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The poverty of Crewe Bay

Someone I know was working down in the Crewe Bay area recently, they were involved in a survey of illnesses and difficulties faced by the families there. Crewe Bay is one of the slums in Freetown, with well over 500 households in the community. It is an illegal build, along one of the watercourses that runs from the hills down to the sea. The household sizes vary immensely; some had 29 people (man, 3 wives and 25 children), living in a single room, whereas some were just couples who had come to Freetown in search of a better life. Since at least 70% of people in Sierra Leone live below the US$1 a day poverty line (79% in rural areas, with a lower proportion in Freetown, tho’ it’s much more expensive to live in Freetown than in the rest of the country), it’s understandable, why people look to move somewhere else, but often the difficulties and diseases that they face in the city are at least as bad as in the rest of the country.

The unemployment rate remains very high, despite the government’s drive to increase youth employment (youths are anyone between the ages of 18 and 35). The elections are just round the corner, so there are a lot of attempts at providing short-term jobs (both for political gain and also to try and increase stability by providing an activity other than ‘rallying’ for the youth to be involved with).

Anyway, back to Crewe bay- the ‘streets’ between the houses are so narrow that you cannot stretch out your arms to either side because you will be pushing into/through the walls of people’s homes. There isn’t running water, and electricity-well, take a guess. Very few of the children had clothes on and despite the warmth of this country for most of the year, when the rains are persistent (and don’t drain away), it can does get quite a bit cooler (low 20’s). All of the children have been suffering from respiratory problems- probably due to a mix of coldness and lack of good nutrition. The inhabitants of the Crewe bay slum cannot afford packaging, yet the watercourses are jammed with rubbish- most of it from New England and other communities based further up the hills; they just throw the rubbish into the rivers and wait for the rains to wash it out to sea, but instead it gets jammed up round the Crewe Bay area and causes flooding into the houses people have built there- the waters can come about 4ft high and are a mix of rubbish and sewage, since the drainage systems are overwhelmed by the rains. There are even stories of some people/businesses throwing the rusting shells of old cars (once all useful parts have been removed) into the watercourses and waiting for the rains to wash them out to sea. Instead, it just makes life even more unbearable for people.

The annual rains/floods make life very tough- children’s school books being washed away (in the middle of their exams); make even attempts at self-advancement that bit more difficult. Illnesses ranging from chicken pox (needs to be kept away from adults who could get shingles), to respiratory problems, to leprosy, to the ever present threat of malaria make earning a living harder-there isn’t really such a thing as unemployment benefit here and for many casual jobs, it’s the amount you produce that you get paid for and the work often requires physical exertion, which if you’re ill is difficult- you either end up producing less (and therefore get paid less), or can’t find work, or need to borrow money to pay to medicines (although I haven’t heard much about loan sharks here, I know they exist in other countries’ slums, so assume there’s a similar system in operation here).

So what can be done- well, in some ways very little- the buildings are not precisely legal and anyone who tries to put in place permanent structures will not end up in the government’s good books. However, there are things that can be done- the local youths can be employed to clear the rubbish out of the waterways (the main city dump is less than a mile away), locally made tools and wheelbarrows can help in the rubbish clearing and removal and will also produce a small multiplier effect on the local economy (local being a particularly small geographical area in this case). If the necessary equipment is made available, it has been suggested that the waterways are deepened, since there’s probably been a lot of build up of gunk in the watercourses over the years- if the rains had somewhere to go, they wouldn’t need to flood the alleyways and homes of the Crewe Bay inhabitants, which may make it slightly easier for them to survive.

Labels: floods, malaria, poverty, rain, rubbish, slums

posted by Nenya @ 10:57 am