Breakfast with Hayford was a shared bowl of sweetened porridge and tea bread. “When did the boy lose his finger?” I asked.
“Last Tuesday. He was in a cocoa tree with the cutlass, holding a branch with his left hand. He’s a lefty so he was trying to cut with his right, which is not good.”
I wanted to add that perhaps it wasn’t good for ten-year-olds to be pruning trees with machetes, but I held off. A billboard seen along roads all over Ghana said AGRICULTURE WITHOUT CHILD LABOUR IS POSSIBLE! Maybe so, but for most Ghanaians it certainly wasn’t practical. A September 2010 report by Tulane University’s Payson Center for International Development said hundreds of thousands of children work on cocoa farms in Ghana and next-door Ivory Coast; many are trafficked and forced into labor.
“Did he get medical care?” I asked.
“There is a clinic in Adawso.” Remembering the road we had taken, I imagined a long, agonizing trip.
I had to get back on the road to Koforidua, but first Hayford wanted me to meet one of his brothers who was a preacher—not his twin, another brother, named Kwesi, which means “born on a Sunday.” We walked up a hill to Kwesi’s house and sat in chairs under a raffia awning. It looked like rain; Hayford was wearing a long trench coat and complaining about the cold, even though it was in the eighties.
“Are you Christian?” Reverend Kwesi asked me.
“I grew up Catholic.”
“Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?”
“It’s an important part of Catholicism,” I replied, trying to stick to the facts as I remembered them from Sister Madonna’s second-grade classroom.
That seemed to satisfy him, and he abruptly changed the subject. “Do you grow cocoa in America?”
“Oh no,” I said, somewhat relieved that we had moved on from the Holy Spirit to agriculture, a subject on which I felt firmer terra. “Too cold. Not even in the far south. Not even Hawaii.”
“Does it snow where you live?”
“Very much. And the lakes freeze so thick you can walk on them.”
“No!”
“I swear it. Like Jesus on the water.”
“Hah! Like Jesus!”
“You can even drive cars on the ice when it gets really cold.” This was a bridge too far, beyond Ghanaian comprehension, and I gathered they thought I was joking.
“Of course, every year, someone’s car goes through the ice,” I added. Kwesi thought that was hilarious, which it sort of is, if not to the driver.
Hayford’s brother had a Chinese bike that needed fixing—not a Walmart Chinese bike with sparkle paint and a pseudo-English name, but a real made-for-Shanghai bike, plain black with Chinese writing. Could I take it into the shop in town? I agreed, and accepted a ten-cedi note for the repairs. The bike was a mess—flat tires, bent rims, missing brake cables, no doubt much more. In America and probably even China it would go to the dump, but not here. I was looking forward to meeting Dave Branigan, the American who ran the bike shop around the corner from us—the former Peace Corps worker who had been beaten in his own home by Nigerian gangsters.
2. Guilty
Back in Kof-town I coaxed the bike across the street—the rims were so bent they thumped like a djembe on the pavement—and down the alley to the shop for Ability Bikes, the nonprofit venture that Dave ran. Three Africans—one woman, two men, all of them polio victims on aluminum crutches, were hard at work on various disabled bike frames. At the front of the shop, working on another bike, was a blond white guy in his mid-thirties with a nasty fresh scar under one eye.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to get this thing ready for the Tour de France.”
He looked up and extended a hand. “You must be Whit’s brother.”
“I’m Max. You must be Dave.”
“Pleasure. Where’s Whit?”
“He’s in China on mission impossible—trying to get factories to make twenty-dollar flashlights for fifty cents. Speaking of China, I’ve got one of their finest for you.”
Dave looked at the bike and exhaled deeply. “Bad timing. I’m on my way to Tema. Container of bikes just came in. I’m swamped. But let’s take a look.”
The way Dave’s business worked was he got charity bikes sent over from the States—wrecks that somehow escaped the dump—which he reconditioned on the cheap for local consumers. In the process he trained disabled Africans to repair bikes, building skills for people who might otherwise end up as beggars. His venture was affiliated with a Boston organization called Bikes Not Bombs that promotes bike empowerment in poor countries around the world, as well as in American cities.
