Dispatches from Salone

Looking back

2010-11-07T21:38:00.009Z

Dear readers:

I’m back in the United States, for now, and so will no longer be updating this blog regularly, though I may still occasionally post news or stories about Sweet Salone.

I will leave this blog up as a resource for those who want to learn more about Sierra Leone – through the eyes of a newcomer in 2006 and a not-so-newcomer in 2010. If you’d like more current news and updates, check out Visit Sierra Leone's blog or sign up for their newsletter. Please also visit the Welbodi Partnership, a deserving effort to improve child health in Sierra Leone.

For those of you who have been following this blog over the years, thanks for reading and for your patience with my infrequent posts. I hope you’ve come to develop a soft spot for sweet, striving, startling, spectacular Sierra Leone.

And if you’d like to join me in a short trip through memory lane, look back through the archives from the last few years, and find:

stories of dust and rain...

of lazy Sundays and hectic Fridays...

of a broken health system and young lives lost and saved ...

of poverty and presidential inaugurations ...

of football stadiums and tiny village cinemas...

of mountains and tiny villages and urban chaos ...

of optimism and giving credit where credit is due...

and so much more.

Sierra Leone is still a deeply poor country, but it is not the same country it was in 2006, when UN forces kept the peace and the lights were out across the capital. With any luck, it will celebrate its 50th birthday next year with an unprecedented – and deserved – sense of hope and possibility.

Maybe you should even go celebrate with them. As a recent article in the UK’s Independent newspaper notes, “wildlife, white sands, and a new wisdom” await you.

For now, kushe and tenki.

Ryann

Help kids in Sierra Leone without leaving your seat

2010-07-26T10:06:00.001Z

Vote online NOW for Rebecca Cridford and the Welbodi Partnership to help us win support from the Vodafone Foundation for our work in Sierra Leone.

Rebecca and Welbodi are in the finals and it’s up to the public to choose the winners – so we need your votes NOW! It takes just 60 seconds and could make a big difference to our work supporting pediatric healthcare in Sierra Leone.

The competition ends on Wednesday 28th July 2010, so just a few days left!

What can you do to help?

FIRST: Vote online for Rebecca Cridford through Facebook. Voting closes on Wednesday 28^th July 2010.

THEN: Tell everyone you know to vote as well. Post a link in your status. Message all your friends on Facebook. Tweet or blog about us. Email your friends, family, colleagues. Forward to any listservs or groups you belong to. We have just until noon on Wednesday 28^th July 2010 to get as many votes as possible.

WANT TO DO MORE?: Contact friends who have blogs or who tweet or facebook frequently and ask them to help spread the word. Ask your school or workplace if you can set up a virtual “voting booth” at lunchtime -- all you need is a connected computer. Call your local radio or write a letter to your local paper to encourage others to vote.

Just a few moments of your time can make all the difference.

Read more below about the Vodafone World of Difference contest, the Welbodi Partnership, and our work at the Ola During Children’s Hospital.

Who is Rebecca Cridford?

Becky Cridford is a UK trained nurse with 7 years of experience in the NHS and overseas. She plans to spend a year working with the Welbodi Partnership at the Ola During Children’s Hospital to support the nursing team to further develop the life-saving skills they need, and to put them into practice. Becky applied to the Vodafone World of Difference programme and was chosen out of over 2,500 applicants to go forward to a public vote on Facebook.

What is the Vodafone World of Difference International programme?

Each year, the Vodafone Foundation supports a handful of inspiring people to work for a year with their “dream charity,” while also providing funds and publicity to those winning charities. More than 2,500 people applied this year for just 8 spots, and it’s now down to a public vote to decide which of 4 candidates will win one of 2 remaining spots! The competition closes

Vote now for Becky and the Welbodi Partnership

What happens if Rebecca wins?

The Vodafone Foundation will provide funding for Rebecca’s year volunteering in Sierra Leone. Vodafone will also make a sizeable donation to the Welbodi Partnership, and we will also benefit from significant free publicity in the UK and elsewhere.

Why do we need support for nursing in Sierra Leone?

Nurses are absolutely vital to save the lives of children in Sierra Leone. The Welbodi Partnership is working to support nurses at the Ola During Children’s Hospital in Freetown in various ways, including in-service training, support to nurse managers to improve supervision, and provision of essential equipment and supplies that help nurses to do their jobs better.

One in four children in Sierra Leone die before they are 5 years old (UNICEF, 2009). There is only one government children's hospital in Sierra Leone, which also serves as a training facility for doctors and nurses. The Free Health Care Initiative launched on the 27th of April this year, which made essential health services free to all pregnant women and children under five, was a wonderful step to improve access but has also resulted in a quadrupling of patient numbers. This puts an added burden on the hardworking nurses and doctors at Ola During.

What is the Welbodi Partnership doing to help?

The Welbodi Partnership’s volunteers work in the Ola During Children’s Hospital to provide on-the-ground training and support to the nurses, doctors, and non-medical staff of the hospital, to improve the quality of care and transform Ola During into a center of excellence for training the next generation of pediatric health workers. To learn more, visit www.welbodipartnership.org .

Vote now on Facebook to help Rebecca Cridford and the Welbodi Partnership win support from Vodafone.

Things I don't expect in Sierra Leone: Public safety messages

2010-07-21T17:48:00.000Z

Today I got a text message from the Sierra Leone Police.

“Please WEAR your seatbelts and safety helmets at ALL times when driving vehicles and motorcycles. Message brought to you from the Police Services Board.”

Mom would be proud.

The best salesman

2010-07-19T09:56:00.001Z

Three boys are standing outside the Total station in Wilberforce. One is selling change to my taxi driver. Another is trying to sell cold water in printed sachets. A third is pitching bags of popcorn. They’re all around 8-10 years old.

The popcorn seller, a head taller than the others and obviously the boldest of the bunch, entertains his friends with a tongue-in-cheek sales pitch. “I’m the best salesman,” he says in Krio, “buy from me.” The other boys giggle. “If you buy one, I’ll give you one. If you buy 5, I’ll give you 5.” He grins, infinitely pleased with himself.

“If you buy 25, I’ll give you 25. That’s why I’m the best.”

Laughter all around.

Snapshots of Freetown 2: Sani Abacha Street

2010-07-15T16:02:00.005Z

As you reach the end of Kissy Road and pass the clock tower at Eastern Police Station, heading West towards the center of town, Sani Abacha Street slopes down in front of you and then up again, affording a clear view of what is to come. Chaos.

A mass of pedestrians swell and surge around vendors and wheelbarrows and poda-podas and massive trucks, the latter discharging their contents in a stream of speed-walking laborers or inching through crowds spewing toxic fumes. From above, it’s impossible to see even the smallest patch of open pavement. The street is a writhing mass of motion, both human and machine.

You take a deep breath and start your descent into this ocean of people and sounds. Horns blare as vehicles plow through the crowds, scattering pedestrians and, sometimes, vendors themselves – their wares, spread on flattened cardboard or nylon sacks on the ground or piled on makeshift wooden tables, hastily pulled back towards the curb.When two trucks meet, they scrape by one another by mere centimeters, squeezing all foot-bound souls into tiny spaces between the roadside vendors, onto the treacherous sidewalks, or into filthy gutters.

Next in size to the trucks and poda-podas, and often much faster, are dozens of wheelbarrows, omalankes, and other hand-drawn carts. The bare-chested men and boys who drag these, piled high with anything from scrap metal or building materials to cases of beer and soda, are among the hardest-working people in this bustling commercial area. Sweating buckets in the tropical heat, their chests and backs rippling with muscles that gym-heads in the US would kill for, they drag their heavy carts over potholed and unbelievably crowded roads. When they start to pick up momentum, they are loathe to slow down – and hence their urgent shouts join the din, calling out a guttural “hup hup” to anyone in their path, followed by more explicit and angrier commands to those who don’t catch on. Hesitate for a second and these carts, like the trucks and poda-podas, will run you down.

And then, from all directions, come the shouts of hundreds of vendors, pitching their wares at full voice and in an endless carnival-style repetition. Their Krio phrases run together in an often unintelligible stream, this already minimalist language abbreviated further to enable rapid-fire sales pitches. Often, only the prices emerge clearly from the din.

“Buy biscuits 2 for 1-5”.

“You don buy chocolate 1 block.”

“Umbrella 10-10 thousand.”

“Halfback 5 thousand.”

“Grafton 2 block.”

“Kola 1 block.”

“Buy 3 thousand.”

“You don buy?”

“2-2 thousand.”

“1 thousand.”

“5 block.”

And on and on.

The wares are more varied than you could imagine, and you wonder if there is anything you couldn’t find on this street. A mountain of radios to one side. A precarious tower of pots and pans to the other. A tray of chintzy gold jewelry atop a makeshift wooden stool. Familiar breakfast cereals – Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Raisin Bran – are sold in slightly battered boxes, as though they were carried across the ocean in giant container ships. (Which they probably were.) Vast assortments of personal hygiene products also include familiar names – Irish Spring soap, Colgate toothpaste, Head and Shoulders shampoo – alongside Arab brands and cheap Chinese knock-offs. You see a glamorous array of perfume bottles and wonder how the 90-degree heat affects their scents.

Many, if not most, of these stalls are run by women, and behind and among the displays are a smattering of young children: babies set on the ground, watching the crowds with wide eyes; toddlers wandering amongst the passersby and playing near the open gutters; slightly older children, some in school uniforms, helping to mind their younger siblings. If forced to the crowded sidewalk by vehicles or the crush of people on the street, you pick your way carefully with your eyes firmly on the ground, hoping you’ll neither step on these children nor fall through the large gaps in the sidewalk where cement slabs are broken or missing.

One of the most common items for sale is fabric, and you see stack after stack of brightly-colored fabrics: printed cotton, embroidered lace, hand-died gara, metallic shine-shine, textured brillante, sequined chiffon. These lengths of fabric, sold by the yard or by “lapa” (a two-yard length suitable for a sarong-style skirt), are stacked on tables, spread artistically at street level, or rolled and stuck into large plastic bins like the spines of giant multi-colored sea anemone.

Fabric sellers are almost always women, and rarely shout. Fruit and vegetable sellers, also women, are constantly shouting. Okra. Cucumbers. Tomatoes. Onions (“yerbas” in Krio). Avocado (“butter pear”) larger than you’ve ever seen. Bananas. Pawpaw. Mangos in mountainous stacks, the smallest smooth-skinned and fist-sized in uniform green or yellow; the largest a mottled reddish-green too large to hold in one hand. Large plastic tubs packed with oversized bunches of cassava leaves and potato leaves adorn the ground. Similar tubs are filled with gari (ground cassava flour), rice, or caustic soda.

As you draw closer to the end of Sani Abacha street, near the area known as PZ, the street widens slightly. The vendors have more space to move, and a few actual shops – as in brick-and-mortar buildings – blare Sierra Leonean pop music from their open doors.

To your right, a young woman shakes a plastic basket filled with cheap metal silverware, the jangling ringing out above the pandemonium around her. “5-5 block,” she shouts.

Ahead of you, a young man blows on some newfangled and deafening noisemaker meant to imitate the howls of a very unhappy baby. People turn to watch and laugh, ignoring the approaching traffic. An impatient truck driver blares his horn, hardly slowly as he drives the crowds out of the way.

Taxis, absent from Sani Abacha, meet you in force when you reach the PZ intersection, and you are forced again to the sidewalk. Your ears are ringing and sweat drips from your forehead. A few police officers try feebly to direct traffic. One gives up and calls to a passing vendor, a young man carrying women’s blouses on hangers. The officer admires one, a bold pink and yellow floral print, and they begin to haggle.

(Photos courtesy of www.itsayshere.org and Sigma Delta on flickr. Tenki!)

Snapshots of Freetown 1: China House

2010-07-12T14:24:00.001Z

In anticipation of leaving Sierra Leone (for now) at the end of the month, I’ve decided to do a series of “snapshots” of some memorable locales.

Is there someplace in Freetown you think I should include? Or would you like to submit a “snapshot” of your favorite Freetown spot? Let me know! Suggestions and contributions welcome.

And so, in no particular order, here is the first installment.

China House is a timeless, and utterly unique, Freetown institution. A squat, unassuming building, it huddles in the shadow of the main government headquarters, from which it is said to have gotten its name. (The Youyi Building houses a number of ministries and was donated by the Chinese government.)

I don’t know when China House opened, but walking in there always makes me feel like I’ve wandered into another decade – maybe the early 1960s, when the sweet taste of independence was fresh on everyone’s lips, and Freetown’s hottest couples would don their finest attire and shimmy their Africana-swathed behinds to Highlife beats.

Today, China House is a crumbling but still well-loved venue, one of the few places in town where you can hear live music on a weekly basis. (The house band, Africombo or Supercombo or AfriSuperCombo – I can never remember – plays old standards and covers of today’s hits every Friday night.) On a clear night, the band sets up in the open-roofed courtyard, and quickly attracts a crowd of gyrating couples of all shapes, sizes, and ages, some of them seemingly straight from the 1950s or 60s.

During the rainy season, the band relocates to an adjoining enclosed dance floor, with levered glass windows and some very feeble ceiling fans. On a busy night, that dance floor can easily become the steamiest spot in an always sweltering city – the air itself sopping wet, clothes drenched, with hardly enough space between you and the stranger beside you to allow you to move independently.

Last week, I went to China House on a Monday night to bid farewell to a friend leaving for the US. The place was remarkably lively for a Monday, and not just because of our party. It also gets a respectable after-work crowd, with civil servants and other professionals in West African robes or short-sleeved business suits sipping cold Star beers. I ran into the former head of one of Sierra Leone’s tertiary institutions; apparently he was enjoying his semi-retirement.

Skewers of cold roast meet and smoked fish, draped in mosquito netting, were for sale at the bar. The scowling bartender, in a rooster-printed Krio dress and headscarf, studiously ignored her customers but eventually caved and served us a Heineken and Savanna cider. Opening the bottles, she flicked a bottle cap at my face – and pretended it had been an accident. Hmmm.

Drinks in hand, we headed outside to the bustling street, Old Railway Line, to buy some freshly-grilled meat from a roadside vendor. (The ones on the bar had clearly been there all day and were long since cold and congealed.) For 10,000 leones, about $2.50, we got two slabs of “beef” (we hoped!) with onions, pepper, and Maggi flavoring. Another 1,500 leones bought us three Fullah bread loaves from a vendor further down the street.

