Agbogbloshie

The world replaced six thousand phones this morning. All of them are burning in Agbogbloshie, in the heart of Accra, where six thousand people make a living stripping copper from what you replaced. They breathe air five times more polluted than what the WHO considers safe. No one keeps track of what they die from. He lives there. And while everyone else scavenges for weight, he searches for the part that still works. With a washing machine motor, laptop batteries, and spliced wires, he raises a streetlight in the middle of the alley where he lives. That night, for the first time in twenty-two years, the street had light. That’s why they found him. Fiction set in a place that exists.