Ghana, Breed Mountain Waste Club of Plastic – and Big Industry Environmental news

“It is an important work.”

Once again in the waste square, the works fade for today.

Bamu and her young children, we can, 10 10, Josephine, 6 years old, empty the past few bottles. It will be in bed by 8 pm, as it rises in the middle of the night of its studies of the Bible before starting working again at dawn.

Bamfu did not think that she would become a waste.

She was nineteen years old when she finally obtained her school certificate, and by selling oranges, she gathered enough money for a secretarial course. But she could not bear a writer.

While the other girls took advantage of their machines, the keyboard was painted in her book exercise and practiced it, and her fingers pressed the paper.

Soon, money ran. Instead of the office job that I dreamed of, I found works to destroy stones at a construction site.

“At that moment, I see myself – I am a big loser, and there is nothing,” says Bamfu, she tends forward in her office chair to monitor any final trilogy bikes. “I see that the world is against me.”

Then, one morning, I woke up to find that the location of the building had disappeared overnight, and the replacement of its discharge: a truck load of water bags, drinks bottles and nylon wig.

Her five children lie asleep. Her husband, as usual, did not return home. To buy Cassava to make Banku – Stew Stew – she needed money quickly.

A friend told her that the city’s factories would buy plastic waste for a few CEDis kilograms. It was one of the least jobs that were there, not only involved employment that does not penetrate but stigmatize shame and shame.

“If you are a woman choosing this waste, people think you do not have a family that you care about,” she says. “They think you are bad. They think you are charming.”

She returned to the house one day to find that her husband had abandoned her. But not before her father called to tell him that his daughter became a “eagle”.

She only fled her father. To escape from her neighbors, Bamfu moved with her children to the other side of the city.

There, she seized her small courtyard, purchasing waste from picked up and selling them to factories and recycling plants. Little by little, the girl of a wooden house. Ultimately, the courage was extracted to contact her father.

“I said, come and look at the work I do. See it is not something that will feel bad about it.”

When he saw the courtyard and trigger teams that became Bamfo, NKosoo Management Management (“NKosoo” is Twi for “Progress”), he could only admire.

“You are not a woman, you are a man,” you remember telling her once, admiring half and a half. “The heart you have – even your brother does not have this heart.”

Now hope to transfer some of its flexibility. King, supervisor of her in the courtyard, slept on a nearly a small waste landfill and says Bamfu and her waste company saved him. “I can’t say anything bad for her. It’s my mother.”

With the stability of the night on Accra, the polluted plastic tide ran slightly up. But she says that Bamfu found dignity in the battle to keep it in a critical position.

“It is an important work we do,” she says. “Sometimes I feel very sad and bad about not getting the education I wanted. But we see the city. I am thinking about it.”

This story was produced in partnership with Higher care