Back inside, we found the dance floor lively, if not full. My friend’s guests included, along with work colleagues from a development research outfit, a handful of guys from his neighborhood and his favorite Okada drivers. (Okadas are motorbike taxis, and their drivers are, without exception, men in their teens and twenties.)

Later, with a flash of inspiration, someone told the DJ to announce a dance contest: 100,ooo leones ($25) to the winner. The floor went wild, with a dozen young people, mostly men, shaking it up for the prize money. My personal favorite was a lithe young Okada driver with an amazingly snazzy black-and-white-striped cap, but a red-shirted guy (seen in the back of this photo)stole the prize with some impressive shimmying.

As the night wound down, the white people tried their best to keep up on the dance floor, and the DJ played “One More Night” on repeat – a favorite from late 2009 and a tribute to my friend’s departure the next day.

Caine Prize goes to a Sierra Leonean author

2010-07-12T13:31:00.001Z

The 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing was awarded last week to a Sierra Leonean, Olufemi Terry, for his short story Stickfighting Days. If anyone knows where you can buy or read the story, let me know.

Sierra Leone has a number of highly-acclaimed authors. The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, a magical novel by poet and novelist Syl Cheney-Coker, has been named one of the best African books ever written.

I also have to give a special mention to my wonderful friend Namwali Serpell, from Zambia, who was also shortlisted for the Caine Prize. You can read an interview with Namwali here, or – if your internet is faster than mine is here in Freetown – listen to an interview here from the BBC World Service. Namwali’s short story “Muzungu” was featured in Best American Short Stories 2009.

Congratulations to both.

Teddy Bear Taxi

2010-05-24T11:18:00.002Z

With my car disemboweled, I’m back to taking taxis – something I actually quite enjoy, at least for awhile, as it brings me face to face with some of Freetown’s wonderful wackiness. (Read more about the experience of taking public transport in this 2007 post.)

Last Sunday, I got into an unremarkable taxi driven, like many, by a rather tough and taciturn young man. Barely out of his teens, he made no eye contact with his passengers and did not trouble himself with intelligible speech, communicating instead with nearly-imperceptible nods and occasional grunts.

Obviously a hardened Big Man of the World and probably a former combatant, I thought.

And then I saw his gearshift, utterly transformed by a worn stuffed teddy bear which had been pulled down over the gearshift so its head covered the handle and its soft black body surrounded the shaft.

Each time he shifted gears, our hardened driver grabbed hold of this floppy bear, which smiled out amiably through his fingers, to the delight of a six-year-old boy in the front passenger seat.

Amazing.

What might have been -- or -- Of birthdays, cocaine, and counterfactuals

2010-04-27T22:58:00.006Z

Today is Sierra Leone’s 49^th Independence Day, and Freetown has been celebratory for days – from the first-annual Green White and Blue Ball on Saturday night, to the annual lantern paradeyesterday and a launch of free health care for women and children today. Spirits have been high, and the country seems to be standing a little taller in its almost-50-year-old shoes.

But the headline event, the capstone of this birthday celebration, was meant to be a concert tonight by Senegalese-American R&B star Akon. Sadly, that performance – by the biggest artist to visitSierra Leone in decades – has been scuppered by a surprisingly severe early-season rainstorm. And to make it worse, the storm seems to have shorted out Freetown’s electricity supply, and the filling stations are low on diesel.

Therefore, instead of grooving away at the national stadium, I’m stuck at home with a noisy generator and just a few hours before the house goes dark. Nonetheless, in the spirit of my newly-rediscovered optimism and in honor of Salone’s independence day, I think I’ll use this unexpectedly quiet evening to give a little more credit where credit is due.

Specifically, I want to talk about cocaine and counterfactuals.

In 2008, as I wrote about at the time a plane from Venezuela landed at Freetown's Lungi Airport filled with 600kg of cocaine worth $54 million. The plane was seized, its contents held safely and later destroyed, and its pilot and crew – including 9 foreigners from Latin America and the United States – were tracked down, imprisoned, and ultimately convicted, along with dozens of Sierra Leoneans also found to be involved in the trade. Two South Americans were even then extradited to the US to face charges there, and many high-profile and very well-connected Sierra Leoneans – including a brother of the then-Minister of Transport and Aviation and a former manager of the national football team – found themselves in Pademba Road Prison, where many remain today.

At the time, as you may notice from the tone of my blog, I was quick to poke fun at the government’s response. After confiscating the cocaine, they shut down a major Freetown thoroughfare (Pademba Road) for months and placed armed guards throughout the surrounding streets to prevent any daring prison break by the South American drug lords or their collaborators. Watching the somewhat bumbling Sierra Leone Defense Forces manning likely-ammunition-less anti-aircraft guns along residential streets, I was struck by a mix of unease and amusement. Even the extradition seemed overly dramatic: the prisoners were whisked away in great secrecy in the dead of night just after their conviction in the Sierra Leone high court. Even the involvement of my own government didn’t convince me; we all know the Americans can be a bit hysterical from time to time.

“How important could these guys be?” I asked disdainfully at the time. “Come one, would the drug lords really send anyone important to a tiny country in West Africa? Surely these are minor foot-soldiers, or they’re being punished for something, and the drug lords won’t risk any other manpower to come spring them from Pademba Road.”

Since then, as I’ve learned more about new narcotics routes through West Africa and on to Europe, I’ve tempered my criticism. And then I read this New York Times Magazine article, "Africa's Drug Problem", and it really shut me up.

The opening story of that article is eerily familiar to those of us in Sierra Leone. In 2008, a plane from Venezuela landed in a small West African country. As in Sierra Leone, the plane was filled with more than a half-ton of cocaine, and the crew were arrested. Unlike here, however, the cocaine vanished and the crew were later released – both incidents apparently with the help of the army.

Today, Guinea-Bissau is on the shortlist of incredibly fragile states in West Africa destabilized by the cash and criminality of the international narcotics trade. As journalist James Traub says in the NYT article, “Guinea-Bissau and its neighbors offer to South American drug traffickers what the impenetrable terrain of the Hindu Kush offers to Al Qaeda and the Taliban — a place beyond the reach of law.” According to the article, the narcotraffickers have openly purchased Parliamentary seats, Cabinet appointments, and even coastal islands in Guinea-Bissau.

Sierra Leone, in contrast, is launching free health care and attracting international celebrities in droves.

***

It is often difficult to get credit for averting disaster. Stop an epidemic before it really takes off? Deter terrorists before they begin to plan an attack? At best you will be quietly acknowledged. More likely you will be accused of “crying wolf”, and wasting resources or energy on something that turned out to be a non-event.

The thing is, we are not very good at appreciating a counterfactual – that alternative “what might have been” reality that could or would have existed if we had done, or not done, something differently. If the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control predict a major epidemic and then are successful in preventing it – perhaps through expensive investments in prevention and control – many people will use their success against them, pointing to the non-epidemic as evidence that they made a big fuss over nothing.

Similarly, if you take steps to prevent your country from being a narco-state, snarky foreign residents like me may well ridicule you for overreacting.

In reading the New York Times Magazine article, I’m struck that President Ernest Bai Koroma’s government has not gotten enough credit for its actions in 2008. Surely he knew that the South American drug lords and their local counterparts would likely offer millions if not billions of dollars for his (and his government’s) complicity in their trade. Maybe they even made the offer. But he didn’t take them up on it – and instead made a very public, very firm stance against drug trafficking.

The traffickers, looking for the paths of least resistance, most likely then opted for easier routes rather than risk incarceration in Sierra Leone. And certainly that’s a good thing for Salone – if not for the countries on those easier routes.

I certainly don’t pretend to have my finger on the pulse of the West African drugs trade, and I know there are still rumors in town of ill-gotten wealth (“See that guy with the Hummer? Guess where he made his millions…”) and of domestic cocaine use (another tragic consequence of the trade) here in Freetown.

But there’s no doubt that Sierra Leone has taken a very different path in the last few years than has Guinea-Bissau, and it seems to me that Bissau’s story could serve as an important reminder to Sierra Leoneans of what might have been – and perhaps a reason to give a little more credit where credit is due.

Perhaps, due to the government’s response in 2008, Sierra Leone avoided a much darker alternate reality, in which this long-suffering country reverted to instability, coups, and a general breakdown of the rule of law. Instead, Sierra Leone is celebrating a peaceful (if damp) 49^thbirthday, and nearly 10 years of post-war peace and stability.

In 2008, two Venezuelan planes landed in two West African countries. In one, the army stole the cocaine and freed the dealers. In the other, the government confiscated and destroyed the cocaine and convicted the dealers – and their powerful local counterparts.

And that, as they say, made all the difference.

Happy Birthday Mama Salone. Well done.

Glass half full

2010-04-12T20:41:00.002Z

I think I used to be more of an optimist than I am now. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded what that felt like.

Because I never have time to blog anymore (that should change soon -- watch this space!) I'll instead point you elsewhere, to a recent post by Otolo at Visit Sierra Leone on So how is Sierra Leone these days?

This is a post that I wish I had written. Though it's easy to be weighed down by pessimism in a country where so many basic things don't function well and so many people are far too poor, it's also important to recognize progress and give credit where credit is due.

I think it's fair to argue, as Otolo does, that in the first quarter of 2010 -- nearly a decade after the end of the civil war and a year away from the 50th anniversary of Sierra Leone's independence -- that Sierra Leone's glass may in fact be half full.

How's that for optimism?

The Girls Them Sugar

2009-12-19T10:34:00.003Z

Thank You Sister

Den Dae Pan Check

2009-11-07T20:36:00.001Z

Waiting at a joint military-police checkpoint at Bottom Mango on a rainy October night – consequence of a new (and apparently successful) government of Sierra Leone initiative to stamp out a spike in armed robberies.

When good news isn’t

2009-09-23T10:47:00.002Z

On my flight back to Freetown on Tuesday night, I sat next to a group of drunk rough-and-tumble middle-aged guys, many of them Scottish. A friend and I sized them up and figured they must be miners. Or mercenaries, but there aren’t as many of those running around Freetown these days.

In fact, as we discovered later in the flight when a particularly drunk and offensive member of the group tried to chat us up – “You actually live in this godforsaken country?” he slurred, throwing back yet another gin and lemonade – they were members of an oil drilling team working for a large petroleum company. According to him, they’d just struck oil off the coast of Sierra Leone.

After another offshore find last year in Ghana, this wasn’t particularly surprising, but I still put even odds on the fact that he was full of it. But sure enough, Wednesday morning brought headlines on the BBC, Financial Times, and others, that the US Anadarko Petroleum Corporation and its partners had found oil off the coast of Sierra Leone.

This should be good news for Sierra Leone, I suppose. A new and lucrative industry to create jobs, generate tax revenue, and bring foreign currency into the country is surely welcome. Images of tiny Gulf states made impossibly rich by oil revenue, or a childish cartoon with an oil geyser bursting from a backyard, come to mind. “We’re rich, Ma, we’re rich!”

Sadly, among the world’s poorest countries, the presence of valuable natural resources has tended to lead not to the reduction of poverty, but to the creation of rent-seeking, kleptocratic elites growing richer while the vast majority of the population continues to live in gripping poverty. Take the Niger River Delta in Nigeria, where abundant oil resources have failed to benefit the local population and instead have fuelled terrorism and popular unrest, while causing tremendous damage to the natural environment. Or the many poor economies in which, as Paul Collier argues in his book the Bottom Billion, “resource rents … make democracy malfunction.”

So I want to celebrate Sierra Leone’s latest opportunity for economic growth, but I worry that oil – like diamonds in the 1990s – could prove more of a curse than a blessing. Two members of the Visit Sierra Leone online forum express these duelling reactions: saint_dracula says “Genuinely horrifying, depressing news...Yet another curse... Don't expect much,” while SaloneBoy celebrates, in Krio “Betteh don kam oh, betteh don kam!!”

I hope you're right, SaloneBoy. I hope good things have come.

Making the Video

2009-08-26T22:06:00.004Z

I love this BBC audio slideshow by Glenna Gordon. It shows all the sass and energy of the Sierra Leone pop music scene. It also demonstrates why, after three years in Sierra Leone, I sometimes feel compelled to defy my age and buy teeny-tiny clothes made of shiny synthetic fabrics from stores like Forever 21.

I also love Glenna's blog, the Scarlett Lion. Her photos are nothing short of breathtaking, and her commentary is incisive and true. She's based in Monrovia but has written about Sierra Leone -- apparently I just missed meeting her on a recent visit, when I opted not to attend a mass disaster drill by the country's emergency services. (But that's a story for another day.)

Here is one of my favorite photos from Glenna's recent trip to Freetown. If it were my photo, I would title it: In Which A Man Has An Idea.

Enforcement

2009-06-24T11:18:00.001Z

A policeman in a riot helmet, carrying a wooden bat. With him, a man in a DayGlo vest talking on his cell phone, and another man, in a white T-shirt, walking a few paces behind.

Emblazoned across the back of the T-shirt: “Attitudinal and Behavioral Change Secretariat Enforcement Squad.” On closer inspection, Mr. DayGlo Vest had the same shirt. I suddenly had visions of Orwell.

The men walked unhurried along Jomo Kenyatta Road . Thanks to the traffic, we kept pace – I’d drive slowly ahead of them for a moment, then wait for them to catch up. As we performed this slow dance , I stared at them surreptitiously, wondering what they were up to.

A few meters on, I got my answer. A larger group of vested and T-shirted Enforcement Squad members, most armed with crude tools, clustered by the roadside. One reached up and began to tear off the locked shutter from a small makeshift kiosk, painted in the neon colors of Zain. The owner probably sold cell phone credit and simple provisions – candles, soft drinks, cigarettes – for a meager living. Until now.

When President Koroma introduced the concept of Attitudinal Change, everyone had a different idea of what he meant – and without fail, it involved a change in someone else’s attitude rather than your own. To the poor, it meant that wealthy elites should stop pursuing their own interests to the detriment of the masses. To the rich, it meant the poor should stop demanding handouts. To commercial drivers, it meant the police should stop harassing them. To all other drivers, it meant the commercial drivers should start driving more responsibly. To more than one of my friends, it meant that the staff of restaurants, bars, shops, banks, and offices of all sort should start serving customers with a smile, rather than treating them like an unwelcome disruption.

Attitudinal Change became a buzz word for everything – and, as far as I could tell, it struggled to move from the realm of rhetoric to the arena of actual change.

But now it seems the Freetown City Council had its own definition, and is ready to put it into action. Attitudinal Change Enforcement means clearing the sidewalks of small-scale vendors who are trying to make a living a few thousand leones at a time. Never mind that the City Council hasn’t yet managed to build a single new market to provide an alternative space for the displaced sellers.