“Thanks, Dave,” I said. “By the way, our agent gave me ten cedis to fix this thing.”
“That’ll be tough,” he said, stooping to examine the twisted carcass. “Let’s see … definitely needs tubes and tires. I’ve got some used tires I can throw on, and if I buy the cheap Chinese tubes he’ll save a couple cedis. We can probably straighten the rims rather than replace them; they’ll be good enough to ride, anyway. Brake cables, I’ve got some used over there. Looks like the whole front brake assembly needs replacing.” He started writing down figures.
I wanted to ask Dave about getting cracked over the head with a mahogany plank in his own bed (“What’s that like?”), but it didn’t seem like the right time. “We’ll need some grease, maybe an hour of labor …,” he went on. “I’m guessing this all comes to about nineteen cedis.”
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Dave looked up at his workers. “Anybody have time to do this job over the weekend?”
“I will do it,” said a tall man on crutches with toothpick legs and a bodybuilder’s chest popping out of a bright red Arsenal soccer jersey.
I thanked Dave, made a mental note to ask him later about Nigerian thugs, and walked back across the street to home and a hot shower. On the way I ran into Kevin, who had just come back from his route.
“Hayford says you worked very hard on his farm,” Kevin said.
“Well, I wanted to work even more, but I think he was tired.”
“Oh, he told me about that,” said Kevin. “He said he was afraid you were going to cut your leg off with the cutlass.”
Back in our flat, I stood under the shower and watched the mud of Sokwenya swirl around the drain, and I felt deliriously comfortable and guilty. A white person in Africa can feel guilty about almost anything. I felt guilty that I could be enjoying a hot shower when people like Jonas and Hayford had to bathe in a bucket; guilty that I used conditioner in my hair; guilty that after dark I could turn on lights and cook over a shitty but serviceable gas stove, or (if I wanted) drive to get a shitty but edible steak in a hotel restaurant; guilty that I didn’t chew my chicken bones; guilty that I accepted ten cedis from Hayford for the bike repair when I could easily afford to foot the whole bill myself; guilty that I did not give my farm boots to the queen mother and go barefoot like so many Africans I saw every day; guilty that we were trying to make money off people who were so poor they needed to let their children work with machetes; guilty that I could go home.
Yes, it’s easy to feel guilty in Africa, but it was also easy to forget that Whit was giving people jobs and teaching them skills; that I was paying for half the bike repair; that I gave Hayford and Jonas nice gifts (heavy-duty Coleman flashlights unavailable in Ghana) and that I helped them on their farms without cutting off any body parts; that I was a long ways from home in a dangerous place. All these conflicting feelings rose and fell like a blush, and soon they disappeared like the red dirt down the shower drain, and all that remained was a million tiny mosquito bites.
1. Personality Crisis
I could handle the concept that batteries need good nutrition and regular exercise. It was the last sentence that got me: Each battery seems to develop a unique personality of its own. I was out on the veranda reading Isidor Buchmann’s battery bible, hoping to learn more about the product at the center of the Burro business. Buchmann is a Swiss-born Canadian inventor who,
according to Whit, made a small fortune in the early days of the cell-phone business by helping phone manufacturers get a handle on runaway battery returns. He helped them figure out why seemingly good batteries went bad—that is, failed to take a charge—and how to analyze and recondition them. Being a techie nerd, Whit loved this kind of stuff; he went so far as to telephone Buchmann, twice, exchange several emails and, on one trip home to Seattle, have lunch with him over the Canadian border. I, on the other hand, expected his book to be eye-glazingly technical and dry as a camel bone. In fact it was surprisingly readable. To be honest, I soon found myself transported far from the dusty streets of Kof-town to a science-fiction netherworld where batteries were like HAL, the malicious computer with a mind of its own in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
If Buchmann can be taken literally (and the man is nothing if not a precise writer), batteries are not merely good or bad, strong or weak. He says each battery develops its own personality. Think about it: that’s a lot of personalities. Taking Buchmann’s analogy to its nightmarish conclusion, batteries have the potential to be temperamental, stubborn, melancholic, curious. And that’s just a four-pack. It gets worse. Much like a misunderstood lad who adopts a life of crime after meeting more hardened youths in reform school, it seems that a perfectly good battery can be spoiled by other, more delinquent cells in proximity. Bad personalities rub off. Imagine if all the batteries in the world banded together under one type-A personality battery (a triple-A making up for size?) bent on global domination. Chances are good it could happen here in Africa, which has bred despotic dictators since the colonial masters showed the Africans how it’s done. Then what? Look out is what. I could scarcely imagine the outcome, mainly because like most people I don’t think much about batteries until they die, at which point I curse them and move on.
