Sunyani is not a metropolis. 60 thousand people live in the township and this number rises to 100 thousand taking the outlying areas into account. However, in central Ghana this makes it an important hub, with large amounts of immigration and emigration. Those arriving from the north have more often than not had the hard experience of poverty – of learning to live on less than nothing, on the empty rewards of the barren earth. Earth that has seen its forests turn to savannah and its savannah turn to desert. And when you arrive from the north, with nothing but the will which says to you hold on, you can get used to any type of living conditions.
This explains Sunyani’s slums. The slum district is known as Zongo. It spreads between the zones which harbour the old, Citizen’s Market and the Wednesday Market – the regional bazaar which is held, as its name would suggest, every Wednesday. The slum district has been since time immemorial the dumping ground of both of these trading places, and Zongo climbs and grows upon a mountain of waste. It grows because there are no regulations or planning services governing the makeshift accommodation of those people who, in fleeing even more precarious situations, are obliged to adapt to whatever circumstances they find. Most of these people are Muslims and the social, religious and scholastic life of Zongo is decidedly Islamic.
Just a few miles away is the Don Bosco Boys Home. Sunyani is not Rio or São Paulo: there are no groups of street children being pursued by the police; but there are many who have been left to fend for themselves, the offspring of families in trouble, or simply families who no longer exist. The Boys Home is their home. Around 30 live there and many more hold it as a reference point to help them get through their problems at school, problems with health, and above all because they desperately need someone to be their friend, someone to consider them as real people, as sons.
It was these boys who felt the call to go into Zongo. Just two years ago a young Polish volunteer, who had spent two years in the Boys Home, went to Zongo to start a type of oratory, and there, where the piles of waste were shallow enough to clear away a few square metres of space, created a point in which young people can come and play, meet others and stay together.
Last summer he went one step further. For some time he had been in touch with a local imam and other town elders who represent a reference point for the community of immigrants – this despite these migrants being of various extractions and having as their only common denominator the fact that they earn practically nothing. The young Pole spoke of summer holiday camps for the children, and the reaction he got was not just positive, but actually enthusiastic.
And so, instead of waiting for the children of Zongo to come to the Boys Home, he took the summer camp to the centre of Zongo. Meanwhile in Odumase and Adentia, summer camps were held for other children. In all there were 1500 children who attended.
The mini primary school that was set up was overflowing with children every day as it proved impossible to stick to limited number of entrants that the imam and elders had planned for.
Outside the school, the open space that the volunteer had founded two years previously was enlarged by covering its bordering waste with sawdust from the mills in Zongo’s timber yards.
The ingredients were the same as every summer camp here in Ghana: children being together in friendship plus certain moments of group activities and play, remedial lessons (English and maths are the bête noir for children of all ages here), moments of learning and of prayer.
Starting from the last: the prayer was led in turn by the boys themselves and for the first few days started with the classic first Surah of the Qur’an, which opens every Islamic prayer across the planet. This was followed by other sung verses that people in these communities all know from childhood. When it was revealed that among the children were a small group of Christians everyone accepted this with open arms and all were happy to learn the paternoster too. Thus the Qur’an and Our Father Who Art went hand in hand at the beginning and end of every day.