At least the Enforcers have riot helmets and batons. We wouldn’t want any trouble.

Glimpses of Paradise – and Paradox

2009-06-15T16:30:00.002Z

I love this collection of photos by filmmaker and photographer Chuck Moss. They capture some of the heartbreaking contradictions of Sierra Leone: beauty and devastation, joy and melancholy, vibrant motion and frustrating stagnation.

From afar, great beauty…

… and also beauty up close…

…but then a touch of devastation: what a million new inhabitants do to a mountainous, coastal city.

A few shots of what it takes to make a living…

… and a few more on how to live it up with style.

A sense of the color of commerce…

… of the looks of joy….

… and then, in the quieter moments, of a touch of sadness.

For more of Chuck’s stunning photos, see the full collection here.

Progress?

2009-05-29T13:21:00.001Z

For better or worse, Freetown is now developing an upper crust scene typical of what you find in most African capital cities.

This occurred to me last night, as I sipped passable white wine and ate an artfully arranged plate of barracuda and mashed potato on the balcony of the Country Lodge, while a live jazz band played in the background. The tinkle of glasses and silverware mixed with the muted strains of Ella Fitzgerald, heat lightening brightened the sky over the coastal city far below, and a well-dressed crowd of the well-to-do – European, Lebanese, and African alike – chatted away.

This is not Freetown, I thought. This is Abidjan before the war. Or Dakar. Or Durban, for that matter.

But it is Freetown. It is now. It is again, because certainly Freetown had these kinds of places before the war.

Maybe tonight I’ll flash back to 2006 and seek out one of my old haunts, like PB’s restaurant on the side of Spur Road, separated from the traffic by a woven thatch screen. Burgers and pumping hip-hop. Pools of florescent light and vast stretches of darkness. The occasional smell of garbage or sewage. Raw and real.

Or maybe not. The jazz band is playing again tonight, at the Aqua Club, a members-only boating and sports club. Sunset cocktails by the sea.

Hierarchy of Professions

2009-05-27T14:09:00.001Z

A police officer smiled through my passenger-side window as I crawled through traffic at the Eastern Police clock tower yesterday.

“Don’t you want to hire me to be your driver?” he said. He wasn’t kidding.

I looked at his name tag.

Sergeant.

Stories I Like to Tell Part II – My Friendly Airport Security Lady

2009-05-14T20:35:00.001Z

This is the second installment of Stories I Like to Tell About Sierra Leone. (Also check out the first one, about my friendly corrupt policemen.) If you are a blood relative, close friend, or have bought me a drink anytime over the last year, you’ve probably heard this story already. Sorry.

If, however, you are one of the 3 people who read this blog despite having no personal obligation to do so, read on!

To preface the story, I must describe a bit about Lungi Airport, Sierra Leone’s national airport and gateway for the small number of tourists the country has begun to attract, thanks to – as Tony Blair wrote after a recent visit – its “unspoilt beaches, beautiful tropical islands, world-class fishing and diving, and a rich cultural and historical legacy.”

Infamous for the astonishingly bad urban planning which located it across a large body of water from the capital city, Lungi is also notable for being the approximate size of a postage stamp. One runway, bordered by broken-down planes and a debris-strewn grassy plain, leads to an unimpressive two-story building with gap-toothed yellow-and-black letters spelling out Freetown International Airport. Inside are perhaps 5 main areas – lobby, departures immigration, security and departure lounge, arrivals immigration, and baggage claim. All together, the airport’s square footage is probably about the same as two average middle class American homes. And that limited space is always a swirl of color and mild chaos, as I described in a 2006 post shortly after I first arrived in Sierra Leone.

Lungi has a few other characteristics worth noting.

The duty-free shop (the size of a NYC newsstand) sells a remarkably good selection of single malt whiskey at remarkably good prices. Or so I’m told.

The only other shop (the size of a NYC phone booth) sells candy bars and small canisters of Pringles for criminally high prices. This I know from experience, from trying to buy last-minute provisions for an empty stomach before a long flight.

An historical “landmark,” of sorts, is the porter who has been working at Lungi Airport since before Sierra Leone’s independence in 1961. He remembers military dictatorships, fledgling democratic regimes, and a war. He remembers colonial governors, tourists, diamond miners, journalists, peacekeepers, development workers – an endless parade of light-skinned visitors. He now stands about 4’11’’ – my grandfather’s height – and wears his brown uniform pants pulled up to that old man waistline, just below the armpits. He has a cataract in one eye, an impish smile, and a questionable command of the English language. He is far, far too old to tote bags.

“How old are you?” I ask him one day in Krio. He looks perplexed, embarrassed, and I immediately regret the question. He probably has no idea. I smile kindly in apology, and he tells me he put in his request for retirement this year. “They said no,” he said. “I have to keep working for a bit longer.” I was dumbfounded.

This porter is perhaps my new favorite Lungi story to tell. But before he came into my life, I used to wax lyrical about the thoroughness and professionalism of Sierra Leone’s airport security workers.

Now, security at Lungi is profoundly questionable at the best of times. There is no metal detector, no x-ray scanner, no narcotics-trained bloodhounds. Security consists of a cursory search (repeated three times but never involving more than a superficial rifling) of all luggage, and a physical pat-down to check for weapons or contraband.

First problem: it would be profoundly difficult for this process to uncover any but the most blatantly obvious breaches of law or security. When someone opens my backpack zipper, peers inside, and then zips it closed again, they’re apt to miss anything smaller than an AK-47. As proof, I can tell you that I have on several occasions brought 1.5-liter bottles of water through security in my carry-on backpack without detection. (Purely accidentally, of course – I have the utmost respect for the “put your 3-oz facial moisturizer in a plastic baggie and we’re all safe” rule, and would never try to smuggle extra drinking water on board.) In case you’re not clear, a 1.5-liter bottle of water is quite large. Almost the size of a big jug of Coke. If they can’t find that, how exactly will they find hidden narcotics or diamonds?

Second problem: it is tremendously easy to bypass this procedure entirely. You don’t have to be much of a VIP or pull too many strings to find someone to walk you straight out onto the tarmac and on board the plane. If my businessmen friends can do this with one simple phone call because they’re late and want to catch their flight, a cocaine baron could clearly arrange something of the sort to facilitate his multi-million dollar cargo. And anyway, the grounds of the airport are totally open to the surrounding community, so pretty much anyone can wander in and out as he pleases.

But all these problems pale in comparison to what happens when the security officers themselves stop taking their job very seriously – or at all seriously.

Last year, I was accompanying my friend Amie’s 14-year-old daughter through the airport security. I was flying to London and she was heading to Philadelphia for the school holidays.

We walked through the non-functional metal detector and placed our bags on the counter. The one female security guard – always responsible for female searches – is a generally jovial woman, and we smiled and chatted with her as she did her cursory bag check. She teased my companion about having to wear an “unaccompanied minor” tag around her neck.

We then walked over to the pat down area, where the guard is meant to make up for the lack of a metal detector by doing a thorough pat-down.

Instead, the guard looked both of us up and down, in our slim jeans and fitted tank tops, and laughed.

“I can tell you’re not hiding anything,” she said. “I don’t need to search you.”

“No?” I asked.

“No.” She stepped towards me, arms outstretched. “I’ll just give you a hug instead.”

And she did. A big bear hug. And then one to my young companion. And then she sent us on our way.

Sierra Leone, On the Move

2009-04-16T11:57:00.005Z

.

.

It does feel like this sometimes.

(Thanks to Ajay Patel for the photo)

Groundnuts and Running Companions

2009-04-06T23:30:00.000Z

I went for a run today on Lumley Beach, after work.

The sun was enormous and low in the sky, a shade of orange I would have sworn did not exist in nature, reminiscent of 1980s short-shorts and plastic bangles. The tide was high, forcing me to dodge the long arms of occasionally enthusiastic waves and venture reluctantly into softer sand.

I ran from Family Kingdom on the northern end of the beach, past the rainbow umbrellas and temporary tables of the new makeshift beach bar replacements; past the florescent orange Africell signs and Sierra Leonean national flags marking the site of a recent beach volleyball tournament; past the rubble of the old Bunker Bar, untouched since its demolition months ago. I turned back just short of the southern end, perhaps two and a half miles down the three mile stretch, at a billboard advertising a new national insurance scheme.

On my way back, the sun now hidden behind the wide band of haze that rings the horizon this time of year, I passed two little girls. Zainab and Mumuna, I later learned. 8 and 13 years old.

Zainab wore a pair of knee-length shorts and a black t-shirt. Mumuna wore a long flowered skirt and a tank top. Both walked barefoot and carried their halfbacks (flip-flops) in their hands. And both held, upon their heads, a wide tin platter topped with a bundle of fabric the size of a soccer ball. Within, I knew, were parched groundnuts – roasted peanuts – warmed by the sun.

The platters were much broader than their slender shoulders, and besides the bundle of groundnuts, each held a series of accessories – Zainab a pink plastic bowl tucked precariously into the side – including the halved tin cans they used to price sales. The largest tin, roughly the bottom third of a Campbell’s soup can, represented Le1,000 worth of groundnuts, about 30 US cents.

I passed the girls with a small smile and little thought. And then, a few minutes later, I heard the patter of small feet and intermittent giggles behind me. I turned and the girls were running just a few paces behind me, hands still holding halfbacks, platters barely moving at all. I marveled at their poise – models with a stack of encyclopedias on their heads had nothing on these two – and called out in Krio. “You want to run with me?” I asked. “Come, let’s go.”

I thought they would give up soon – you often get running companions on Lumley, but they usually bore quickly – but they followed me most of the way back. Past the orange volleyball court, past the beach bars, past several soccer games, past a pack of malnourished dogs and a smattering of young couples, holding hands and pointing at us with obvious amusement.

At that point I started to realize how it must look. Me, in proper sneakers and running attire, being matched stride for stride by two half-pint girls with wares on their heads. They rarely even reached a hand up to steady their loads, except once when Zainab dropped a pen she’d salvaged from the beach and in stopping to pick it up, upset her pink bowl. And they chatted amiably, if shyly, with me while we ran, turning their heads gingerly to not upset the trays balanced on top, but otherwise running confidently, coltish legs flying.

Eventually they started to tire, and though they egged each other on for a bit longer, they finally fell behind with another round of giggles and a wave. I finished my run alone, shamed enough by their impressive showing to sprint the last few hundred yards.

Next time I’ll try it with a tray on my head.

A coup? Mutiny? Civil war?

2009-03-26T12:11:00.004Z

This Sierra Leone headline caught my eye in my Google News alert today:

Sierra Leone: Murray Town, Police Surrender to RSLAF

RSLAF are the Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces, so you can imagine my surprise.

“Jeez,” I thought. “This is big news.”

And then I read on.

Freetown — The Murray Town and Sierra Leone Police cricket teams were the latest to be subdued by the highflying Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Force (RSLAF) as the 'soja boys' defeated both teams in the ongoing 20/20 cricket league.

Ah. Cricket. Of course.

Salma Hayek and Sierra Leone

2009-02-13T11:22:00.006Z

So it seems that Salma Hayek’s breast is all it takes to get pediatric health in Sierra Leone on the public’s radar.

We should have thought of that a long time ago.

In this ABC News piece, Salma first visits the Ola During Children’s Hospital, Sierra Leone’s only government children’s hospital, where I work with the Welbodi Partnership to help improve the standard of care provided to sick children. There she watches a week-old baby die a terribly painful (and utterly preventable) death from tetanus.

Tragically, this is not unusual. One in six children in Sierra Leone die in infancy. One in four die before their fifth birthday.

Salma then goes upcountry, to the provincial capital (misleadingly called “a remote corner of the country” by the ABC folks) of Makeni. Once there, she decides to breastfeed a tiny baby whose mother did not have milk to give.

This, of course, is what set the news media and blogosphere abuzz. Famous Hollywood actress gives breast to poor African child. History upended as light-skinned wet nurse feeds dark-skinned child. Bodily fluids shared on camera.

Breastfeeding is incredibly important to the health of young children, particularly in places like Sierra Leone, and is one of the best ways to ensure proper nutrition and protect against illness. And if Salma Hayek’s breast helps raise awareness of the importance of breastfeeding, so be it. (Though I can’t help but point out that Sierra Leoneans are much less abuzz about this than the rest of the world. The vast majority will never see this footage or the headlines that have accompanied it, and in any case have no idea who Salma Hayek is. At the hospital, we turned up the day after this film crew and were told only that some white people had visited the day before; none of the staff knew how famous she was.)

But the film’s focus on breastfeeding and on other preventive measures – specifically a vaccine to prevent tetanus – ignores another reality, one evident in the first few minutes of the piece when Salma watches that tiny baby die in what should be Sierra Leone’s premier pediatric care facility.

The Ola During Children’s Hospital should be in a position to provide accessible, high-quality care to sick children. Parents should come to the hospital early, as soon as their children get sick. Drugs and supplies – at least for the most common illnesses – should be available and free of charge. Nurses and doctors should be properly motivated and trained, and should have the medical tools and enabling environment they need to provide care.

In reality, however, the dedicated staff of the children’s hospital struggle to provide even a basic standard of care. The hospital has no x-ray, rudimentary laboratory facilities, and no back-up power supply. Doctors and nurses are forced to charge impoverished and severely ill patients fees for consultations, laboratory tests, and drugs and supplies in order both to provide the hospital with revenue to meet its running costs, and to supplement their own meager salaries. (A trained and experienced nurse makes less than $50 per month, not nearly enough to feed a family).

These fees mean that many parents wait far too long before they seek medical care for their children, and that too often they cannot afford urgently-needed medical interventions – medicine to treat malaria or pneumonia, a blood transfusion for a severely anemic child, fluids to treat dehydration in a baby with diarrhea. These delays cost the lives of hundreds if not thousands of children each year.

Prevention of childhood illness is absolutely essential, and UNICEF is right to invest in vaccines and the promotion of exclusive breastfeeding.

But even with the best prevention, many children will still get sick. If there is not a pediatric health system capable of providing effective, low-cost treatment for the most common illnesses, the country will continue to lose far too many young lives.

The Welbodi Partnership supports pediatric health care in Sierra Leone by partnering with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation and the Ola During Children’s Hospital. To learn more and to find out how you can help, please visit our website.

Party favors

2009-02-01T17:59:00.002Z

I had forgotten this story, but was cleaning my room today and found a little money-sized manila envelope, and I remembered.

