in “Boys Home”, aware of the poorest ones among her youngsters began going to Zongo and to set up there a kind of flying oratory wherever the rubbish dump allowed a area of a few square metres of space to meet, to play and spend time together.
This summer a more courageous step forward was tried. In good time the Imam and the other Elders were contacted as the focal points for the communities of immigrants, who come from various different backgrounds of tribes and language united in their common lack of income. There were talks with them about a “summer holiday camp”, and the reaction was not merely positive but enthusiastic. So instead of trying to welcome the youngsters from Zongo at “Boys Home,” the holiday camps were set up in the middle of where they were living; youngsters from Odumase, Adentia and “Boys Home” itself held their summer activities simultaneously involving more than 1,500 people altogether.
The tiny elementary school became more and more crowded every passing day since it was impossible to keep to the “fixed number” which the Imam and the Elders had first thought of.
Outside the school, to the small open space the volunteer had found two years previously a few extra yards were added by covering the rubbish with sawdust which the saw-mills in the market “dumped” at Zongo. The programme was the same as for all summer camps here in Ghana: being together as friends, with some time for games but also for repeat lessons especially in English and Maths which are the two bugbears for students at all levels, time for formation and for prayer.
The youngsters themselves took turns in leading the prayers which started at the beginning with the classic first “Sura” of the Koran which opens every Muslim prayer, followed by other verses which are sung and learned as children. When the youngsters learned that among them there was a tiny group of Christians, they all agreed to learn the Our Father: the Koran and the Our Father went hand in hand at the beginning and end of every day.
During the formation time the leaders and the youngsters told the stories they had heard from elders of the community.
One of the most important days was that of the outing, with the truck from the woodwork shop, and all the pick-ups and minibuses available. The youngsters from “Don Bosco Boys Home” and from the “Zongo Holiday Camp” were taken to the “Don Bosco Technical Institute” in Odumase. Here Moses and John Bosco, two Salesian novices from Nigeria, organised Olympic Games.
For the youngsters having at their disposal a whole sports field was like living a dream. The girls wearing their veils over their faces continued running up and down the hundred metres course dozens of times even when the competition was over. At Zongo there aren’t even ten metres where you can run freely, and because of the rubbish there are only small twisting paths to run along between broken glass and barbed wire.
The “Holiday Camp” experience has left as an indelible mark, the desire to get to know each other in a new way. The variegated and marginalised Muslim community in Zongo met Christians to whom they could entrust their children, the most precious things they have, in an atmosphere of openness and trust without any of the useless baggage of extremism, fanaticism and intolerance with which, so often, anyone connected with Islam is lumbered; the generalisations and prejudices which prevent really knowing a civilisation, tradition and religion with 14 centuries of history which is as diversified as Christianity.
For those who took part in running the “Zongo Holiday Camp” it was a very formative experience – being in contact with the really poor and getting to know Alima, Alhassan, Silifatu... It was a chance to learn new faces, names, life stories, meet people to love, overcoming the prejudices and barriers built and re-enforced by the different ethnic backgrounds.
The one thing that remains above all else is a new seed of hope in the heart of each one. A successful remedy for any situation where there is conflict, isolation, distance between groups; a cure that starts with seeing the other person as a human being. Don Bosco understood it perfectly: begin with the young.
This is the characteristic feature of the Salesian mission.
Published 28/09/2009