By the fall of 2009 this whole battery personality business had become a big issue for Burro. Jan and Whit first started getting indications about battery problems in the summer—customers, the agents said, were complaining about noticeably shorter battery life. “I am worried,” said Kevin one day after his route. “The agents say they don’t want to go out and sell because they don’t want to hear the complaints.”
This was puzzling because in tests back at the office, the batteries seemed to be doing fine. Granted these early tests were not the most scientific; without sophisticated electronic analysis equipment, testing basically involved running batteries through a discharge cycle (a feature on the chargers that simply reverses the current flow) and timing how long it took. The batteries were rated to deliver 2.3 amp-hours of current, which in battery-speak is expressed in one thousandths of an amp-hour (one milli-amp-hour), written like this: 2300mAh. In practice, said Whit, it was more reasonable to expect around 1800 mAh per battery at this stage in their life cycle. (You could compare this to the difference between a car’s official gas mileage rating and its actual mileage in traffic after a little wear and tear.) Since the chargers had a metered discharge rate of 300 milli-amps per hour, it ought to take around six hours to completely discharge a healthy battery.
Which it did.
So the batteries seemed fine—but to be sure, Jan also tried running down fresh batteries in a variety of flashlights and radios, and timing the results. All these tests had begun as soon as we arrived in June, and the batteries seemed to be holding up well, certainly as well as Tiger Heads. Still, the complaints continued. What was going on? What kind of weird personalities were we dealing with?
2. Animal Electricity
The battery was invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta, a physics professor in Como, Italy. Volta had studied the experiments of Luigi Galvani, a Bolognese physician who observed that a frog’s leg twitched when connected to two dissimilar metals. Galvani thought the phenomenon was due to what he called “animal electricity,” but Volta realized that the moisture in the frog’s leg was actually facilitating a chemical reaction between the two metals that caused a transfer of electrons—an electrical charge. Put another way, chemical energy was being converted into electrical energy. Volta refined the process, using brine-soaked blotter paper instead of a frog’s leg to create a steady electrical current between plates of copper and zinc stacked up within a glass tube. His battery, known as the Voltaic pile, was itself of little practical value. It was large, fragile, and prone to internal leakage of the brine (known as the electrolyte), which caused short circuits. It also had a tendency to generate bubbles of hydrogen gas which, besides being explosive, increased the battery’s internal resistance and limited its useful life to about an hour.
But the principle was revolutionary. When you consider that the electrical generator was not invented until 1831, by the British physicist Michael Faraday, Volta’s battery represented the first form of continuous electricity (as opposed to static charges) known to man. Today—at least in the modern West—we think of batteries as a convenient supplement to generated electrical power, yet in fact they came first. By the time Faraday was demonstrating his first electromagnetic generator, incremental improvements on Volta’s design had already led to batteries with steady currents capable of lighting rooms, albeit not for very long.
And then something special happened. In 1859 the French physicist Gaston Planté replaced the copper and zinc electrodes of the Voltaic pile with alternating plates of lead and lead oxide. Then he used an acid solution as the electrolyte. The acid interacted with the two forms of lead to generate a sustained current unlike any previous battery. Planté’s lead-acid battery had genuinely useful applications; his 150-year-old design was essentially the same as the battery in your car. But his findings went beyond inventing the first practical battery. Planté also realized that after the lead-acid battery ran down (converting the two types of lead into lead sulfate), it could be brought back to life by reversing the process and feeding a current back into it. Thus in one swoop, Planté had also invented the rechargeable battery.
