Ghana Connected Photos by Robin Ingenthron

While getting news when we can from Accra's terrible flood and fires of the past 24 hours, I'm uploading photos through National Geographic.  175 dead, we pray for the families and friends of our friends in Ghana.  We are connected.

Here are 15 Photos from our Agbogbloshie trip which try to connect the dots of the "ewaste" story... the villages young men leave for the "big city". The Tech Sector which imports used electronics, connecting us, creating sustainable jobs. The cities which eventually upgrade and produce overflow "e-waste". And the young men who break motors and burn wires to pay rent in the city.

Ghana Connected:  Photos by Robin Ingenthron (National Geographic website)

This is a Slide Show with 15 of the best photos from the trip to Ghana.   Need at least 15 more, to cover the trip to Tema for example, to the shopping malls, and to the homes (and children) of the technicians who hosted me.

If you want to read more, go here.   Two more reporters confirm the "Millions of Tons" Hoax.

This place I'm standing on is now under water.  While I was there, they told me it would be under water in another month or two. It's a flood plain.  It happens every year.

Injury Box Blog: Pics Parasites Poverty

Last week I "kinda severely" injured my left hamstring in two winter-home-weatherization related incidents.  What has been frustrating has been to be home-bound but unable to sit still, upright in a chair for long.  Makes for halting, sporadic blogging.

Last weekend's post "Missing Poverty: Poverty Comedy" was messy, but I'm kind of excited by something that turned up from inside it.   The parallels between 1960s Ozarks and 2010s West Africa is not exactly uncanny, we've even been there before.  But the Hans Rosling videos I've been engrossed by this winter helped me generalize my subjective insights.



In 2009, South Korea became the first former recipient of OECD economic assistance to join the assistance giving committee.   South Korea was admitted to the OECD in 1996, 25 years after OECD was defined.  The 1961 original OECD membership list was whites - only (not even Japan was considered "developed").  Kids in college today are getting a message about "developing world" from people who considered South Korea a charity case, and they are getting the message on Samsung handheld devices (which they use to shop for Hyundais and Subarus in another tab).

You can track affluence and progress through lifecycle of appliances.  Koreans bought used products from affluent 1970s Japan.  Selling a first used car to a teenager is not necessarily "exploiting" the teenager.  Selling a starter home to a young family is not making them poor.  The guilt-by-association with poverty dogs the used goods market, and photographic snapshots of poverty should not become a modern soul snatching juju.

It's a fallacy that invokes instincts of nurture and instincts of aversion, and it sways crowds of people who self identify as "Agents of Conscience".   The key is to understand spiritual materialism (the desire to be a good soul) and history of development.  Rosling has shown how the majority of humans, like my Ozark cousins, have emerged from poverty within generational memory.  We need to explain to the Royals that fixing and recycling stuff isn't suffering.

Many places have been wealthy for so many generations that they do not have any institutional recollection of the end of poverty.  But for those of us who can remember, boycotting the poor is not how affluence went down.