Early morning contrasts

An untypical gloomy morning, with heavy cloud almost offering rain, created a host of images which had been less evident on previous journeys into the city.
Children, young people and adults emerge from humble homes, up the hillside or down in a ravine and today the luminosity of the children’s shirts and blouses are all the more vivid. The smallest of the children are burdened with oversized rucksacks that are manageable only because they are largely empty. Whereas the neatly dressed and immaculately coiffured young women, with plaited, extended or relaxed hair, suffer no impediment in looking chique.

Together, they arrive at the kerbside unnoticed by the car washer, who is stripped to the waist and hurling water at a dusty car using cupped hands, or the man who wields a machete to remove the husk from but one of the thirst quenching green coconuts being prepared for sale.


In the semi gloom, luridly green and orange coloured bottled drinks, sitting on a fragile wooden stall, advertise their availability for a quick sugar rush. Whilst next to them a mini pyramid of cerise coloured cola-nuts, offer a brief high and dulling of appetite/hunger for much longer.


A hunger and thirst for education and schools to provide it, requires that even limited space is used to erect the fragile classrooms that are located at various distances along the road. In one, the pre-school assembly is led by singing teenagers and the rhythmic clapping, tunes and lyrics are that of the ‘shouts’ and choruses heard in many churches.

On the road, an over chromed jeep’s progress is impeded by a wooden hand cart. With cumbersome car tyres, a “rag-n-bone” activity has already collected a few heavy items of metal, causing the two men in charge to lean-into the pushing of their load. The cart’s space on the road is challenged by aggressive poda-poda (mini-bus) drivers and threatened by exuberant okada (motor bike) riders, who offer the pillion place as a taxi service and then choose to weave at speed through the inevitable congestion.

Together the poda- podas and okadas display a commercial dis-courtesy that is not evident among other motorists, including taxis drivers, who give way to pedestrians crossing a road in manner that is at times heart warming.
On reaching the city centre the sellers of newspapers become evident, carrying a small quantity of at least five newspaper titles, of which the customer is expected to buy at least three. Apparently no newspaper has a circulation in excess of 1,000 and there are more than twenty titles published on weekdays only and the cost of the most expensive is only 2,000 Leones (34p). Be it an 8 or 12 page publication and usually in monochrome, it relies financially on governmental announcements and commercial advertising. And the content is largely devoid of investigative journalism and local news but includes at least two pages of Premiership football news, lifted directly from the British press!