Back in September, I was at a party thrown by some Sierra Leonean friends. It was a professional crowd, lots of IT specialists and bankers, and they liked to party. In typical Salone style, the drinks were plentiful, the food – meat on a stick, chicken wings, fish on a napkin – spicy, the music loud, and the dance floor filled to bursting.

At one point, I escaped to the balcony to rest my sore feet and cool down. As I sat chatting with friends, admiring the grinding bodies inside, another guest came around handing out little bits of paper. I accepted mine and turned it over. A party invitation? A complementary ticket to a new hot club? A flier for an upcoming concert?

No. It was an envelope for a church offering.

“St. Patrick’s Church, Kissy,” it read. “Friends of St. Patrick’s 10th Annual Thanksgiving Service, on Sunday 21st September 2008 at 9:30 a.m.” – just a few hours hence.

I looked at the man in mild disbelief. He misunderstood my questioning look. “If you can’t make the service but would like to make an offering,” he said, “you can just put it in the envelope and give it to me now.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said. He smiled and moved on.

Flip Flops and Foreign Affairs

2009-01-29T13:46:00.002Z

On Tuesday I tried to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to drop off a document.

At the entrance, a handful of police and security guards stopped me, demanding to know where I was going and why.

“To the fifth floor,” I said. “Consular section. To drop off a letter.”

A particularly cocky officer leered at me self-righteously and pointed to my feet. “You can’t go inside in slippers. We only allow people in decent clothing.”

Now, before I continue, let me clarify a few things.

First, I was not wearing slippers, nor shorts and a tank top, nor beach attire of any sort. I was wearing a perfectly professional dress, which covered both my knees and shoulders (neither particularly mandatory in Freetown), and matching jewelry. I carried a briefcase.

I was also wearing flip-flops – a simple black pair – because I’d left my heels behind at the office in order to brave the uneven, often muddy, and always treacherous Freetown streets. I’ve learned the hard way that running errands in nice shoes is a danger to both the shoes and myself.

But calling my clothes not “decent” was a bit unfair.

Second, I am very sympathetic with the desire for professional attire in professional places of work. It is a particular pet peeve of mine that some visiting expatriates feel they can attend meetings in what amounts to safari attire. One of my most embarrassing days in Sierra Leone was when I met with both the Chief Justice of the Sierra Leone Supreme Court and the Inspector General of Police with two colleagues from Washington wearing jeans and T-shirts. (The CJ was in a suit, and the IG in dress uniform. I was in a skirt and blouse and heels.) I mean, would they have met with the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court or the head of the FBI without putting on a suit and tie?

I therefore would have no problem with a Ministry issuing a code of conduct for such visitors, explaining the expectations for attire befitting the office of the Sierra Leoneans involved. And for the record, if I had been meeting the Minister of Foreign Affairs (or anyone else in the Ministry, for that matter) I would have worn my “decent” shoes.

This is somewhat different, however, from barring my entry to the building itself on the basis of a harmless pair of flip flops – a point which I made to the Fashion Police and to a senior official who happened by and explained that the police were merely enforcing a new Ministry policy.

“This is a government ministry, is it not?” I asked the official.

“Yes,” he said.

“So are you trying to exclude poor people from accessing their own government offices?” I asked, totally hypothetically as I am far from poor by Freetown standards.

“No, of course not,” he said, now looking around as I began to raise my voice. In my defense, I was hungry and hot and cranky after a morning of annoying errands.

“But you are excluding people who don’t have fancy shoes?” I insisted.

“Yes,” he said.

“So poor people without nice shoes can’t come visit their own government?” I asked, now enjoying my metaphorical high horse.

“Everyone is welcome,” he said. “They just have to wear decent attire.”

Hmmm.

In the end, they let me pass. As usual, my white skin overrules most rules – unfairly, of course, but then I really did need to deliver that document.

December is…

2009-01-05T20:22:00.002Z

… four straight weeks of parties. And counting.

… lying in bed on a Monday evening (or Tuesday morning, or Sunday afternoon) listening to booming club music. The speakers must be right below my window.

... empty hospitals. No money to pay for medicine. No time to take the kids to the doctor.

… outings. The normally-tranquil peninsula beaches are taken over by parades of cars and taxis and poda-podas, hordes of people, free-flowing alcohol and freely-smoked ganja, and giant stacks of speakers blaring music. And waterside reveling galore.

… weddings. Processions of cars bedecked in pastel ribbons and flowers, with horns blaring and emergency lights flashing, stampeding their entitled way through jam-packed streets. A videographer perched precariously on the windowsill of the first car, facing backward to film the parade in all its glory. Along Lumley beach, one… two… three wedding parties taking photos: bridesmaids in dazzling colors, small children in chiffon dresses and tuxedos, groomsmen goofing around, everyone grinning.

… JCs. Sierra Leoneans living abroad (the diaspora) who come back for the holidays. Known somewhat disparagingly as “Just Comes”, this exotic breed can be identified by their flashy plumage (spanking-new designer clothes and lots of bling), strange accents (Krio infused with a Texas twang is perhaps my favorite), sense of entitlement (especially on the road – apparently if your car still has its shipping label from the port, you’re allowed to blast past everyone else) , enthusiastic partying (bottle of Baileys under one arm, bottle of wine in the other hand), and frequent displays of frustration and disapproval (‘What has this country come to!?’).

… amazing Christmas decorations. My local (Lebanese-owned) grocery store had: a life-sized dancing (mechanical) Santa Claus; a 10-foot-tall inflatable snowman; a sparkly silver reindeer with tinsel for fur and a red light bulb for a nose; spray-painted fake snow spelling out holiday greetings on the windows; strings of colored lights covering the roof and awning; and, on Christmas day, two unhappy cashiers with sparkly two-foot-tall Christmas trees – one silver, the other gold – on their heads.

… “Christmases.” Small gifts of money owed to staff, colleagues, friends, neighbors, strangers – basically anyone whose path crosses yours anytime in December has the right to request a “Christmas”. Many stores, restaurants, and office buildings put out brightly-wrapped boxes for the staff, with a tiny slot at the top and a holiday greeting scrawled on the side. A friend was badgered by the security guards at the main government ministry building until she dropped a few thousand leones in their Christmas box, at which point they pulled out a second box. “And for this one?”

… Christmas Eve at the national stadium. Kiosks set up around the perimeter, with thatched roofs and bamboo walls. Some sell cold beer, soft drinks, fried chicken, roast meat, fish balls, and popcorn. Others play music or movies. One, hidden behind a thatched doorway, is showing porn. Several are photo booths, with assorted backgrounds to choose from: flashy plastic flowers, a British flag, Arsenal and Manchester United team paraphernalia, a fake Christmas tree. I posed on a miniature armchair with a poster of the Chinese countryside behind me. Then we went in to watch the concert: hip-hop and pop stars, celebrating the birth of the baby Jesus with gritty lyrics and grinding hips. As we staggered out around 4 a.m., leaving thousands of our fellow concert-goers going wild in the stands – dancing, shouting, and occasionally throwing fireworks – a drunk policeman yelled at us for leaving before the main act. We had to give him our leftover beer to shut him up.

… Christmas Day with the family-less strays and castaways, eating roast duck, fish casserole, and a dazzling array of delectable desserts, including a Christmas pudding imported from London. ‘Yankee Swap’-ing gifts under the palm-frond Christmas tree.

… Boxing Day on an outing to John Obey beach. Childhood friends, now with children of their own, playing childhood games. A potluck picnic lunch. Cold beer. Speakers and a deejay. A sassy game of musical chairs. Sun and sand and good cheer.

... New Years Eve Salone-style: first church until midnight, then promenades in the street, then parties until dawn. Ringing in the New Year itself on a street in town, lined with vendors selling snacks and drinks, pop music blaring into the night.

… New Years Day, waking up at 10 after just 3 hours of sleep, exhausted and hung over, to the sounds of club music from a house down the street. The party continues, but I just can't keep up. Salone man dem sabi enjoy!

Introducing Ryann Sesay

2008-12-22T15:54:00.005Z

I have a namesake.

Little Ryann Sesay was born just 6 days ago, to my cleaner, Susan.

It's less of an honor than you might imagine to have a baby named after you. It certainly doesn't mean I'm beloved or revered. In fact, Susan was quite clear that the motivations were partly financial. "If it's a girl, I'm going to name her Ryann," she told me when I learned she was pregnant. "Then you have to throw the party."

The party is for a naming ceremony, usually held about a week after birth. (Ryann's isn't yet planned, in part because I didn't realize I'm supposed to choose the date. Oops.) Other obligations for supporting one's namesake can range from occasional birthday gifts to the payment of school fees. One Lebanese businessman I know is now paying tuition at the University of Sierra Leone for his namesake, Mohamed -- not a blood relation.

I am happy to play this role. (Well, maybe not the college tuition...) I like Susan, and have known her for 2 years now. And it's nice to feel part of a Salone family, even if only tangentially.

The weird thing for me is to call another person "Ryann". I'm the only Ryann I've ever known!

But deep down I'm pretty chuffed about the whole thing. I mean, isn't she beautiful? As you can see, my housemate Tom was smitten. And maybe jealous -- the baby would have been Tom if she'd been a he.

Economist article on Sierra Leone

2008-12-13T18:47:00.001Z

Not the most upbeat article, but nonetheless.

A Freetown welcome

2008-12-08T09:18:00.003Z

It's nice to be back in hot, sweaty Freetown after a few weeks in the wintry US Northeast. When I'm away, however, I sometimes forget some of the details of Freetown life -- both the bursts of color and the everyday hassle.

Here are a few such moments from my first week back:

My elder guard, John, when I first arrive home, gesturing enthusiastically with his arms to suggest a stout, hefty body. "Yes, I know John," I say in Krio. "I've gotten fat." John grins wildly. "Yes!," he replies. "Such a body! You must have enjoyed your trip home!!"

A citywide fuel shortage because the price (negotiated between the government and the fuel companies) just dropped to $4.17. Long lines at filling stations, pumps shut down by mid-day, my car running on fumes until it finally refused to budge from a spot outside my office. Finding someone to find me a 5-gallon drum of petrol, then trying (in the dark) to pour said drum of petrol into my gas tank without wasting half of it on the ground and all over my legs and feet. Failing. Leaving my car behind for another night and heading home smelling of petrol.

At one of the most successful companies in Freetown, the CEO's personal assistant: wearing an unremarkable black skirt suit, and as her dress shirt underneath, a Hooters t-shirt.

Being stood up for not one, not two, but four separate business meetings in the space of a few days. Feeble apologies and blaming of "traffic", Freetown's catch-all villain for the incurably tardy and absent-minded.

A surf board and a sunny Sunday.

The sound of prayers for Eid-al Adha. Goats tied up for sacrifice outside every home that can afford them. Feasts divided in thirds: one third for family, one third for neighbors and friends, and one third for the poor.

Air Fresheners for Obama

2008-10-27T00:50:00.003Z

I am sitting in traffic near St. John roundabout on Saturday, after a trip to the tailor and for lunch at Diaspora Cafe.

A gaggle of young men cluster around the car, trying to sell us the usual street-corner goodies: cheese balls, seat covers, bootleg CDs. I am a bit grumpy and my friend Marisa is on the phone, so we ignore them and wait for the traffic to move.

Then, from outside my window, I hear: “Obama air freshener.” This (needless to say) catches my attention.

I turn to see a teenager with an aren’t-I-clever smirk holding a plastic-wrapped air freshener in patriotic Red, White, and Blue. It looks like it belongs on a Chevy truck deep in Red State America.

“That’s not an Obama air freshener,” I say to him in Krio.

“Yes it is,” he replies.

“No it’s not,” I say. “Where do you see Obama?”

“His face is on the back,” he says without hesitation, handing it to me.

I turn it over. “No it’s not,” I reply. The back was simply more stars and stripes. It occurs to me that he had no way of knowing I am American, or an Obama supporter.

“Oh, but it says Obama here on the package,” he argues, pointing to the instructions (listed in at least 8 languages, starting with Chinese).

“No,” I say, now a bit peeved. “It does not.”

He pauses, not at all deterred and still smiling.

“Obama is American,” he says at last. “American is Obama.”

Ah. The logic is hard to combat. Besides, I like Obama, and love the idea that in this corner of Africa, America=Obama. (We could do worse than that particular association.) And that a man once criticized back home for not wearing an American flag lapel pin is somehow synonymous here with a pine-scented bit of cardboard in Red, White, and Blue.

I give the guy a smile for his effort, but resist his salesmanship.

“You’re not going to buy one?” he says, genuinely surprised.

“No.”

“Then you don’t support Obama. If you did, you would buy my air freshener.”

An elegy for the beach bars

2008-10-09T17:09:00.003Z

My favorite restaurant was just bulldozed to the ground, along with every other sand-in-your-toes, open-air beach bar on Lumley Beach in Freetown.

Okay, some of them were distinctly dilapidated and ramshackle structures. And some blasted music at ear-splitting decibels, eliminating any possibility of a peaceful walk on the beach. And I’m sure many of them lacked legal permits.

But what they had – in spades! – was character. From barebones Harris at the Aberdeen end, where some of Salone’s top pop stars smoked ganja in the gazebo; to skeezy Sea View, where prostitutes mingled with old white men; to De Village, where on Sundays you could buy a plate of delicious peppery goat meat with onions and white bread; there was a beach bar for every style and every mood. As edgy and laid back and no-frills as Salone itself – most of the bars sold only soft drinks or beer, and frequently ran out of either or both – they were a cornerstone of Freetown’s leisure scene for expats and locals alike. I can’t imagine what all the diaspora Sierra Leoneans (“JCs”, for Just Comes) will say when they come back for Christmas!

But the biggest loss for me is lovely, quiet, friendly Ramada’s, which served the best meal (by a long shot) in Freetown. Plastic tables on the sand, under the stars, and with the soft rush of waves in the background. A few soft lights scattered around, but mostly left to the moonlight. Two options on the menu: fish and chips, or chicken and chips, and both prepared better than any place else in town. The barracuda was always perfectly cooked, moist and delicious, and topped with a delicious peppery sauce. The chips were crispy and hot. The meal always took a long time to prepare – we’d joke they were out catching the fish – but you didn’t mind with such a gorgeous setting.

For two years, Ramada’s has been my go-to spot – for visitors on their first, or last, night in Freetown; for special meals with friends; for a romantic date. I feel like someone I loved has died, and I didn’t have time to say goodbye.