The 1880s saw the development of dry cells (made of carbon and zinc), which made it possible to produce small, portable batteries. Dry cells are not totally dry—it’s a relative term compared to the watery liquid in lead-acid batteries. They do, however, leak a gooey, corrosive electrolyte when run down very low. In 1898 the National Carbon Company introduced the first D-cell, a carbon-zinc battery whose direct descendant is the Tiger Head sold in Ghana today.
A Swedish inventor named Waldemar Jungner created the first rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery in 1899, but it was expensive and impractical as it required venting of internal gases. It wasn’t until the late 1940s that sealed NiCd batteries (which recombined the internal gases) were developed, opening up the consumer market for rechargeables.
NiCd batteries proved to be workhorses that dominated the rechargeable market for decades. They are relatively inexpensive, tolerant of deep discharge, can handle high loads (such as those required for power tools), recharge quickly, store well, and last for more than a thousand charge cycles. On the downside, NiCds have low energy density, meaning power comes at a cost of weight and size. The batteries also develop crystals on the cell plates that reduce charge capacity over time—that familiar phenomenon called “memory” that can be especially problematic if NiCds are repeatedly charged without having been fully discharged. Finally, cadmium is extremely toxic in the environment, complicating transportation and disposal of NiCd batteries.
The next major battery improvement was the development in the 1980s of the nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) battery. NiMHs have several advantages over NiCds, namely far less memory effect, as much as 40 percent higher energy density (meaning smaller size for equivalent power), and only mildly toxic ingredients, greatly simplifying disposal and transportation. But there are trade-offs: NiMHs don’t last nearly as long as NiCds (you get roughly three hundred charge cycles); they can’t take high loads as well (making them less suitable for power tools); they are less tolerant of deep discharge; they take longer to charge and generate more heat while charging; and they hav
e a greater propensity to “self-discharge”—that is, they lose their charge relatively quickly during storage. Oh, and they also cost about 20 percent more than NiCds, although the price difference seems to be narrowing as NiMH technology has improved and come to dominate the consumer market.
Given all the disadvantages associated with NiMHs, you might think the old standby NiCds would be the way to go in Ghana. But Whit ruled them out for one simple reason: because of the NiCd’s low energy density, it was impossible to get the power of a D battery in an AA-sized cell. This was a deal-breaker because a big part of Burro’s business model was the two-for-one offer: an AA battery that slips into an adapter for D-powered devices. Then there was the environmental issue: “Do I want to be the guy bringing tons of cadmium into Africa? I don’t think so,” said Whit.
NiMHs, on the other hand, were environmentally friendly and dense enough to deliver the big power in a small package that Whit needed. From the beginning, they were the only real choice.*
3. Nights in the Battery Room
Whit arrived from China in July with an array of geeky testing gear—a battery analyzer with a serial port interface to his laptop, and a regulated DC power supply that could be adjusted to deliver a constant source of either amps or volts.† Using these machines, he could run calibrated loads on batteries to mimic the load of any device, such as a flashlight or a radio. Then he could monitor how long it took for the battery to run down—the point where the voltage dropped so low as to be effectively useless. The analyzer plotted the results as a graph on his laptop.
Whit connected a cheap Chinese LED flashlight—the kind many Burro customers use, bought at the market in Koforidua—to the DC power supply unit, using alligator clips. The flashlight was meant to be powered by two 1.5-volt D batteries, so he set the power at three volts. The beam was clear and bright. Then he dialed the voltage lower and lower, watching the light grow increasingly dim. At one volt (half a volt per battery), the flashlight gave off only a faint glow. We turned out the room light (it was nighttime) and could barely see ourselves in the orange cast. It was dimmer than a candle. “I would argue that’s the bottom end of useful light,” said Whit. “I mean, it’s beyond any functional task lighting; you couldn’t read by it. But I suppose you could argue it still works as a night-light. Basically it’s dead.”
Max Alexander Page 15