Lavender Hill: Where human excreta is perfume


For many, the sight of faecal matter alone is enough to quench their appetite for food or even nauseate them.

But for some residents in Zoom Zoom, a suburb of Korle Gonno here in Accra, living close to the popular sewage dumpsite and inhaling the unpleasant smell of human excreta daily is no big deal.

 
JOYNEWS’ Kwakye Afreh-Nuamah who visited the area reports that dwellers have adjusted to the massive air pollution in the area.

Korle Gonno in the Ga Language means the hilltop near the Korle Lagoon.

“When coming from the Manstse Agbona area you will climb a hill.  From that hilltop, one feels a rush of bad air: The smell of human excreta,” Charles Amarteyfio, a sanitation enforcement officer in the area said.

Amarteyfio has lived in the area for more than 40 years. He explains that living in this area has been beneficial to him because of the work he does.

“I am used to the scent so wherever I go, any community I enter, when I inhale that scent, I know if someone may have laid his toilet pipe into a gutter” he told JOYNEWS.

 
Many of the residents there like 30-year-old Comfort Abbey say they are now used to the unpleasant smell.

“We are used to the scent here. There are different kinds of scents (sic). I can count,” she opined.

 
But some people are yet to adjust to the “scented” atmosphere at Korle Gonno.  Charles Wutor is one of them.

“In the afternoon, the very hot afternoon, the scent is unbearable,” he said in a frustrated tone.

So the popular mantra there is he who can bear around, lives around. But when these residents have nowhere else to go, they have to brace themselves to live around.

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