People of Holomuni travel 68km to make phone calls

Making a simple phone call has become a very big source of worry for the people of Holomuni in the Wa East District of the Upper West Region due to the lack of network coverage.

Residents of the community have to travel a distance of about 68kms to Bulenga which is the nearest community with network coverage.

However, mobile handsets are a common device in the community with population close to 2,000 people.

Mr. Boasah Hanzeri Jiamah, Former Assembly member of Holomuni Electoral Area in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in the community last Thursday said the lack of mobile network in the area was one of the community’s biggest headaches.

“Here, if you wish to make a phone call, you have to buy fuel on your motor bike and ride a distance of 68kms to Bulenga to make the call and return”, he said.

Mr. Jiamah said the situation apart from being risky and time consuming also made it difficult for them to communicate with their loved ones outside the community.

The former Assembly man had therefore made a passionate appeal to the District Assembly and mobile network operators to sympathies with their situation and come to their aid so that they could also sit at the comfort of their homes and make a call to any part of the country and beyond.

Mrs. Marcy Ali, a Midwife in the community shared her frustrations with the GNA, saying each time she needed to send a message across; she had to write a note and give to anybody from the community going to Wa to deliver it.

“I have no other means of communicating to even my superiors when I am here, this is really bad especially in emergency situations”, she lamented.

“Here, we do not also have access to the ambulance service and because of the distance whenever I refer patients to the Wa hospital, they always refuse to go”, she added.

The Midwife said she referred a newborn baby to Wa and that because it was a matter of life and death, the parents went used a motor bike to send the child to the Wa hospital.

However, because of the long distance they lost the baby by the time they got to the hospital in Wa, she explained sadly.

Mrs. Ali wished that for now the issue of communication would be solved and that they were provided access to the ambulance service to take care of their emergency cases.

Mrs. Ali who is having a baby of about one year old sympathetically revealed that each time she was in the community she loses touch with her husband and other family members.

Asked whether her husband who works at the Regional Hospital in Wa was not worried about her situation, she said “sometimes he always threaten me that he will get married to a different woman”.

Mrs. Ali has been working in very remote communities in the Wa East district for the past seven years.

Source: GNA