I’m not lazy...
on Jude Timothy (Ghana), 19/Jul/2010 13:56, 34 days ago
Every day outside my office a policeman is stationed to guard, I know not what. Hopefully it is not an important task because I have never actually seen him awake. Every time I pass by he is sat in his chair head slumped on his chest and for all intents and purposes dead to the world. Indeed it may be that he is not actually alive at all, but is dragged out by his shoulders and placed on the chair every morning as some sort of‘visible deterrent ...’ or it might be an exceptionally clever rouse to lull prospective wrongdoers into a false sense of security in order to catch them in some elaborate sting operation. I rather doubt it’s either, but every time I see him I long to plant a sign around his neck with the phrase I saw on someone’s T-shirt... I’m not lazy... I’m just saving energy...However to call it lazy is being rather disingenuous to the Ghanaians... The day for most of these people starts before the sun has even thought of peering over the horizon. By the time you or I would be awake they would already have washed, cleaned, cooked, taken children to school and made their own way to work. Hawkers will stand on street corners or at traffic lights from rush hour to rush hour selling not much for very little in order to keep the family going for that tiny bit longer. Added to this, shop and office workers work long, boring shifts devoid of stimulus in over-staffed premises and in such oppressive temperatures it would make even the hardiest of us nod off every now and again. Really, being lazy is certainly not a characteristic that can be ascribed to the people here.So if it’s not lazy, then what... I remember an incident not long after first arriving in Ghana when I found myself walking down a fairly busy shopping street in Accra where I noticed a man lying on the street. He lay motionless, half on the pavement half on the dusty verge, one arm stretched out across the path, the other slumped over his chest. His tattered rags barely covering an emaciated, filth encrusted body, broken and yellowing teeth protruded from a gaping mouth and long blackened fingernails and greasy matted hair all added to the impression of someone who had finally shed his ‘mortal coil’.Because nobody seemed in the slightest bit interested in doing anything about the body, I remember wondering about what happened to people who were found dead on the streets in Ghana. Perhaps the police would come, cordon off the scene, check for foul play, snap a few photographs, draw a chalk line around the corpse, and eventually, once forensics had finished, cart the body off to the morgue.An hour or so later when I passed by the spot once again our friend was no longer there. At the time I imagined he had indeed been hauled off somewhere, but then of course, I hadn’t been in the country long enough to appreciate that ‘This is Africa’ and he was more likely to have be having an afternoon nap rather than communing with the angels.Indeed the ability to sleep is one trait, amongst many, that I have come to envy most in Ghanaians. This amazing capacity, as demonstrated above, can not only be performed at any time of day but also in absolutely any place. Whether it’s immigration officers, post office counter staff, shop assistants, market stall holders, the police at check-points, on the roadside or at the station... bar staff, waiters or waitresses, people on the street taking a break from hawking their wares to passing motorists... or just people who feelthe need for forty-winks... they just set themselves down anywhere, on the street, under or in the branches trees, on walls, in their cars, in chairs or on benches... and doze.This morning I came to work on a tro tro. Our driver, a young chap with no great consideration for the other road users let alone his passengers, stopped behind a few other vehicles at a set of traffic lights. When the lights changed the cars in front moved away but our tro tro stayed put. Being seated in the front I was able to look over to the young‘Lewis Hamilton’ to see that he was sat with his eyes shut. Eventually under the ever increasing clamour of surrounding car horns he was roused from his meditation and we moved off.Now apart from the obvious worry at our driver being that tired, I don’t actually know whether he was asleep, just resting his eyes or psyching himself for another assault on his fellow road-users, but experience tends me to favour the former. And as to my tramp friend on the street in Accra... I have since seen him ‘dead’ in a number of places, outside the postoffice, near the market, in the middle of a roundabout and on the... zzz zzz...