The Charcoal Lady

Our apartment complex is located on a dirt road on the outskirts of Sunyani, near the little town of Abesim. Directly across from us is a large lumber mill. This is really good because we don't have any poverty shacks nearby with no plumbing, but the sounds of saws buzzing all day (and sometimes into the night) do get a little old and nerve-racking, and the constant smell of smoke permeates the air on most days.

Literally hundreds and hundreds of gigantic tree trunks are brought into the mill daily and ripped into planks. These logs are usually 40 to 50 feet long and anywhere from 3 to 8 feet in diameter. The scrap wooden pieces left after the boards and lumber are cut and loaded into huge trucks, are then piled systematically in giant piles about the size of the kids' playhouses. Then these piles are completely covered with sawdust and lit on fire, where they smolder and burn for days until charcoal is formed. The lumber mill truly does use every bit of wood, and even the sawdust, from the destruction of those beautiful trees. It looks like a field of mini-volcanoes all spewing smoke.

As we pull in and out of our driveway and wait for our gatekeeper to pull out the giant metal door, a shadowy dark figure sits on piles of smoking wood on the other side of the road. She is completely grey, covered in soot from head to toe (an old African Cinderella), and her sunken eyes always catch mine. I began to smile and wave and now she always returns the gesture with a big grin and motions back.

The charcoal lady, as we affectionately call her, sits right on the ground near the burning coals and monitors the process. Sometimes she pokes the piles with a long stick; sometimes she throws water on them; but she is always breathing and covered with the billowing grey smoke. She looks old and withered but is probably much younger than she appears. After about a week, they let the fires burn out, pull off the sawdust, and pack up the charcoal that is left behind from the burned lumber. Then they load it in bags, pile them in the back of taxis or tro-tros and send them off to sell at the side of the road or out of one of the little shops. Then the people buy the charcoal to put on their little fires for their fufu pots.

It's black, grey, dirty and smelly and can't be healthy to sit and breathe that smoke day in and day out. But that's her life--our little charcoal with the sunken eyes.