Africa, Accra, Asbestos...Trafigura

My husband calls just minutes after the Trafigura news reaches me from a colleague in London. "There is asbestos outside the school," he says. "I've spoken to them, they're having it disposed of. Can you check, later?"

Of course I agree. "It" is corrugated roofing material, white, old and toxic. I went to look. It is under a tree in the sun, flaking and broken and in the path of an easterly wind that blows towards our house.

"Having it disposed of" assumes there might be some municipal authority that will come in suits and masks to take it away. But asbestos worry hasn't reached these parts. I can make this statement with a small degree of authority because of a conversation with caretaker Jonas about the ironing board earlier this week.

"I can do the ironing" says Jonas, a muscular Ghanaian. "You can't", says my husband, a muscular Brit, "it has an asbestos hotplate". As much as I enjoy this homoerotic housewife chat, there is an important subtext. Jonas is a clever man but he has no idea about asbestosis. And nor do I, much, but that's because I've never had to deal with a potential cause. The locals don't because no one has told them, and they waft past the roofing in long skirts, sweeping up fibres into the sultry haze and moving about their business.

I check with the school later about the disposal. "It's all in hand" says the secretary, who dismisses me but shows no plans to follow it up. We walk home on the opposite side of the road, Magnus breathing through cupped hands.

An expert on the Trafigura tale says the level of toxic waste dumped in neighbouring Ivory Coast was enough to "bring a major city to its feet". A major city might have warned its people not to go outside and breathe the fumes that caused miscarriages and deaths, to work from home, to stop the transport system. I don't think that happened in Abidjan.

Do Africans care about rubbish dumps? I don't know. I queried Google. It said "Did you mean: do Americans care about rubbish dumps?"

On a day when Trafigura is top news, I didn't expect that. There's not much more I can say.

After one week, this much I know...

Writing a blog about a subject as emotive as Africa is hard. At some point I shall write about turmoil or the lack thereof, music and dancing and joie de vivre, but I am underqualified to do it yet. I've been cosseted in a luxury hotel with wifi and three pools and now a beautiful house with a caretaker, aircon and the world's biggest bed (photo to come). I haven't been to Sodom and Gommorrah, the slums housing 55,000, which the authorities plan to destroy. I haven't seen the local effects of HIV or the sadness of poverty I haven't been to the part of the beach the locals use as a toilet, nor inside single rooms housing neighbours' entire families. When I do, I'll have a rounder picture.

Other visitors warn me not to go near the scruffy town beach, but I do. They say the hawkers make it unpleasant. I have found it to be anything but. They exist, but you can exhaust their persistance in seconds by talking of English football. I take Magnus (aged 6) for back-up. I know all of the clubs but none of the players. So Magnus, a gentleman, takes over converstion while I look at the sea and examine opportunities for fishing.

I am lost when local children who play in the garden (like Jacob, pictured) ask to come inside the house. Our (British) landlady says the tempation to steal is too great. We have reporting equipment here that could provide three years' wages a pop. We have bought a rope swing and paddling pool in the hope it will not be an issue, but I know in time they will come inside and watch TV, and I won't want to give them back.

The beautiful photographs that are an inevitable consequence of this stunning colourful land will be impossible to post to this blog as an inevitable consequence of the stunningly poor upload speeds. To maintain my marriage to the web, I have bought both a Vodafone broadband connection and mobile broadband from South Africa's MTN. I am single handedly propping up their share prices. The Vodafone service is unreliable, affected by something as basic as rain. My Blackberry is an expensive luxury I turn on only on work days.

The taxis are universally ancient, the doors falling off, suspension gone. When a driver left his seat to help me with bags, his car rolled off and he caught it through the window. Asking for seatbelts seems absurd, but we do it. The views are incredible.

I am scared to go fishing. It was one of the things I looked forward to most, but visiting the tackle section of the supermarket has dampened enthusiasm. Rod fishing hooks at home measure a couple of inches. None here measures fewer than 10. I can only imagine what they can catch.

Lifeguards are unqualified. Some parents even more so. At a local hotel, as staff packed up at 5pm, they found the body of a child at the bottom of the pool. It took them three hours to find the parents. I am taking my boy to the pool for eight solid hours at weekends to make him a stronger swimmer. I have taken him out too deep and watched him cry for help and never want to go there again.

Nights that start at 6 when the sun goes quickly still feel like winter. Even in the tropics with the aircon off. But you sleep soundly knowing the sun will stream through the shutters in the morning, and that the cockerel will bang on for six hours solid.