Getting to Lake Volta isn’t an easy task. Well, at least the part I was going to isn’t. The southern part of the lake is a large hub for tourism with swanky resorts dotting the shores. It is about a two hour drive from the capital city of Accra, where you can sit lake-side and sip cocktails with little umbrellas in them, or so I’ve heard.
In the north, Lake Volta looks different. It’s a major port for human trafficking in West Africa. Yeji is the name of the outpost in the north. It hosts a massive market twice a week where people come from miles away by boat to sell fish, second-hand clothing, and vegetables. Some people pay with money, others trade goods because they come from such remote areas any currency is rendered useless back in their home communities. Yeji is also the first stopping point for trafficked children to be sold. Tucked behind food stalls or hiding in corners are children who appear to be unaccompanied. But if you look closer, you will notice an adult lurking a few feet away. The average cost of a child: around $100.
To get to Yeji, it's a 10 hour car ride from Accra. I don’t get car sick, but I threw up twice. The roads are bumpy. Once you get to Yeji, it’s a 7 hour boat ride to an area called The Black Volta, which is a remote branch off of the main tributary of Lake Volta. The boat is made of solid wood and the cracks in the hull take in water as we motored north. Seven hours of bailing water was exhausting, my back sore and my hands wrinkly from moisture.
Kopedeka isn’t on a map. When you google it, there is one webpage on the internet that mentions Kopedeka - 3 sentences about how the area is home to 150-200 residents and they do not have safe water collection methods.
As we beached our boat, no part of the village was visible behind the tall lake grasses. Once we touched land and walked 5 minutes up a muddy path, did structures start to appear. Kopedeka is what most villages on the lake are like - homes made of resources readily available like mud and sticks. There is no running water. Water is collected from rain in large tubs or hauled from the lake in bright yellow jerry cans. Toilets and showers are outdoors with branches for privacy. The cooking happens outdoors over open fire.
Sandra, who comes from a middle-class Ghanaian family and leads communications for our local partner on the ground, Challenging Heights, shared with me after our stay in Kopedeka, that she never realized that people from her own country were living like this. In 2023, Kopedeka was like stepping back in time. Something that stood out to her, besides the primitive living, was the lack of variety of food. Imagine for a moment, eating the same thing, every single day of your life. The same flavors, the same textures, for all of your meals, for eternity. That food - Fufu, yam or cassava root that is pounded into a dough and mixed with dried or salted fish (depending on availability on what is left over after going to market).
Life on the lake is challenging. The average life expectancy is a staggering ten years younger than the rest of the country. I doubt that statistic takes into account the illegal child labor that fuels the fishing industry. A lot of these trafficked children arrive and are sold out of Yeji before they are transported to the villages speckled along the lake where they will be forced to work in order to pay off the debt of their families. Most children do not know how to swim, but are forced to dive into the lake to untangle nets or plug holes in boats.
Depending on the season, and what species of fish are hatching, days start at four in the morning before the sun rises over the mud-colored water of Lake Volta. With empty bellies, children as young as six will drag heavy wooden boat oars in the pitch-black night down to the lake’s edge to start fishing for the day. All day and into the night these children will cast and pull nets as they work alongside peers who also fell to a similar fate.
A large part of my job is to interview beneficiaries of our local partner programs.
Typically, they are adults who were rescued by one of our local partner organizations, and through these incredible programs, have healed and are now going back into their communities to strengthen them from the inside out. Hearing about the abuse suffered on the lake is difficult to comprehend. There is physical and verbal abuse, rape of girls and boys, withholding food as punishment for not collecting enough fish, dangers of sleeping out in the bush, and medical neglect (children offen suffer from untreated malaria or hepatitus).
One beneficiary from Ghana, Abeku, shared that at one point his slave master became angry with him and put him in a cage that was too small to stand or stretch out his legs or stand for days at a time. He was forced to use the bathroom in the tiny cage and passed out from not being fed.
At the age of 17, Abeku was rescued. He’d never been to school before. For teens like Abeku, catching up academically is typically out of the question. He was enrolled in a trade program and today owns a successful welding business. To give back to the program that saved his life, he offers apprenticeships to other survivors so they too can learn a trade. Abeku is married and has a two-year old son. In the interview, I asked him what he liked most about being a dad. He said, “I feel enormous pride in knowing my son will get further in life than me because I will be able to send him to school and not to the lake.”
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Reflecting on this now, on paper, Abeku shouldn’t be alive. God clearly had a greater plan for survivors like him - he survived evil and has come out with enormous strength on the other end.
Abeku is what makes this work so important, he is just one example of the solution to the problem.
See what the village center looks like