Everybody's going to Denmark

I almost take it for granted that my own country is going to be an embarrassment at this conference, but Canada aside, I'm excited and mildly optimistic about what's going to come out of Copenhagen this month. I didn't think I'd be able to afford it until a couple weeks ago, but now I'm actually going to be there for the last week. And while I'm scrambling to figure out how to get in, I am trying to remember why I wanted to go in the first place.

Next semester, I'm hoping to intern with an NGO here in Ghana called Abibiman Foundation. They do some pretty wicked climate lobbying work, from what I can tell, and they let me read a really interesting -- and kind of heart-breaking -- document they helped produce. This October, along with a whole bunch of other development organizations, they visited villages and cities around the country doing something they called Climate Justice Hearings, finding out the impacts of climate change on people's lives in all these places. The final report was presented to the Ghanaian government to help them pull together a clear position for the talks this year.

They visited communities in the region I'm actually in right now, up north. A lot of the concerns expressed by people in cities, towns, and villages up here are similar: existing problems are being made worse by a drier, hotter growing season, more intense and unmanageable rains when they do come, and more common flooding when the dams overflow up north in Burkina Faso.

I spent the last three days researching water and sanitation with my class in a tiny village called Kukua, talking to NGOs, the district government team in charge of water and sanitation projects, community members, schoolkids, teachers... People there have an incredibly difficult time getting water not just for drinking, but for washing, cooking, tending to their animals (oh my god, donkeys are so dumb), you name it. There are wells, but they dry up in the hot, dry Harmattan season (just beginning now).

A woman in Kukua drawing us a calendar to show water sources in different seasons

A couple of government-associated projects have helped them get boreholes with handpumps, but kids still told us there's no water anywhere near the school. In the rainy seasons, they harvest rainwater and store it in a big black plastic Polytank, but the teachers rely on students to bring buckets of water from home. And when everybody pours their buckets together, all it takes is one bucket with a weird colour or smell, or sand in it, to affect the quality of all the rest.

So then today, I'm reading through this report on my computer, and I come across testimonies from kids in a village called Tumu, northwest of here. Imagine a community facing a situation like Kukua's already, and then it gets worse as the climate changes. Tumu has been hit hard by flooding from Burkina Faso in the past few years. So the community said that even as wells get drier and drier, they've been getting polluted by high floodwaters in the rainy season, which have also washed away people's homes...

One kid said:

"The impacts of climate change are not farfetched. We, children and pupils in Tumu suffer the worse effects of climate change. We have to carry water from long distances and sometimes service our parent’s farms and animals before attending school. We have to struggle to pass the same exams we sit with our colleagues who have better condition of living and learning. This is unfair and unjust”

And I guess, to put it simply, the feeling I have reading this is a part of why I want to go. More later.