Kayayo: Making the Most of Poverty
(Click here to view an audio slideshow by Peter DiCampo on Time.com)
At times, their words and their actions tell two different stories.
"I won't go back to that place. They are suffering there. If you don't have money, you suffer. You won't eat. At home, you can always cook and eat," says Amariya, a woman in her twenties who worked in Ghana’s capital, Accra, until she had enough money to return to her village and marry.
"The work is not good. You carry one load and already you are tired. A whole day and sometimes you get less than 20,000 cedis [$1.36]. And the people insult us. They don't respect us, even though we're the ones who carry their heavy things," says 19-year-old Abiba, who left her village to work in the city of Kumasi.
They are the Kayayo, thousands of women and young girls from barren northern Ghana who leave their homes to work as porters in the cities of the south. They make the journey to escape a place where meager subsistence farming is the primary occupation; where it is a normal practice for girls to do housework and raise their male siblings rather than attend school; and where education, infrastructure, and health care lag far behind the rest of the country.
But if the story their words tell is of hardship and poverty, their actions often display their enthusiasm for a chance at independence and opportunity.
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