The day before the combined police and military team swooped on suspected criminal elements, within Gomoah Buduburam's Camp Liberia refugee settlement, it so happens that I went there to buy a few household cleaning products.
The hardworking owner's diligent teenage daughter Hajia - who is incredibly intelligent, and somehow reminds me of the teenage Swedish environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, whom she also resembles - told me that they had been informed that the area was going to be evacuated and leveled to the ground - in order to make way for the construction of a modern market by the Gomoah East District Assembly.
"I am very worried, Grandpa. Just look at all the stuff in the shop. Where will we take them - and where will all of us live: since we live just behind the shop?" She was clearly traumatised, by the looming day-of-disaster when their lives will be turned upside down, and irrevocably changed.
Since the house I currently live in, at the State Housing Company's Buduburam Estate, does share a fence-wall with part of Camp Liberia, as my widow's mite contribution to empowering small businesses in the settlement, as much as is practicable, I try to do most of my shopping in the many small shops in the settlement.
That the teenage Hajia is deeply traumatised is beyond doubt. Her whole family definitely needs trauma counselling. To help them, I have been thinking about how best her kind and gentle family's plight, can be positively resolved, for the past two days.
The idea is to leverage some of the many initiatives put in place by President Akufo-Addo's administration, to empower Ghana's female SME entrepreneurs - so that that hardworking family, from whose shop I purchase most of my small household items, regularly, don't end up becoming homeless and destitute. That will be awful in the extreme.
Finally, one ought to stress that well-thought-out mitigation measures should be put in place by the Gomoa East District Assembley, the Ghana Refugee Board, and, if there is one, whoever is the liaison officer for refugees in Ghana, attached to the United Nations Office in Ghana, which will ensure that the lives of all Camp Liberia's refugees (comprising nationalities from different sister African nations, incidentally), who have chosen to be integrated into Ghanaian society, are not ruined in any way, by the construction of the planned modern market for Gomoah Buduburam. Yooooo. Hmmmm...
Sent from Samsung tablet.
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