To Accra! To Water!

June 2^nd, 2013  - Sunday

            In Ghana, you can tell yourself that you had a successful day if you accomplish one task. Meals take several hours to order and eat, transportation is unpredictable and unscheduled, and yet, it always ends up working out in the end. 

            Today I decided I’d brave the city alone.  I walked to Fise junction and stood waiting for a trotro (long van).  Trotros are the preferred means of public transportation here; they’re long vans packed to the windows with people, bags, food…sometimes live animals (chicken, goat).  There are no numbers, no labels, no indicators of where the drivers will take you; only slurred words that slightly resemble their proper pronunciation.  For example, I wanted to take the trotro to Accra and get off at King’s Way.  To do this, I had to wait for a trotro with the “mate” (the driver’s helper, think of a “first mate” from pirate stories) to hang out the window, point up to the sky like a disco dancer, and yell “KraKraKra!”  I entered the car, asked “Sen Sen?” and he said “Wu Ko?” (How much and Where are you going).  I explained I wanted to be let off at King’s Way by saying, “Me Ko Keesway! Can I ‘be light’ at Keesway?” (be light means to get off before the final destination).  1 Cidi 20 Peswas (about 60 cents) is what I paid for the hour long ride into town, which was at least 15 miles away!

            I hopped off at Kings Way, and walked down the street with my backpack to reaffirm “Yes, I AM a tourist and don’t belong.”  One woman told me to go down a highly polluted alleyway to get to Tudu station – another told me to go the opposite way.  I considered getting a taxi, but then was shown by a kind small girl the correct road.  At the Tudu Station, I was asked to change my american money “to help the black market,” among other interesting requests.  I found the car I would take the next day, or “tomorrow next” (meaning the day after) to Sogakope.  Having completed my task, I took the reverse action back out of the city – Taxi to Amasama station and trotro to FIse junction. 

            While waking down Amasama road, I took “Mkosua Mianue” (two eggs) with spicy “Pepe” sauce and also grabbed some cream crackers for lunch. 

The afternoon had an unexpected surprise for me; James, my friend at the lodge, had arranged for his friend Emanuel to take us to a water factory!  We drove to Baria junction and enterd a residential  neighborhood before making it to “Roots Water.”  Fred, the manager, was asleep inside on an old car seat, but was happy to be awoken and to see James.  I met Alex, the biochemist who had worked for the factory for 10 years and worked for Voltic water for 25.  The operation was massive; The room we were in was the filtration room.  Frank instructed me that he has two boreholes that feed his plant.  One is located directly under the factory – the other is about 300 feet down the road, located under his residence.  An underground pipe connects the two boreholes to the factory.  Frank told me that he had to search and find a company that would drill down 200 feet to reach the water he was looking for.  Again, his factory opened about 10 years ago. 

The filtration room featured several large plastic drums an PVC piping that connected everything.  Frank explained that the water was pumped into the two large black plastic drums (about 7 feet in diameter and 8-10 feet tall). From there, it was run through four filters contained in separate 4-foot by 8-inch diameter white PVC tubes.  The water rushed out of these filter tubes into a blue 2-foot diameter 4-foot tall drum that was converted into a funnel of sorts.  The rushing water was visible and open to the air, most likely designed to be accessible to test before it went into the holding tanks.  The holding tanks were a set of four large white plastic drums, each a little smaller than the black drums at the back, around four or five feet in diameter and 6 feet tall.  These holding tanks pumped filtered water into the next rooms.

The second room housed the bottling plant.  On the far side was the bottling machine, about 8-feet tall by 12-feet wide and 10-feet tall.  The walls of this machine were clear so one could see inside to the bottling process (which was stopped; today was Sunday).  It looked as if water was pumped into the machine, filled the bottles, and then the filled bottles were capped.  The capped bottles then passed on a conveyer belt to a labeling machine, which both put labels on the bottles and also stamped the bottles with information such as lot number, fill date, and expiration date.  Frank informed me that he purchased the bottling machine from China, and purchased the labeling machine from France.  Toward the back of this room we could see the 18L “water cooler” drums that Frank also bottled and sold.  We didn’t visit this room.  Also in the back of the bottling room stood already filled boxes (24 bottles a box) as well as empty boxes ready to be filled.  This process was done by hand.

The final room of the water plant we visited was the Sachet water room.  Now, I have read that most independent small-scale water companies in Accra purchase one machine. Frank had 6.  The machines are about 2x2 feet and 6 feet tall, and work by taking a long, pre-labeled, polyethylene tube and feeding it to a filling tube.  I have read that these machines have filters already built in, but that seemed excessive for this operation.  The water in the long tube met a heat-sealing device, which also cut the filled portion of the tube off (making a sealed bag).  Imagine taking a “redvine” candy (or better yet those things called “cowtails”) and pinching the tube, creating two chambers.  The filled bags (500ml) were dropped into a bucket.  A worker at a stool normally caught the bags before they fell all the way and, after a split second inspection, dropped the bags into larger, sturdy polyethylene bags.  The worker inspected the bags and tossed bad ones into another bin.  The large polyethylene bags held 30 sachets and were sold to distributors for one cidi, twenty peswas.  I counted, and the machine dropped one bag between every 2-3 seconds, which is between 20 and 30 bags a minute. With all six machines operating at the same time, that’s 120-180 bags a minute!  This comes out to 4-6 large bags per minute, meaning 4.8 – 7.20Cidis per minute, which is a modest sum!

The final stop on the brief tour was the office.  On display were around a dozen certifications and honors the plant had accumulated over the past decade.  Through other interviews, I’ve gathered that sachet water started in Ghana as early as 1997, and as recently as 2003 – in any case, this small enterprise looked stable and to be growing.  In addition, it was good to see that it was registered by the Ghana Standards board as well as passed a Food and Drug administration test.  Tomorrow I hope to go back and interview Frank, Alex, or Frank’s wife who manages the business when frank is absent.  For good measure, I was offered a bottle and drank the whole .5L on site.  It was quite a successful day!