Thinking Inside Our Immediate Environment

Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh

Our stress levels have led to insomnia and various life-threatening illnesses. I am still waiting for my doctor's final decision. Maybe I will be enabled to sue one of these days.

So when a televangelist preacher man appeared with a theme, 'Thinking Outside Your Immediate Environment,' I realised my one piece of beef in this motherland is thinking inside one's immediate environment right inside the motherland.

I am not thinking sitting inside your immediate environment to think. My interest is in concentrating thinking on what exists and is happening in your immediate environment.

If the pastor and congregation of the Christ Apostolic Church across the street will only think about the immediate environment at the church's location, they would be saving the motherland from a lot of unpatriotic nuisance.

They use their time making noise rather than work. By so doing, they interfere with work by neighbourhood workers, whose sleep-aided rest is sabotaged by church noise. So they will not work and they will not allow anyone to work; simply church sponsored nation-wrecking.

It sounds like a group of congress people who have no idea about running the affairs of the motherland and yet would not allow anyone else to do it by staging coups and stealing elections.

The CAC noise-makers are 'chuchians' not Christians. That is what the father of a president who died in office taught me at teachers' college. Lo and behold, this was the one godly man who wanted the entire motherland turned into one big noise making prayer camp.

In the same immediate neighbourhood environment are life-threatening issues to think about. The gutter in front of my house is choked. It was constructed recently. When a contractor came to save us from dust by surfacing the road, he ended up filling the gutter with uncontrolled bitumen and chippings debris.

Now it has become a headache, where would I find money to clear the stuck and hardened bitumen?

The gutter is collecting rubbish all the time to multiply mosquitoes which love to feed on me and the rest of the dwellers in my house to malarialise us.

Clearly, CAC knows not about cleanliness being next to godliness. They are just bastardising spirituality.

By many standards, the neighbourhood is being turned into a slum. Containers and kiosks keep appearing consistently. One night, I noticed a kiosk being constructed. I rushed to the Adentan Municipal Assembly office to inform them. No one showed up to stop it. Later, they came to write 'Remove by ….;' only for the owner to paint over the inscription. More structures have been following since.

In this day and age, the woman next door has no garbage bin neither do the people who reside in the kiosks and containers lined up opposite. So when my household leaves to eke out some living, they all dump their garbage including human excreta into my bin. The assembly cares nothing about all that.

The street side space in front of my house is littered twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five or six. The most nauseating being the plastic stuff.

One day, in broad daylight between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon when I arrived back from a chiefly duty, thieves had come to raid and loot the house. None of all the people milling around the kiosks and containers saw a thing.

Maybe, just maybe, one or some of them had been monitoring the household's movements for the thieving opportunity.

So, you see, we are endangered and constantly live in danger in our immediate environment. There is no protection from health threatening or criminal acts. Therefore, looking and thinking inside our immediate environment must come before thinking outside it.

We need to do that, at least, in the environment where I live. There, irresponsible churchians make noise which, in my humble view, has nothing to do with worshipping God. Hear ye the people's Pope Francois. He says you don't need to believe in God to go to heaven.

I think rather by your thoughts about, and the resulting deeds towards your fellow humanity within your immediate environment, you will go to heaven or you will not go to heaven. If you die and you don't go to heaven, you can guess where else.

If we would think inside about the negative consequences of our immediate environment's noise and dirt and filth and penny capitalism, we may want to do something so we can also develop. Maybe thinking outside may provide some clues. But certainly, we are not thinking enough inside our immediate environment.

 By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh