Photo Essay : Timeless Days, Honored Lives

Dendo is more than a mile from the nearest water, a muddy pond. It is without electricity and so dark when the sun sets that old men brag about it. Life in the Ghanaian farming village is hard, plain and timeless, as in many parts of rural Africa.

But if cholera doesn’t come with the water, nor malaria with mosquitoes, and if drought doesn’t kill the cassava and corn, the villagers say they can live into their 100s. For theirs is a life of little stress, just the routine of the agricultural cycle. At the end of the day, the estimated 700 villagers lie down on thin mats on hard dirt or cement, dog-tired, and sleep. Without power, there is no television, no MTV, no news to stir the emotions.

Village life is regulated in a council of elders, generally men in their 70s. They are honored as custom requires, and the large families of the countryside provide a pyramid of support from below, even in the face of 50% infant mortality rates.

Woe to the man like Jacob Kofi Gbadago. He claims to be 106, so old he has outlived all his children and now lives alone. His eyes show the weight of his ordeal.

It’s a hard life too for Dasi Adika, 75, who balances a bucket on her head bringing water home from the pond to fill her cistern. Often as not there are polliwogs in the water. But Adika has 12 children and 65 grandchildren, so she is not alone like old Jacob.

Dendo and the nearby town of Sasecofe seem filled with the elderly. Four claim to be 100 or older, though these claims must be taken with a grain of salt. There is no county clerk to record births, and ages are figured by comparing them to those of siblings and known events, such as droughts.

But age is honored, even when imprecise.