THE Second Lady, Mrs. Matilda Amissah-Arthur on Wednesday, 11th March 2015 launched a book written by Claudio Turina.Titled “City of God” (Sodom & Gomorrah) at the Christ the King Parish Hall, Cantonments at 5pm.
She called on Ghanaians to make it a must read the City of God Book, since it tells all the problems associated with the are called City of God formerly known as Sodom and Gomorraand also help with some financial aid and assistance for the talents of the children in Sodom and Gomorra whowere wasting away their great talents and have decided to learn something good.
Mrs. Matilda Amissah Arthur lauded the efforts of theCatholic Church in establishing such a project, such as this one, to help educate not only the children but adults to read and write
She said visiting the place herself what was called Sodom and Gomorrah now City of God, which is said to be the biggest slum in Ghana, it was very horrific and is bounded by a burning dump and a sewage channel and has the hustlers, builders,, entrepreneurs, bad boys, and dreamers who live there.
The Catholic Church, with its vision of reaching out to the poor, has established a project christened, the “Business and Faith Developing Centre” to cater for the social needs of the less privilege and it’s a pro poor project, which began in Sodom and Gomorra, a suburb of Accra, with about 150,000 people, camped in one place of about two square miles.
“Biblically Sodom and Gomorra was a place, which was destroyed by fire due to the immoral activities that went on there, but upon introducing the project Ghana’s Sodom and Gomorra, by the catholic church it has been baptized as the City of God,”.
In the present day, because the community is known to be a place of poor sanitation, with no water, poor lighting system, no schools, no clinics for health care and no accessible roads to the place the catholic church decided to help build a place where there would be peace, happiness and development and where every child born there would have a future outlined for him or her.
So Far there about five projects had begun there: by the church clinic for health and sanitation; adult literacy programmes and school for children; fire service training and training programmes for other emergencies; skills training; and peace building to build their capacities.
Before launching the Book the Second Lady took it upon herself to be involved in with her media team to do a documentary in the area known and Sodom and Gomorrah how horrifying the situation was.
Watching the documentary before the launch of the book it is something that sprouts shantytowns like weeds with thousands of people living on less than half a square mile in the capital city, Accra, near a toxic lagoon and a channel of raw sewage.
They are surrounded by the guts of one of the fastest-growing economies in West Africa, miles of teeming factories, markets, and workshops
The 15 minutes sponsored documentary by Matilda Amissah Arthur is very revealing and soul touching, it is a community that has a smell that is gut-wrenching in the mid-day heat, made more intense by the pall of acrid white smoke from the flaming dump where the canal meets the lagoon.
The canal sits between Sodom and Gomorrah and central Accra. North of the slum is Agbogbloshie, home to a scorched field where tons of the world’s discarded electronics are burned for scrap.
South are the glass towers and modernist hulks of Ghana’s government. The waterway was once a clear blue river running through the city until some bright soul decided it would be better off as a sewer and buried everything but the last, filth-choked mile, renaming it the Agbogbloshie Canal. It’s a study in the kind of planning that has the city teeming with cholera, typhoid, and malaria.
Sodom and Gomorrah, officially named Old Fadama, has evolved into home for some of the most eager, energetic, and determined migrants in Ghana. Crowded into this miserable corner of the capital city, without much law to guide them, these people have built a community that has helped lift them out of poverty.
But because everything they do is haphazard, unplanned, and illegal, Sodom and Gomorrah has quickly become a problem for the rest of Accra. It causes floods, harbors armed robbers, and thwarts hundred-million-dollar infrastructure projects. So even as it has grown, Sodom and Gomorrah has been constantly threatened with destruction.
The entire west side of Sodom and Gomorrah is actually in the Korle Lagoon, built on layers of silt and rubbish and covered by layers of sawdust. This has narrowed the lagoon so much that during the rainy season, the rivers, canals, and gullies that flow into it back up, flooding huge swaths of Accra. Every year people drown, and everything in the capital city grinds to a halt.
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