by Steve Cole
Sometimes, even now, I get off my mattress and sleep on the floor. It feels more natural. And I’m glad for the splits in the plywood walls that let in the light, and the smells of the food market, and the traffic’s endless rumble.
Gifty has a way bigger room, just next to mine. She’s even got a proper glass window in the wall. But that’s cool. She needs the light cos she teaches kids up there most evenings and the electric lamp doesn’t work half the time. And that’s after she’s been to school herself all day, learning more. Gifty doesn’t even have time to change out of her school uniform, but she doesn’t mind teaching in it. It shows the kids that she really knows stuff.
She knew how to save our butts six months ago, for sure.
The night it happened, Gifty helped me carry the bike back into Trashland. We dumped it right by the main path and put some sacking over it – just one more wreck at the dump.
The bike gave us a whole load of precious metals. Our problem was that we had no way to convert them into cash. But Gifty reckoned Mr Ghazi could think of something. She’d followed me the night before and watched me go after Emanuel and Digger Guy. She wanted to know how Mr Ghazi was involved, so she followed him to his office and overheard him on his phone trying to deal with Sammy. “I know a guy who’ll pay a whole lot for these … ‘goods’,” he’d said. “But I thought it only fair to give you first refusal …”
Of course, Sammy came after Mr Ghazi and, well, you know the rest. Gifty had heard that her cousin was recruiting “friends” for action at the dump that night, otherwise she would never have guessed the reason and come looking. Who knows what might’ve happened?
So me and Gifty went back and talked to Mr Ghazi. And Gifty said he could have the bike.
But Mr Ghazi was afraid to touch it cos Sammy would be after it. If Mr Ghazi got rich suddenly, it wouldn’t take a genius to work out how. So Gifty said Mr Ghazi could keep it hidden and carry on as normal. He could wait until the heat was off and he thought it was safe, then sell it and keep whatever he got for it.
In return for the bike, Gifty wanted … investment.
See, Gifty didn’t want to live on stolen money. She wanted a proper place to teach, money to afford the books and the uniform and stuff she needed. She wanted people to believe in her.
Pretty soon, Mr Ghazi became one of them.
He’s a businessman, so he already had some money, of course. He agreed to pay back the cash Emanuel took from Gifty. And he agreed to stump up six months’ rent on a better place for Gifty to live and work while she got herself into school. Of course, Mr Ghazi would make it all back and a ton more once he’d sold on the bike parts. Gifty didn’t care about that.
But I cared.
“You’re gonna come out of this all right,” I said. “What about me?”
“You can stay with me,” she said. “That way you’ll have a real address, which should help you find better work.”
She was right.
I don’t use my magnet now. I’m a scrap buyer – I knock on doors around town each day with my trolley, collecting electronics that don’t work. Then I sell the stuff on to a big wholesaler. My wages help pay for our food and bills while Gifty is still in school. I’ve never walked so far in my life, but I don’t care. I feel blessed that I can walk at all.
I mean, it’s more than Emanuel will ever do.
The hospital had to take off his leg and he needs a stick to get around. He’s the worst room-mate. The snoring is bad, but his night terrors are worse. Man, it’s tough when those kick off. I jump out of my skin when he starts screaming and thrashing about. I have to hold him down till it passes and tell him he’s gonna be all right. Which is easy to say but harder to believe sometimes.
Just like when Gifty tells me I’m a hero for helping Emanuel so much.
It’s only right that I look out for him. If we’d never met, I’d still be dying down in Trashland. But Gifty says that if he wants to stay with us, he has to take her classes and educate himself. That’s if he ever wants to do something more than beg in the streets.
“I’m broke,” Emanuel says one day in class. “I’m always gonna be broke.”
I push his arm. “‘Money’ broke?” I ask him. “Or ‘broken inside’ broke?”
“You know that everything comes to Trashland broke,” says Gifty, looking out of the window. “If it can’t be fixed, we have to help turn it into something new.”
I join her at the window. I look out at the smoking dump beyond the busy street market – miles and miles of useless scrap, sent here to Ghana from all across the world. And for each thing that’s recycled, there are fifty more coming to take its place.
Will things ever change?
Yeah. I’ll change. As I get older, I’ll learn more and get smarter. Get even smarter.
No one knows it, but the night it happened I took a solid gold brake lever from Morgan’s Yamaha. I got it off with a screwdriver made out of silver. Both of them are hidden in my mattress now, and they must be worth a ton. One day I’ll sell them and use the cash to start my own business, just like Gifty. And my business will be about finding ways to make recycling easier … ways to help this burnt-out old world of ours, somehow.
I mean it.
I’m not just talking trash.
Discovering Trashland
In 2019 I wrote a book called Tin Boy, about a boy in Indonesia having to mine tin illegally. The tin is needed because it’s used in the circuit boards that power our technology, such as smartphones. But I found myself wondering: What happens to those shiny new devices when they’re discarded?
That’s when I started to think about this story. While Tin Boy looks at what goes into putting gadgets together, Welcome to Trashland explores how they are taken apart.
Recycling waste electrical and electronic equipment is a big problem. The word “recycling” makes it sound like we are doing good for the planet, but often the truth is very different. In 2019 alone, less than 20% of e-waste around the world was recycled responsibly. Forty-four million tonnes of it was left to pollute the planet – either buried in the ground, burned or illegally dumped.
Some of this waste ends up in the scrap section of Accra’s Agbogbloshie Market in Ghana – or Trashland, as Theo calls it. There are many more Trashlands around the world. It is here that all the fridges, TVs, laptops, car parts and other electronic scrap items end up. As Theo has explained, this “e-waste” is broken up and burned down for spare parts and to recover the valuable metals inside.
In Agbogbloshie, the workers tend to come from poor farming areas of northern Ghana in search of jobs that will help them support their families or put themselves through school. If they have any cash, perhaps they can buy faulty second-hand items in the hope of fixing them to sell for a profit.
If they don’t, or are unskilled, chances are they will end up scavenging like Theo or working unsupervised in the burning sites or breakers’ yards, trying to earn enough to survive.
It is dangerous even to live in such a toxic area already hit by high levels of pollution in the air, soil and water, let alone to do such punishing work each day.
And yet recycling this waste is vitally important. For too long, the way things work has been: “Take, make, use, throw”. To take better care of the world we need a new system: “Reuse, repair and recycle”.
If we keep resources in use for as long as possible, we extract more value from them and slow the rate of pollution. The hope is that, in future, places like Trashland will be better organised and more efficient, with workers respected and rewarded for their difficult work. That’s what people like Theo will try to bring about.
There’s things you can do too. We all like new stuff, but don’t upgrade your phone just for the sake of it. If there’s a faulty appliance in your home, see if it can be repaired instead of replaced. Certain charities agree to take second-hand electronic goods, where they are either sold on to raise funds, or donated to households or businesses that may be strug
gling. This way, less electronic waste will be burned or buried.
We need that to happen – before the entire Earth becomes a Trashland.
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Copyright
First published in 2021 in Great Britain by
Barrington Stoke Ltd
18 Walker Street, Edinburgh EH3 7LP
This ebook edition published in 2021
www.barringtonstoke.co.uk
Text © 2021 Steve Cole
Illustrations © 2021 Oriol Vidal
The moral right of Steve Cole and Oriol Vidal to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in any part in any form without the written permission of the publisher
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library upon request
eISBN: 978–1–80090–068–4
