‘It’s important work’
Back at the waste yard, business has died down for the day.
Bamfo and her youngest children, Nkunim, 10, and Josephine, 6, are emptying the last few bottles. She will be in bed by 8pm, rising at midnight for her Bible studies before starting work again at dawn.
Bamfo never thought she would become a waste picker.
She was 19 when she finally gained her school certificate, and by selling oranges, she scraped together enough money for a secretarial course. But she couldn’t afford a typewriter.
While the other girls tapped away at their machines, she drew the keyboard on her exercise book and practiced on that, pressing her fingers into the paper.
Soon, the money ran out. Instead of the office job she dreamed of, she found work breaking stones on a building site.
“At that moment, I see myself – I’m a big loser, and there’s nothing,” says Bamfo, leaning forward on her office chair to keep a watch for any final delivery tricycles. “I see the world is against me.”
Then one morning she woke to find the building site had disappeared overnight, replaced by a dump: Truckloads of water sachets, drinks bottles and nylon wigs.
Her five children lay sleeping. Her husband, as usual, had not come home. To buy cassava to make banku – dumpling stew – she needed money urgently.
A friend had told her that factories in the city would buy plastic waste for a few cedis a kilogramme. It was one of the lowliest jobs there were, involving not only backbreaking labour but stigma and shame.
Lydia Bamfo at her waste yard [Costanza Gambarini/SourceMaterial]
“If you are a woman doing this waste picking, people think you have no family to care for you,” she says. “They think you are bad. They think you are a witch.”
She came home one day to find her husband had abandoned her. But not before he had called her father to tell him his daughter had become a “vulture”.
Estrangement from her father only compounded the shame. To escape her neighbours’ taunts, Bamfo moved with her children to the other side of the city.
There, she took over her small yard, buying waste from pickers and selling it on to factories and recycling plants. Bit by bit, she built a wooden house. Eventually, she plucked up the courage to phone her father.
“I said, ‘Come and see the work I do. See that it is not something to feel bad about.’”
When he saw the yard and the tricycle teams that had become Bamfo’s business, Nkosoo Waste Management (“nkosoo” is Twi for “progress”), he couldn’t help but be impressed.
“You are not a woman, you are a man,” she recalls him telling her once, half admiring and half accusing. “The heart that you have – even your brother doesn’t have that heart.”
Now she hopes to pass on some of her resilience. King, her supervisor at the yard, slept on a nearby dumpsite as a small child and says Bamfo and her waste business saved him. “I cannot say a bad thing about her. She is my mother.”
As night settles on Accra, the polluting plastic tide has crept a little higher. But Bamfo has, she says, found dignity in the fight to keep it at bay.
“It is important work we do,” she says. “Sometimes I feel very sad and bad about not getting the education I wanted. But we clean the city. I think of that.”
This story was produced in partnership with SourceMaterial