I hope the Ministry of Tourism has a good reason for bulldozing the bars, and it’s not just so they can give permits to their friends and families. I hope that from the piles of rubble will rise wonderful new options, part of a fresh tourist-friendly post-war Salone. I hope there will again be somewhere to kick off your shoes, curl your toes in the sand, and dig into a delicious plate of goat meat or barracuda, or tip back a crisp cold beer.

I hope so, but I’m doubtful. And for now, I’m in mourning.

Read more here.

Reviving Dora

2008-09-24T15:30:00.004Z

I had the most amazing experience this week.

On Friday, I donated blood at the children’s hospital, something I’ve been meaning to do for ages. There is a blood bank at children’s, shared with the neighboring maternity hospital, but blood is in chronic shortage – in part because people are reluctant to donate and in part due to difficulties with storage. As a result, patients needing blood are required to replace the blood they use before they’ll be given any from the bank.

What this means in practice is that a severely ill child will lie in a hospital bed – sometimes for hours – while family members run around trying to find someone willing to donate. (A similar scene unfolds in cases of trauma, or when a mother starts hemorrhaging after giving birth, and often to similarly tragic ends.) This process is complicated by local beliefs that only men should donate blood. In addition, families must buy the blood bags from a pharmacy across the street – the hospital itself is out of stock – which for many means trying to beg or borrow the money to do so.

Sometimes the family manages all this in time to save the child.

Sometimes they don’t.

So on Friday, I found myself lying on a worn leather examination table in a dark, cluttered room marked “Bleeding Room”, a needle in my arm drawing my A-positive blood for a little girl named Dora. (And yes, the needle was straight from a sealed package and the technician was wearing gloves.)

Dora’s mom waited outside the room. Dora, an adorable toddler, lay unconscious on Ward 2, watched over by her grandmother. She had malaria and was severely anemic, so much so her hands and feet neared mine in paleness.

My blood was out of my body just long enough for the team to test and label it. Just as the technician told me I could get up from the couch, a nurse hurried off to Ward 2 with a bag of my still-warm blood in her hands. I followed, and watched as they prepared the transfusion, then came back later with a doctor friend to check how Dora was doing. The doctor was worried that her heart might be overwhelmed by the volume of fluids given to her – not just blood but malaria meds and other fluids – but she seemed to be coping. We left her still unconscious and with her worried (but grateful) mother and grandmother at her side. I prayed she’d make it.

On Monday, I arrived at the hospital to find Dora not only alive, but sitting up and smiling at me from a windowsill. She was pink and alert and looked perfectly healthy. We took her photo (see above), though she refused to smile for the camera.

I was positively glowing all day, and kept stopping by to visit my personal little miracle. There were lots of jokes among the doctors about the super-duper powerful blood the little girl had been given – in other words, blood from a white foreigner – but they all knew as well as I that almost anyone could have given that life-saving blood.

The American Red Cross blood services no longer wants my blood, because I’ve been exposed to malaria and other sorts of nasty African pathogens.

No problem, I’ll happily save it up for little girls like Dora.

To learn more about the children’s hospital mentioned here and to find out how you can help, please visit the Welbodi Partnership, which supports paediatric health care in Sierra Leone by partnering with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation to establish the Sierra Leone Institute of Child Health.

Taxpaying as a virtue

2008-09-12T10:00:00.002Z

Sierra Leone usually struggles to collect taxes, even from the minority of the population that can genuinely afford to pay.

Recently, however, at least some of the city's poorest residents are paying their local tax with pride, as documented in this BBC story.

The untold story in that piece is the enthusiastic collection practices by the local council, which has resulted in the shuttering of many small shops and kiosks for failure to pay back taxes. Many of those shopkeepers walk a very fine line between survival and starvation, and would probably express much less pleasure with the new tax collection regime.

Of highs and lows (again)

2008-09-12T09:49:00.003Z

I’ve written before about the extremes of life in Freetown. One moment brings exultation, the next, devastation. Though exhausting, the experience can also be oddly intoxicating. My even-keeled life back home often pales in comparison to the roller-coaster ride of emotional and physical and aesthetic extremes here in Sierra Leone.

Sometimes, however, I yearn for an evener keel.

Last week was triumphant and thrilling, filled with hope and possibility. At the children’s hospital, we got the water running through all the wards for the first time in years, thanks to just $800 in plumbing equipment and the hard work and diligence of the hospital’s maintenance team. We found a source of medical-grade oxygen to use on the wards, a first in many years not only for our hospital but for all government health facilities. On Tuesday, I met with the Minister of Health and Sanitation, who was delighted with our successes and looking to replicate them elsewhere. By Friday, I roved the hospital with camera in hand, capturing the faces of our heroes – plumbers and maintenance technicians – and of the oxygen canister connected and ready to use. As we left the hospital on Friday afternoon, a junior doctor put one of his patients on oxygen, and we had visions of young lives being saved.

A few hours later, we settled in with cold glasses of wine at the Hard Rock guesthouse at Lakka Beach, watching the sky turn brilliant shades of orange and red. We awoke the next morning to find a beautiful sunny day, a rare gift in the midst of rainy season, and spent the afternoon soaking up vitamin E and positive energy from the surf and one another. By Sunday night, as I sat with friends along another beach, I was feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready for anything.

And then, with a crash, came this week: the proverbial Other Shoe.

After spending Monday in the office, we returned to the hospital on Tuesday. We should have noticed the ominous buzz in the air, the palpably chaotic edge, but we did not. We were too pleased with ourselves for the accomplishments of the previous week.

We walked blithely past the packed wards, the hallways filled with waiting mothers and crying children. My colleague, a doctor, went off to check on the oxygen while I roved the corridors with a pile of posters to congratulate the maintenance team for their hard work and introduce our nurse training team. As I hung them, nurses gathered around, murmuring approvingly. “Di white pipul, den sabi mek!” said one. I laughed and then noticed one of the maintenance guys standing behind me. I pointed to his picture on the board. “What do you think?” He grinned.

Then, suddenly, his smile faded and he took my arm, shifting me away from the staircase. I turned and saw two men carrying a body wrapped in orange and yellow fabric. Numbly, I estimated the age: maybe 6 years old, definitely no older than 8.

A few minutes later, my colleague came down from the Special Care Ward, where we’d been delivering oxygen. She was a bit frantic, and we escaped to our office. Turns out she’d just seen a child die, the fourth to die in that ward since Friday, of the five who had been put on oxygen. The nurses were staging a revolt: they didn’t want the oxygen anymore, it just brought them destitute and dying children, and scared their other patients.

The oxygen canister was also empty, a nasty surprise, so we bundled it off to the factory down the street to be refilled. On the way back, sitting in standstill traffic just outside the hospital gate, a poda poda (minibus) behind us lurched suddenly forward, plowing through a crowd of market women and pedestrians and coming to a stop to the right of my car. My colleague, sitting in the passenger seat, recoiled in horror. “There are children under there,” she cried, jumping out of the car and into the melee. “Get the car inside and come back with gloves!”

And so I did, parking quickly and running back with the latex gloves I keep in my first aid kit. By the time I got to the street, a crowd had formed, curious and jostling. Two women sat on the curb, dazed but not seriously hurt. The children had been brought inside. Miraculously, they needed nothing more than a few stitches and some gentle words.

By this point, though, we were deeply shaken. We might have written off the day and headed home, but a delegation from the Ministry was due in an hour. Instead, we opted to hide in our office for a lunch break. I let my colleague and another doctor go ahead, while I returned to the outpatient ward to buy a cold packet of water.

A bad idea.

On my way, chaos found me yet again. Near the entrance to the hospital was a small crowd, with a woman in the middle in a dead faint. She was the mother of one of the injured children, and had been told her daughter had been “mashed” by a poda-poda. When she arrived and heard the truth – that her daughter needed stitches but would be okay – she literally collapsed in shock.

As this calmed down and I snuck past to buy my cold drink, a roar arose outside and I saw dozens – maybe hundreds – of people rushing the entrance of the hospital. Two cleaners in DayGlo orange vests stepped quickly outside and closed the door behind them. The crowd arrived, hungry for blood: if they couldn’t have the driver’s, who had fled immediately to turn himself into the police and get beyond the reach of vigilante justice, then at least they wanted to see the injured children. They milled around outside like the spectators at a rowdy football match. Inside all was quiet, but still with that ominous energy in the air, which I could no longer ignore. My little friend Ibrahim snuck up behind me and put his hand in mind. “Are you scared?” I asked. He shook his head. No. Mentally, I nodded mine. Yes.

Eventually things calmed down, and we even managed a half-normal tour of the hospital for the ministry representatives. By 5:10, my colleague and I were out the door and on our way home, desperate for the day to end.

The week since then has been much less traumatic but no less frustrating. Now, on Thursday night, I am dreading my return trip to the hospital tomorrow. I’m afraid the bad luck of this week is still not spent.

To learn more about the children’s hospital mentioned here, please visit the Welbodi Partnership, which supports paediatric health care in Sierra Leone by partnering with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation to establish the Sierra Leone Institute of Child Health.

Making a Living Part I: Selling Scrap Metal

2008-09-08T13:40:00.003Z

I've been wanting to do a series on the ways people scrape out a living in Sierra Leone.

My friend ABJ beat me to it with this touching short film about boys making a living by searching for jewelry and scrap metal in the gutters and streets of Freetown.

It is a glimpse of what it takes to survive among the poorest of the poor in this poorest of poor countries – teenagers elbow-deep in filthy gutters just to earn a few pennies for rice and a roof over their heads – and of the energy and ingenuity that allows them to do just that. Survive.

A Remarkable Sound

2008-08-23T15:23:00.006Z

.
Another day at the children’s hospital.

Not a good day, overall.

Chaos on the streets outside, under a searing sun.

Chaos inside, the junior doctors overwhelmed. Patients and parents line the corridors.

In the hospital courtyard, my little friend Ibrahim – covered in scars from a long-ago kerosene burn – in hysterics. “I beat him for playing in the gutter,” says a man nearby.

A meeting with the maintenance team. Frustration all around. A suspiciously inflated invoice. Still no plan to fix the water pump. Another deadline.

On Ward 2 a little girl close to death, her eyes glassy, her mother terrified. A nurse adjusts the flow on her blood transfusion. “She’s improving,” she says, unconvincingly.

We trudge upstairs to Ward 3, short on optimism.

And then we hear it.

A remarkable sound.

A child laughing.

Towards me, down the center of the ward, runs a little girl in a flowered dress. Her belly peeks out through a missing button.

She laughs again. The sound brightens the ward.

I run towards her and she shrieks with delight, turns and runs away. Her steps are those of a typical toddler, unsteady but fearless.

Children nearby watch us through the bars of their beds. One or two smile weakly.

I ask her mother, who sits grinning on the windowsill, how long she’s been here. A few days, she says. Before that, another hospital. They gave her blood. Her feet and hands still have marks from the IV.

I ask the nurses. She has tuberculosis.

Her name is Mary.

She is playing hide-and-seek. Behind the curtains, around the cement pillars, under the worn metal cots. She giggles while I search.

I catch her and she collapses under my tickling hands, squealing with pleasure.

This is the best part of my day.

I say goodbye and walk away. I have to work.

She sneaks up behind me. I turn and see her impish grin, and can’t resist.

The game begins again.

Mary is laughing.

So am I.

To help support the hospital described here, located in Freetown, Sierra Leone, please visit the Welbodi Partnership.

Cocaine busts

2008-08-17T13:54:00.005Z

I returned to Freetown a few weeks ago to find a city abuzz with one word: Cocaine.

On July 13, the Sierra Leonean authorities confiscated a plane filled with 600 kg of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $54 million. The Venezuelan plane, a fake Red Cross decal on its tail, landed in Freetown’s Lungi International Airport without a valid flight plan. According to the official story, the pilot and crew fled before the authorities arrived, but left behind a plane full of cocaine. In the hours and days that followed, the crew – including 9 foreigners from Latin America and the United States – were arrested, along with dozens of Sierra Leoneans believed to be involved. In all, some 60 people have been arrested in relation to the case. The Minister of Transport and Aviation has been suspended from office for suspicion of involvement, and other powerful men, including Gbassay Kamara, the former manager of Sierra Leone's national football team, have fled or gone into hiding.

This is all exciting, of course, but is also deadly serious for this small country working so hard to maintain peace and order after a decade-long civil war. In recent years, as demand for cocaine has increased dramatically in Europe, West Africa has become a favored route for traffickers bringing drugs from source countries in South America to the lucrative markets of Europe. In tiny and impoverished Guinea-Bissau, drug trafficking has eviscerated already weak government and security institutions and overrun the legitimate economy, turning the country – according to media coverage – into “Africa's first narco-state.”

To avoid this, or even the perception of this, the government of Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma has treated the case very seriously. Not only have they moved quickly to arrest suspects, and even to suspend very senior members of their own government, but have also taken steps to ensure those already arrested don’t manage to slip away. (Suspects and even convicted criminals have a way of disappearing from police custody from time to time.)

Therefore the police and military, afraid that South American drug barons might swoop in with a paramilitary force to bust their companions out of jail, have blocked traffic all along Pademba Road beside the prison, and on all the smaller roads that intersect with Pademba. They’ve brought in major military hardware – including anti-aircraft guns, I’m told – and have announced a no-fly zone over the prison. On days the prisoners appear in court, they extend their blockade down to the law courts building, on the main drag of Siaka Stevens Street next to the city’s iconic cotton tree.

Now I personally think it’s a bit far-fetched that the drug lords will risk any more men to rescue the small fry rotting in a Sierra Leone jail. Even the quantity of cocaine confiscated – though a record for Sierra Leone – is small potatoes for these guys. And anyway, there is no way the cocaine is being held in the porous and severely under-funded Pademba Road prison. (Best guess on the street is that either the British-led International Military Advisory and Training Team, IMATT, or the few remaining UN soldiers guarding the Special Court for Sierra Leone have been put in charge of the $54 million stash.)

I can't fault the government for what is certainly an admirable show of force and a clear message to any drug lords looking to use Sierra Leone as a gateway to Europe.But it seems to me there are some more practical steps they could take.

For one, they could do something about the laughable airport security. Last time I flew out of Lungi, the female security guard tasked with patting me down for weapons or contraband – because they don’t have a metal detector or any sort of scanner for persons or bags – decided I wasn’t a threat. Laughing, she gave me a big, friendly bear hug instead.

Huh.

Stories I Like to Tell, Part I -- My Friendly Corrupt Policemen

2008-06-30T15:00:00.014Z

I'm back in the US at the moment, visiting family and friends, and I realized (to my occasional embarrassment) that I tend to tell and retell the same handful of stories about Sierra Leone. It occurred to me that if they make good fodder for dinner-party chat, they would probably also work well for this blog. My apologies to those of you who are family or friends and have heard these already...

This first installment introduces some of my favorite neighborhood police officers. Before I tell the stories, however, I'd like to offer a bit of cautionary context.

1) Not all public officials -- and not all police officers -- are corrupt. Despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, not every public official in Sierra Leone is on the make. In more than two years in Sierra Leone -- and in part, I admit, thanks to luck and sheer persistence -- I've never paid a bribe or other "encouragement" to a police officer, immigration official, or government functionary of any sort. (I have paid "kola", a traditional gift now usually given as cash, to local chiefs, but I'd argue that's a greyer area.)

In that time, I've certainly encountered officials looking for some palm greasing, as evidenced by the stories below, but I've also encountered countless individuals who chose not to take advantage of a potentially lucrative situation. (As one example, a friend visiting from the US realized that he had a single-entry visa to Sierra Leone but plans to enter the country twice, on either end of a side trip to Senegal. He was clearly in the wrong, and legitimately owed the government at least the $100 difference in price between the two visas, but when we explained the honest mistake to an airport immigration official, he waved us through without even hinting for a bribe.)

2) Small-scale corruption is often a matter of survival. When a senior government official embezzles hundreds of thousands of dollars intended for a life-saving project -- such as child immunization, school feeding, or rural road construction -- and buys himself a BMW and a big house, he deserves to be harshly judged. So too does a police detective who refuses to file a rape case unless the impoverished and terrified young victim collects enough money from family and friends to pay for paper, a pen, and transportation for the investigating officer. But when a low-ranking policeman paid approximately Le5,000 ($1.67) per day asks someone like me to give him Le15,000 to let me drive away with a cracked side mirror, I have a bit more sympathy (though I still refuse to pay). With skyrocketing food prices, the officer can hardly afford to feed his or her family on the normal monthly salary.

Certainly the collective impact of small-scale corruption can be enormous, and certainly such demands are more onerous on the transport drivers also scraping to survive than they are on rich expats like myself, but there is still something different -- in my view -- between a poor and poorly-paid small-time official scamming a bit of extra income, and a fat cat "big man" stealing big money. I don't accept either type of corruption, and go to great lengths to avoid paying even the smallest bribe, but I also don't judge the small official as harshly as I do the big man.

So, with those caveats, here are my favorite police corruption stories:

As a driver in Sierra Leone -- or, at least, as a foreign driver -- you generally don't face the kind of aggressive harassment you might be led to expect by typical stories of West Africa. However, police officers do pull you over, frequently, if you are driving a car without diplomatic or NGO (non-governmental organization) plates. They invent moving violations or imperceptible problems with your vehicle to try to extort a bit of money. (Once, when I was still new to Sierra Leone, an officer insisted that my left headlight was a bit dimmer than my right headlight and threatened to arrest me. It was false and rather silly but hard to prove.)

I've discovered that the best approach is to greet them from the outset with enthusiastic cheer, chattering away in friendly Krio before they even get a word in edgewise. "Officer, I am so glad to see you out here on the streets protecting us. How is your day going? Is the work too difficult? Is the sun too warm? Thank you so much for your hard work." Often, this approach preempts even the request for money, and after a quick and friendly chat, they wave me on my way.

Occasionally, I still find an officer who makes noise about this or that invented offence. My cracked side mirror is a frequent target, even though my car passed inspection (without a bribe) with the mirror just as broken as it is today.

The most memorable interactions, however, are with those officers that dispatch with the formality of pretending I've broken a law and simply ask point-blank for money. The first time this happened, I was driving down Wilkinson Road -- the main thoroughfare of western Freetown -- with a Nigerian friend of mine. The officer approached us with a smile and started chatting in rapid-fire Krio. (I remember being surprised, as people usually don't expect me to speak and understand Krio as well as I do.) He told us that he'd decided not to act like his fellow officers and threaten to arrest us for some nonsense offense. He didn't want to bully us, he said. Instead, he would just ask us nicely to give him a bit of money.

I kept a straight (but friendly) face, thanked him for his fresh approach, and politely declined. He looked disappointed but let me drive away.

The second time was during a city-wide crackdown on unsafe vehicles and other offenses. The police department itself was quite open about the purpose of the crackdown -- to generate revenue for the department -- and bragged publicly about the hundreds of drivers arrested in a 72-hour period and the millions of Leones collected in fines. I've no doubt that hundreds of others avoided arrest by contributing directly to the "revenue" of individual officers.

One afternoon during this crackdown, I was stopped by a cheery, ruddy-faced male officer with a somewhat grumpier female colleague. I gave my normal friendly greeting, and he replied with the following (conversation in Krio, English translations in parentheses):

Officer: "U no sae wi dae pa dis check." (You know we're on this "check".)
Me: Innocently. "Oh? Us kin check dat?" (Oh really? What kind of check?)
Officer: Chuckles. "Na u finances wi dae check." (We're checking you're finances.)
Me: "Mi finances?" Chuckles. "Ow u go check mi finances? Bank no dae naya." (My finances? How are you going to check my finances? There isn't a bank here.)
Officer: Chuckles again. "Well, na di finances na u pocket, na dat we dae check." (Well, the finances in your pocket, that's what we're checking.)
Me: Now genuinely amused, turn out my empty pockets. "Ah beg, finances no dae na mi pocket." (I'm sorry, but it looks like there aren't any finances in my pocket.)

He smiled at me. I smiled at him. Then I drove away.
No "finances" changed hands.

A Plate with a View

2008-06-30T14:57:00.005Z

Here is a gem of a story from the UK's Independent newspaper about perhaps my favorite place to spend a Saturday: Bureh Beach.

Below are a few photos of Bureh, including a table "with a view" and Prince, the proprieter mentioned in the story. The weathered old man is the coconut man, also mentioned, and a wonderful character.

A Blue Bundle

2008-05-16T18:02:00.006Z

A children’s hospital.

Down the concrete ramp from Ward 2 (general inpatient) to the main entrance comes a group of six young men. Barely more than teenagers, they walk in a loose V formation like soldiers – in uniforms of t-shirts and jeans – to battle. They carry an air of solemn concentration, duty-bound, and the cloud of silence around them pushes back the din of the hospital to a dim distant hum.

One of the boyish men, a few steps in front of the others, carries in his arms a child-sized bundle wrapped in a blue blanket. He doesn’t look at the bundle. His eyes are dry.

Behind this group come two women, also young. Their gaze is riveted on the men in front of them, oblivious to their surroundings. One of the women wails and clutches her breasts, grasping for the child who nursed there. Her face is haggard, and you know she has been crying for hours or days.

The procession passes through the doorway and into the glare of the courtyard. Past parents toting sick children. Past student nurses gathered in the shade. Past security guards and drivers and curious onlookers.

For the small group of mourners, however, all that is far away. The traffic of the hospital and of the street beyond belong to the world of the living. Theirs is the grim task of accompanying the dead.

A dented white pick-up truck waits for them just outside the entrance. The father climbs into the front seat with his precious bundle. The child is small enough to lay across his lap, even with the bulky blanket. I find myself wondering how old she is – was – but shake my head and push the thought aside. Too young.

The rest of the men – brothers, cousins, comrades-in-arms – climb into the back of the truck. They reach down to the mother, to help her up behind them, but she is trembling with grief. Her leg buckles when she steps on the bumper. It is all too much.

As the truck drives away, I can still see the small blue bundle through the front window. I imagine where they are going, what comes next. A tiny casket. A simple gravestone. A memorial service. A lifetime of sorrow. “I had three children, and two are alive.”

I turn away. It is all too much.

To support the children's hospital portrayed in this posting, please visit the Welbodi Partnership.

Sunday is...

2008-05-04T22:23:00.001Z

… the church drummer warming up at 9 a.m.

… a sermon in my bedroom.

… a lazy breakfast of papaya and mangoes on the balcony, or chocolate croissants and smoothies at Bliss Patisserie down the street.

… the long drive to Bureh Town: over the mountain, past the waterfall, through villages that once were refugee camps and towns that once were villages, past scenery so stunning it takes your breath, again, for the thousandth time.

… sun and surf and freshly-caught barracuda for lunch.

… outings, outings, and more outings: a caravan of buses, taxis, jeeps and poda-podas bound for beaches out of town; stereos blaring, bodies crammed in every available space, and clinging to roof-racks and bumpers. On the beach, speakers piled high, music drowning the waves and the seabirds, revelers bumping and grinding, helped by free-flowing alcohol and the occasional joint. Attention-seekers climb atop rocks, then seduce the beach with their swaying hips and chiseled bodies. Others splash in the waves and chase each other – squealing and shouting – across the stark white sand, against the most beautiful backdrop imaginable.

… back in town, an evening walk on Lumley Beach, where Freetown gathers each Sunday to promenade. Playboys plying the beach road in sports cars and Hummers; boys playing football in bare feet and boxer shorts; girls dancing in the sand; children chasing the waves; lovers walking hand-in-hand.

Friday is...

2008-05-04T21:57:00.003Z

... the call to prayer.

... the hum, the murmur, the humble din of beggars outside a mosque.

... noble men in caps and robes.

... statuesque women in their Friday Africana, stunning from their elaborate head scarves to their pointed heels, wrapped in eye-dazzling color, texture, and pattern.

... walking through the crowded East-End streets en route to the Children's Hospital, dodging motorized poda-podas and hand-drawn omalankis, the former packed tight with bodies, the latter piled high with goods. Tip-toeing through sludge and garbage and over open gutters, ducking under panbodi zinc and 10-foot wooden poles carried recklessly atop the heads of quick-moving bodies. Sweating and sweating and sweating under the searing mid-day sun.

... walking back through markets teeming with Friday salesmanship: a wall of vendors flooding the streets, channeling pedestrian commuters through a narrow gauntlet of flashing goods and shouted prices. A bit of cardboard hung with cheap gold-painted earrings; a basin of ice-cold water packed in plastic bags; a woman’s skirt (slightly used) for $0.30; a hundred metal spoons jangled to grab attention; an armful of fake designer sunglasses; a sequined handbag; a pickled pig’s foot; a live chicken.

... suffocating traffic, where the crippled man with legs twisted from polio pulling himself along on his hands and knees moves faster than you in your car.

... a cold shower to wash off the day.

.... a beer at sunset at Ramadas Beach Bar, with the hills of the city behind and the waves before you, and your bare feet buried in the sand.

Aging Gracefully

2008-04-29T18:36:00.002Z

I was sitting in front of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation last week, trying to arrange my hair into something more respectable before my meeting with the Minister. (In the April humidity, my curls generally explode into a frenetic and chaotic mop, and in Sierra Leone unruly hair is a sign of madness, destitution, or both.)

In my car vanity mirror, I noticed a smattering of grey hairs sprouting cruelly from the top of my head. Though I don't generally stress about such things -- I am almost 30 and a few laugh lines and grey hairs seem like part of the bargain -- I do usually pull them when I find them. And so I did, yanking the most obvious before combing my hair into a semblance of order.

But then I started thinking: in Sierra Leone, as in most of Africa, grey hairs are actually an asset. While America continues to worship youth, Africa reveres its elders. On this continent, with age comes respect, power, and gravitas.

So perhaps I should have left the greys. Maybe the Minister would see me in a different light if I looked a bit older. Perhaps I’d no longer be a “small girl” to most of my colleagues and acquaintances, but someone more serious and important. Perhaps people would call me Madam or Aunty instead of Sister.

Perhaps… but for now I think I’ll stick with my more American approach. Yank away, Yankee.

Supernatural Wealth Transfer

2008-04-21T22:17:00.002Z

Sierra Leone is a very religious place. Some 99% of the population identifies as either Christian (24%) or Muslim (76%), though the majority combines these beliefs with various traditional beliefs.

It's also an amazing model of religious plurality. There is good-natured teasing but absolutely no tension between Christians and Muslims. Intermarriage is so common as to barely merit a mention. If a Christian lives in a village without a church, he or she will often turn to the Imam for guidance, and vice versa. Muslims all go to church on New Year's (because that's what you do).

This religious tolerance is worthy of a much longer and more serious post (one I've been meaning to write for some time). For now, however, I want to be a bit lighter.

One of the most visible trends of Christianity in Sierra Leone is big, bold, unapologetic, fire-and-brimstone evangelism. Posters and banners adorn walls through the city, announcing visiting preachers -- many from Nigeria -- special redemption campaigns, and revivals in the national stadium. I used to live down the street from one of many branches of the Flaming Bible Church, with its logo of a burning cross, and I now spend every Sunday morning lying in bed and listening to a hundred exalted voices calling "hallelujah".

I'm certainly happy to live-and-let-live (as the Sierra Leoneans do) when it comes to religion. People find faith and guidance in many different forms. But sometimes I can't help but giggle a bit at the more notable campaigns.

One of my favorites was from a year or more ago. Operation P.U.S.H. -- Pray Until Something Happens. I wonder if anything did.

Then today I saw an enormous poster (taller than me) for a month-long crusade. Among the many miracles on offer was a declaration that 2008 was the year of Supernatural Wealth Transfer.

I imagined money falling from the sky, or a mysterious transfer into all believers' bank accounts from the Bank of God.

Hmm, maybe I should give this church business a try... a Supernatural Wealth Transfer doesn't sound too bad.

Your face here?

2008-04-03T23:24:00.002Z

There’s a somewhat disconcerting practice in many African countries – and probably elsewhere in the world – to create (and wear) fabrics that feature repeating patterns of politicians’ faces. I suppose in principle it’s no different than a Barack Obama t-shirt – or, for that matter, a New Kids on the Block bed sheet, which I am proud to say I did NOT own, but which were quite popular in my pre-teen years – but it still always strikes me as a bit funny.

Imagine someone walking down the street, dressed head-to-toe in a gown or pantsuit made from Democratic- or Republican-inspired fabric, with dozens of Senator Hillary Clintons or President George Bushes peering out from every bit of the body. Makes you cringe, doesn't it?

In an effort to embrace and perhaps understand this cultural practice, I went to the market a few weeks ago and bought myself a length of Ernest Bai Koroma (President of Sierra Leone) fabric. Here I am in a makeshift dress, with the President staring jauntily from my hip. What do you think?

Bintumani ho!

2008-03-28T09:19:00.006Z

I just climbed the highest mountain in West Africa.

At 1,995 meters (6,542 feet), Mount Bintumani in northern Sierra Leone lacks the body-taxing altitude and snow-covered peaks of its larger sisters. (Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, stands at 5,895 meters above sea level, while Everest is 8,850 meters high.) It is instead a gentle giant, with sloping grass-covered skirts rising to an improbable rocky plateau, which perches like a slumbering stone bulldog upon an oversized knoll.

Climbing Bintumani is even less daunting than it might be because 1) if you go by the shorter eastern route you have just one day’s hike to the summit, followed by another day down; and 2) for $5 per day plus food you can hire a porter to carry the bulk of your things. I felt a bit foolish sweating my way up the mountain in my high-tech hiking shoes with only a daypack on my back, while Musa followed in flip-flops and a rucksack packed with 6 liters of water (for me, plus the 4 liters in my own pack); oatmeal and sugar for 17 breakfasts; a pot packed with cooking and eating implements; extra socks and warm clothes (also for me); and various other “essentials.” But I probably wouldn’t have made it otherwise – or at least it would have hurt a lot more.

Here is one of our porters, Saiyo, ready to leave his home village with someone’s pack on his back, and then further up the mountain with a bunch of plantains on his head.

The plantains – harvested partway up the mountain – were the only food, besides a few cups of uncooked rice, that the porters brought along. Despite our request that each of them bring a pot of rice and sauce for their dinner, they came empty-handed. They also brought nothing to sleep on or under, nor warm clothes for the damp and cool mountain evening. We’d been warned and had budgeted food and some water for the 9 guides and porters as well as the 8 of us, but did not have extra tents or sweaters. (In fact we were somewhat under-prepared ourselves: my friend Aongus slept in a makeshift shelter under the “porch” of one tent, while a couple snuggled in a mosquito-dome made for one. And all of us were cold at night.)

It made for some gentle joking as we made 17 peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, stirred a pot of oatmeal for the porters’ dinner, or handed over our extra tarp (meant to cover our bags in case of rain) for the guys to sleep under. And joking turned to frustration as we shouted and struggled to keep pace with our guide, who had a tendency to hurry off with the porters, seemingly unconcerned that we trailed behind without a clue to the path.

But the guys were good-spirited and we eventually grew on one another. I even got to play doctor, which probably redeemed me in their eyes for not having a spare tent to share. As we settled into our mountain camp, in the shadow of the summit, we discovered that our guide Pa Mara (see photo below) had a festering axe wound on his thigh. Two days old, the wound – though seemingly minor from the outside – was probably deep and definitely infected, swelling his knee and thigh and giving him a mild fever. We unpacked our UK government-issued first aid kit – actually more of a mobile hospital – and I began washing Pa Mara’s leg with bottled water and dressing it with layers of sterile gauze (thinking all the time, “If my Mom could see me now.”) Another dressing in the morning and a few paracetemol (Tylenol) and he was in much brighter spirits.

Helped by moments like this, we all made friends in the end – not only through our mutual gratitude (how can you not like someone who totes your heavy pack up a mountain or ministers to your festering wounds?) but also through the exhilaration of our shared experience. Most of the porters had themselves never scaled the mountain, and a few shared our nervousness as we neared the top. Our banana-toting porter Saiyo became particularly anxious as we scrambled through a thick morning mist up the steep upper reaches of the mountain, just short of the rocky plateau, until my friend Drucil started teasing him that if Drucil, a “Freetown boy” could make it, so could the country-born Saiyo.

As we emerged on the top, a vast rocky expanse, the porters and guides stepped immediately aside to pray, before joining in our more secular revelry. When I later asked if the mountain was a sacred space, they said simply that Allah could hear them better when they were up so high.

Most of the porters also refused our offer of celebratory champagne, which we raised in our own tribute to the gods of the mountain. (We even poured a bit in libation, in case the mountain god were more a reveler than a teetotaler.) But they did enjoy posing for light-hearted photos, as well as exploring the summit and its breathtaking views.

After a long trek back down the mountain, and a bumpy, dusty, 11-hour drive back to Freetown, I’m struck by how happy we look in all the photos from the trip. Scratched legs and sore knees and sweat-soaked packs and all, I think Bintumani refreshed and rejuvenated us.

Perhaps Allah or the mountain god were indeed listening from the top.

A sad postscript

In a sad postscript to the trip, we returned to the porters’ home village of Sangbania to find that Saiyo’s son was vomiting blood and had been moved that day to a larger neighboring village to seek medical attention. Saiyo grabbed a ride on the roof rack of our Land Rover, and we drove through the quickly-failing light until we reached the village. While we pitched tents and strung hammocks on the newly-built school outside of town, Saiyo went to see after his son, and returned later with news.

The boy, 18 years old, had fallen from a palm tree some months earlier. At the time he’d been very hurt and vomiting blood, but later grew stronger and seemed to have recovered. Then suddenly the vomiting returned, and after vomiting blood for the better part of a day and night, the boy was now too weak to walk or even sit upright for more than a short time.

The village lacked a government clinic and the family – subsistence farmers when not earning a bit of money trekking tourists up the mountain – lacked the money to bring him to a hospital or clinic. Instead they paid a nurse to give him an injection (quite possibly of sugar-water or some other useless substance) and a “native doctor” to find an herbal remedy.

We knew the boy was in serious trouble if he had internal injuries – as it seemed to our inexpert selves – but that his best bet was with a clinic or hospital with trained personnel. So we woke early the next morning to visit the family and offer to bring the boy most of the way to the nearest government hospital (in Kono’s district headquarter town) and to give them money toward treatment and transport.

In the end they refused the ride to the hospital, preferring to go to another clinic where they had some family nearby, but gratefully accepted our contribution (about $70) to the transport and treatment. They promised emphatically not to spend the money on native doctors or anything else except the boy’s treatment.

We’ll probably never know what happened to Saiyo’s son, because we have no way to contact the family. But I hope they indeed brought him to the clinic, and if necessary to a hospital, and that the nurses and doctors somehow found a way to give him the help he needed with the limited supplies on hand. In an act of forced optimism, I envision not the likely tragic outcome but the grin on the teenager’s face as he learned how much money we’d offered his family, and as the terror in his eyes was displaced – momentarily, at least – by hope.

Visit Sweet Salone!

2008-03-11T10:15:00.003Z

In my ongoing effort to convince everyone to come visit , here are two recent pieces on tourism in Sierra Leone.

The first is a wonderful travel article from last Sunday's edition of the UK newspaper, The Observer. It draws in part on the same island-hopping trip I described in my last post. The cover photo (shown here) is by my stellar photographer/journalist/travel-guide-writer friend, Katrina Manson, who is also responsible for the photo essays on cleaning day and a Freetown slum linked from earlier posts.

The second is a video from the Sierra Leone National Tourist Board, so you can see the sights and sounds for yourself.

Island-hopping

2008-03-02T22:07:00.006Z

There is something deliciously luxurious about boarding a boat (no, not the boat in the photo) for five days of island-hopping. Coolers full of beer and soft drinks. Crates of canned goods and snack food. Waterproof bags protecting cameras and iPods. Backpacks stuffed with mosquito nets, sun cream, bikinis, and beach wraps.

My fascinating and mildly glamorous companions only added to the indulgence. Actors. Journalists. Photographers. TV producers. Presidential advisors. Investment fund managers.

It’s a tough life.

Day One was spent mostly in Freetown, trying to get the hell out of dodge. We finally pulled out of the marina five hours later than planned, still in good spirits despite the delay and the fact that one of our number was struck low with malaria. (He, trooper that he is, simply curled up in the hold and suffered through the journey.)

More than five hours of choppy seas later, and just before sunset, we reached our first destination: Bonthe town on Sherbro Island. The island is a rather large landmass, resembling a peninsula only slightly cut off from land, and its capital town is quite a quaint and pretty place – if somewhat crumbling and battle-scarred – with large homes and wide sandy lanes. The only motorized vehicles on the whole island are two newly-arrived okada motor-bike taxis; a third returned to the mainland after it found business too slow.

However, after two delightful nights at the new and full-service Bonthe Holiday Village – complete with electricity and satellite TV and multi-course meals – and due celebration of one 30th birthday and one engagement, we were ready for the real adventure.

The Turtle Islands lie off the southern coast of Sierra Leone, not far from Bonthe. Unlike their much larger and more-developed neighbor, the Turtles are a string of tiny sandy islands, speckled with palm trees and fishing villages. At least one small hotel operated on one of the islands in the pre-war days, but today you can stay only as a guest of a local village, and only in the simplest conditions. (No bathrooms, no running water, and a bed on the ground...)

Reaching the islands was a bit tricky, not least because we (again) mis-timed the tides and found ourselves navigating narrow channels between very shallow sandbars. After several hours, we decided we’d gone as far as we could until the tide rose again, and three of us set off in a smaller skiff to reach the island where we hoped to spend the night. We left the others (all visitors to Sierra Leone) in the larger boat with contingency instructions in case we didn’t return by nightfall; they seemed less-than-thrilled by the possibility.

As it turned out, everything went swimmingly (no pun intended). Our advance team reached the island in no time at all, and were met by a delegation of villagers and enthusiastic children. We asked the village chief for permission to spend the night, and whether they had fish and rice to sell us and someone to cook for us. The answers to all were yes.

While my companions made the necessary dinner arrangements and the skiff returned to collect the rest of the group, I chatted with a few young women from the village. One handed me her brand-new baby boy, Mohammed. ‘A very big name for a very little boy’ I said as he nuzzled, all snoozy one-month of him, into my neck. Mohammed’s mother’s friend spoke clear Krio and a bit of English, so I asked her if they frequently had strangers (visitors) to their island. She laughed and said no. Never.

I then supervised the cleaning of our humble lodgings: a few roofless (and bathroom-less) rooms in the old hotel, plus the surrounding sand, overlooking the water from atop a small embankment. From that viewpoint I watched the skiff and our larger boat (now able to skirt the sandbars thanks to a higher tide) arrive in style with the rest of our group. They were certainly a fascination for the locals!

The island itself was tiny, with a circumference you could easily walk in just a few hours. The village was home to maybe a few hundred souls, all of them making a living from the water. Transport from the mainland arrived every Wednesday and returned a few days later. If anyone needed to reach the land in the interim – for instance, in case of a medical emergency, as there was certainly no clinic on the island – the only choice was a fisherman’s dugout canoe.

In the center of the town I found a fenced-off area filled with fishing nets rolled and put away for the night. I asked and was told this was to keep the women away from them. If a woman entered the area or touched a net, the fisherman would no longer catch any fish.

Returning to our “hotel,” I found the chief helping a few of my friends to string mosquito nets from exposed roof beams and palm fronds. I chose a spot on the sand between two palm trees for my own bed, while the other two ladies went for a swim in the fading light.

Later, filled with fish and rice and roasted marshmallows – and rum – we played silly games and listened to birthday-boy Tom sing and play the guitar. The full moon shimmered off the sea and glimmered through the palm trees. From nearby came the muffled sounds of a village evening: men’s voices, children’s laughter.

In the morning we set off again, with a promise to return soon.

We meant it.

National Cleaning Day in Photos

2008-01-29T16:05:00.000Z

See photos of cleaning day courtesy of the BBC and our friendly neighborhood journalist, Katrina Manson.

National Cleaning Day

2008-01-28T11:09:00.000Z

The smell of burning garbage woke me up on Saturday morning.

Still lying in bed, I gazed blearily out my window and found a sky hazy and white, an unusual sight in Freetown. “Fog?” my sleep-addled brain briefly asked, before I put together the pungent smell irritating my throat and the clouds of white outside.

Burying my head under the pillows, I thought with resignation: national cleaning day.

I had time on Saturday to write this blog (after a long period of silence) because I wasn't allowed to go anywhere or do anything until after noon. Friends who ventured out (wittingly or unwittingly) on previous cleaning days have been turned back by police checkpoints and – more commonly – self-styled civilian enforcers. If you’re not going to help clean, they say, go back to your house and stay there. (Fair enough).

I swear I’ll help with a cleaning day at some point, but for now the idea of shoveling out gutters filled with human waste makes me shudder. Instead I hid in my house like a spoiled brat and wrote about it instead.

The idea of a national cleaning day – at least in the capital – is usually credited to one of the handful of military dictatorships that took charge in successive coups in the 1990s. Perhaps the most hapless of these regimes, the NPRC (National Provisional Ruling Council) came to power in 1992 and ruled until 1996, when elections returned the government to civilian hands.

According to conventional wisdom, their coup was mostly accidental; the young group of military officers simply wanted to file a complaint, and then found themselves in charge of the country. They spent most of the next few years throwing lavish parties in the presidential mansion and doing little for the country, but are nonetheless frequently named as the best government in recent memory. The reason? Cleaning Day.

Under NPRC rule, every man, woman, and child in Sierra Leone was required to spend one Saturday morning a month cleaning: their own house and yard, the streets, common areas. Sierra Leone has a long history of communal labor in the rural areas, where (for instance) chiefs will designate a day for “road brushing” – the backbreaking work of clearing and repairing the roads, bridges, and footpaths surrounding a village or chiefdom. Overgrown footpaths are one of the first signs that something is seriously amiss in a given area.

But I’m not sure anyone had ever brought the concept to Freetown before the NPRC, and people loved it. “The NPRC, now that was a government,” many people have told me. “With them the streets were clean.”

The idea has been resurrected from time to time since then. On the very week that I arrived in Sierra Leone – late March 2006 – the then-Minister of Trade and Industry called for a cleaning day to prepare the city for the investors and businessman that would be visiting Freetown the following week for an International Trade Fair. People responded with enthusiasm, turning out in droves on Saturday morning to sweep yards and shovel gutters and gather garbage.

And yet when I arrived on Sunday, the city was absolutely filthy: covered in massive mountains of rancid garbage. Over the next few days, the piles remained – in places blocking entire lanes of traffic – and began to smolder.

The Freetown residents had done their part, dedicating their Saturday morning to making their city clean, but the government had failed at its task: collecting and disposing of the waste. Some say that money was allocated to hire trucks, but was stolen by corrupt officials. Others say the government simply didn’t think things through beyond asking people to gather the garbage in central locations. In any case, the result was clear: Freetown was had laid out a welcome mat of garbage and filth to potential foreign investors it wished to woo.

To paraphrase Paul Theroux, it’s the old African story: great people, terrible governments.

The government subsequently obtained a number of shiny modern garbage trucks – donated by someone – and figured out the basics of cleaning up after cleaning day. And the new APC government has apparently decided to usurp the NPRC legacy and make cleaning day a regular event.

The most amazing part about all of this is the spirit of collective action. Though the police will turn you back if you’re wandering the streets on cleaning day, Sierra Leone is far from an authoritarian state. In fact, the government and police alike are generally too bumbling to enforce much of anything.

No, people clean on cleaning day because they want to. They are willing to give their time, and to work at a filthy and unpleasant task, in order to make up for the lack of a comprehensive government-run sanitation and waste-disposal system.

Imagine if your local government suggested that. Cleaning Day USA? Would you turn out with a broom and a shovel?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Pomp and Circumstance, Salone-Style

2007-11-17T12:16:00.000Z

Sierra Leone held its presidential inauguration yesterday, and I spent most of the day at the inaugural events held at the national stadium. For the first time in its history, Sierra Leone opened the inauguration to the general public, reserving only a small “presidential” section for ticketed dignitaries. As a result, the stadium was filled to bursting with tens of thousands of Sierra Leoneans, most wearing the APC’s signature red and white colors.

When I arrived at nine a.m. the stands were filling quickly, and the mood was buoyant. Large groups entered together dressed in identical “Africana”, outfits made from eye-dazzling local fabrics. Makeshift bands played boisterously from various corners of the stadium, leading people in popular pro-APC songs: “pak en go” (pack up and go home) one of them tells the past administration; another says their time “don don” (is finished).

Events on the field started well. The Biana Players dance group did a beautiful, if largely ignored, traditional dance to the sounds of African drums, waving flags in Sierra Leone’s national colors: blue, green, and white. Then some of Sierra Leone’s most popular comedians, a troupe of clowns known for bawdy physical humor, put on a witty skit about the election. Clowns dressed in the colors of the major parties – red for the APC, green for the SLPP, orange for the PMDC – staged a footrace along the stadium track, while a woman dressed in a Sierra Leone flag (representing the electoral commissioner Christiana Thorpe) tried in vain to keep order. In light-hearted snipes to the election’s real-life drama, the SLPP runner dashed off before the starting gun, then later dragged at the shirt of the APC runner to keep him from pulling ahead. If not a message of national unity, it was certainly one of optimism and fun.

But the program soon fell behind, the sun grew hotter, the stands became more crowded and chaotic, and tempers began to flare. A smartly-dressed honor guard from the Sierra Leone armed forces, accompanied by a military band, impressed the crowd with their sharp marching and salutes. They were then left standing on the field for hours while the program was on hold for some unexplained reason. (We later suspected that VIPs, perhaps including the president himself, were stuck in the crowds outside.) Several of the soldiers fainted dead away, and first aid personnel in red cross vests scrambled to carry the men off the field and into the shade.

First aid personnel were also busy caring for victims from the crowds, carting away those injured in the crush to enter the stadium stands as well as those downed by the sun and heat. In our section, like most of the others, crowds of people pushed their way into entrances, while those already inside pushed back. Dozens climbed the railings and made their way over the crowd toward the back of the stands. Dozens more simply pushed and pushed and pushed until they broke free into the seating areas, where they then squeezed themselves into a few inches of free space between the already densely-packed bodies. The whole scene reminded me of a football match I attended at the stadium last year, but seemed somewhat unbefitting a national inauguration.

As the stands grew more crowded, some of those seated began to grumble, shout, and fight back, while others called out to the newcomers and made space. “All man wan see,” said an old man next to me, kindly sharing the breeze from his plastic fan. True, I thought, but the stadium would not accommodate anywhere near the 1 million residents of Freetown (not to mention the 5 million residents of Sierra Leone), a staggering percentage of whom seemed to be trying to attend, so a limit would have to be struck.

By ten a.m., the place seemed packed to capacity, but still people kept coming. By eleven the military guard were in place on the field, the VIPs could be seen fanning themselves with programs in their shaded section, and people were literally dripping with sweat, but the events did not proceed. As the clock crept toward twelve, I purchased a small towel for 1000 Leones (30 cents) to try to shade myself from the beating sun, and vendors did a brisk trade in plastic bags of cool water. But still nothing more happened on the field.

Meanwhile, events in the stands were getting more and more chaotic. Fights broke out, with whole sections of people pushing and shoving. From time to time, a person would tumble down one of the stands – thrown, perhaps, when people grew frustrated with latecomers pushing their way through. As the tumbling bodies rolled over the rows of seated spectators and reached the rails at the bottom of the stands, I always gasped, praying the person wouldn’t plummet to the concrete walkway several meters below. I never saw anyone fall that far, but a journalist friend called us from the field and said he’d seen ambulances filled with seriously injured people. He warned us to stay put until the stadium had emptied out to avoid the crush, and then smiled and snapped a photo of us from the field far below.

The announcers came over the loudspeaker several times to beg the security forces to help stop people from coming inside, as the stadium was already full. I wondered why the organizers didn’t have a better way to communicate with the police and military officers than over the main sound system. And I wondered if they didn’t realize that the officers were unarmed and sorely outnumbered, and didn’t have the slightest chance of gaining control.

A friend still outside the stadium and hoping to join us called to report that the main gates to the stadium were still open, and the streets and surrounding areas were packed with tens of thousands of APC supporters hoping to come inside. I cringed; we thought the police had closed the gates hours before.

Then, suddenly, there was a commotion at our end of the stadium; the main gate allowing access to the football pitch broke open, and throngs of people started rushing the field. A few police and military officers fought to hold it closed and hold back the crowds, lashing out with wooden poles and switches. They wrestled it closed but perhaps a hundred people were already inside. Then the gate broke open again, and again. Hundreds of red-and-white revelers now lined the field. Dust clouds rose as police clashed with those hoping to follow them. We grew a bit concerned and wished the throngs pushing in didn’t make it impossible for us to leave. “You can have my seat,” we kept joking about the people fighting so hard to come inside; “there’s nothing much happening here anyway.”

Finally, the proceedings began again. A motorcade carrying former president Kabbah entered through the gate (along with another several dozen opportunistic spectators who pushed their way through when the gate was open) and made its way to the staging area. Then, after a long delay while the new president made his way through the crowds outside, the hero of the day finally entered through the same gate: the triumphant new president, Ernest Bai Koroma.

Even Koroma’s arrival was marred by scuffles. As he entered to wild cheers from the stands, resplendent in white robes and waving and smiling from the back of a pick-up truck, dust and police batons clouded his wake. Throngs of his supporters pushed onto the field, seemingly impervious to the beatings they received at the hands of the police forces. As the president circled the track once, then twice, a dozen black-suited body guards shielding his car, the numbers of people on the field swelled. And as he reached the staging area, the police and military gave up entirely and went off to watch the ceremony, leaving the gate unguarded. People began streaming in unhindered as Christian and Muslim leaders offered prayers to open the day’s main events.

At this point, the contrasts of Sierra Leone were in stark relief on the field. First, the pomp and circumstance of a post-colonial African state: the military guard standing at attention at midfield, with buttons gleaming and rifles at their sides; the supreme court justices seated under a canopy, their elaborate red robes and white wigs a holdover from the British colonial era; two men on horseback parading around the track, their steeds elaborately decorated with green, white, and blue ribbons and fabric.

And then, alongside these formal state trappings, were fiery demonstrations of traditional beliefs. Among the thousands of people that now filled the field were at least four or five “devils”: spiritual beings associated with Sierra Leone’s secret societies, clad in elaborate masks and long raffia skirts to erase any notion of a human being underneath. (See photos below) Each was surrounded by a crowd of society members: chanting, singing, dancing, drumming. From time to time the crowd around one of the devils would crouch to the ground, accompanied by most of the people in the neighboring stands. A man next to us explained that anyone who didn’t fall to the ground when told to do so by the devil would be shot by a “witch gun”, a magical weapon that strikes you down with sorcery without making a sound.

One of the societies was carrying a stretcher, covered with a pile of green palm fronds. We later noticed that below the fronds lay what seemed to be a motionless human body, draped in a white sheet. Blood soaked the sheet near where the person’s neck would be, and several of those dancing around were also smeared with blood (or what looked like blood). The man next to us explained that the person under the sheet had been sacrificed in honor of the celebrations, but would come back to life later. “What if he doesn’t come back to life?” we asked. “Well, then he’s dead,” he answered matter-of-factly. Staring in horror, I convinced myself that the body must be either fake or actually alive, just as I’ve generally chalked up stories of ritual murder to overwrought rumor. Surely the society, even if it had sacrificed someone, wouldn’t carry the body so boldly into the stadium, past police and soldiers and tens of thousands of people. Eventually the stretcher disappeared into the crowd. I never saw the body arise.

While we were fascinated by these goings-on, the official proceedings continued unhindered. Prayers were prayed; the national anthem was sung; the new president received the gold baton of office. President Koroma’s speech was perhaps the most surreal moment in a rather surreal day. While his revelers reveled, he spoke soberly of fighting corruption and bringing electricity to the capital and major provincial towns. While society devils threatened people with witch guns and proudly paraded a dead body (real or otherwise), he spoke of peace and prosperity. While the crowds overran the outnumbered security forces, he spoke of upholding the rule of law.

We kept waiting for him to address the situation directly, perhaps ask his supporters to stop their music and dancing for a moment and listen to the ceremony. When he didn’t, continuing instead with his prepared speech, it gave the events a “fiddling-while-Rome-burns” feel.

But then, Rome wasn’t burning – it was celebrating. Once the police stopped trying to hold back the crowds, the situation became much less tense, if still a bit disconcerting for those of us unaccustomed to such traditions (and uncomfortable with such enormous crowds). Perhaps Koroma and the other VIPs weren’t denying the chaos around them, but merely accepting its coexistence with the ordered events at the other end of the field.

All in all it was an exhausting day, filled with all the promise and peril of this newly peaceful Sierra Leone – a day of elation and anxiety, unity and partisanship, celebration and violence. I think the image I will carry most vividly is the proud figure of Sierra Leone’s new president – by most accounts a man of integrity, intelligence, and vision – greeting his people with a broad smile, unfazed by the messy confrontation behind him between the mass of supporters that helped get him elected and the state forces now under his command.

I can’t decide if his (non)reaction represents tremendous denial, or insightful recognition of the complexity of the country he now leads. I might wish the day’s events had been better planned and managed, that the organizers had anticipated that crowds would surpass the stadium’s capacity and that security forces would be hard-pressed to maintain control. I might have preferred an inauguration free of baton-wielding police, angry crowds, long delays, and ambulances full of casualties.

But then, every Sierra Leonean who could make their way to the national stadium got to attend the presidential inauguration, an egalitarian feat unrivaled by most nations. And everyone got to celebrate as they chose, whether with Western-style pomp and circumstance or African traditional beliefs.

And at the end of the day, it’s not my country, nor my celebration. I’m just a guest here.

***

Photo 1 (top): APC supporters outside the party headquarters on inauguration day. http://www.africanews.com/site/list_message/8514?data[source]=rss#m8514

Photo 2 (above): President Ernest Bai Koroma (in white) with members of the military honor guard. Photo credit A.P. http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-11-15-voa42.cfm

Photo 3 (below): Prince Charles with a masked devil and members of the national dance group in November 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6176000.stm

Photo 4 (below): A masked devil and dancing women greet visiting World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz in July 2006. Copyright The World Bank / John Fornah.

Please don't corrupt us

2007-11-12T11:28:00.000Z

As you drive out of Lungi International Airport, the main airport serving Sierra Leone, a sign greets you:

"If you can help us, please don't corrupt us."

A Cheering Section

2007-10-30T11:37:00.000Z

I’ve never run a marathon.

I’ve never run a half-marathon.

In fact, I haven’t run a competitive race of any sort since the Turkey Trot in elementary school. (And I didn’t put in much of a showing there, in nine straight years of competition. I certainly never won a turkey to bring home for Thanksgiving dinner.)

But now – in Freetown, of all places – I’ve discovered the joy of a race course lined with cheering fans, the motivation of encouraging shouts, and the extra inspiration of running in a crowd.

Many developing world cities are miserable places to exercise. Crowded, polluted, dangerous… and filled with people who don’t understand why you’re running around in shorts and sneakers, dodging traffic and potholes, breathing heavily and sweating like a pig. At best you get odd stares and lungs full of exhaust, at worst you get harassed by people and attacked by stray dogs.

Freetown, it turns out, is an exception to many (though not all) of these rules. First, if you want to escape the pollution, you can head down to Lumley Beach, a great 1.5-mile stretch of flat sand. You might get a bit of attention, but most of it positive – boys wanting to run with you, girls asking to be your friend.

But more importantly, Freetown is a place that respects and understands exercise. People here do lace up their sneakers (or, if they can’t afford sneakers, their plastic sandals or bare feet) and dash off around the city. In fact, the runners are impressive in their determination. I’ve seen guys (because they are almost all men) running through the pouring rain, the searing heat, or along roads absolutely packed with people and cars. On even the steepest hill in a city of jaw-dropping inclines, you’ll eventually see someone jogging – step by painful step – up the hill.

Perhaps inspired by these examples, I’ve recently started running with the Freetown branch of a group called the Hash House Harriers (the “hash” for short). This international movement, originally started by British colonial officials and expatriates in Kuala Lumpur in the 1930s, is often known by the endearing if juvenile slogan, “A drinking club with a running problem.”

The idea is simple. A group of runners set out from a different location each week. They follow a trail – marked by piles of shredded paper, and rife with misdirection, switch-backs, and other surprises – that was laid earlier by “hares”. The switch-backs and other tricks help keep the group together regardless of fitness level, and everyone eventually ends up at a bar, at which group members (or so I’d heard) devolve into fraternity antics complete with silly songs, beer-chugging, and initiation rites.

Turned off by the fraternity reputation, I steered clear. But friends eventually persuaded me to give it a try, and I found that the run was good fun and great exercise, the group friendly and eclectic – an even mix of native Sierra Leoneans, members of the large Freetown Lebanese community, and white expats. Moreover, it turned out the Freetown hashers were more focused on the running than the drinking. (Or at least, they’d let me sneak away before the drinking began.)

So now I spend most Monday evenings on a winding run through Freetown’s hidden corners. The route is different each week, and always avoids main roads, so we find ourselves on tiny footpaths, alleyways, and empty lots. Often we’re running through very private spaces: between houses and their detached latrines, under clothes lines and alongside patches of vegetables and rice, among family members and livestock.

But few spaces in Sierra Leone are truly private, and most people don’t mind at all having a crowd of several dozen people dash through their courtyards and beside their front stoops.

In fact, they often embrace the fun. “No no, they ran that way” yells one man, pointing down a narrow gully. “Keep going, you’re doing great,” calls out another. “You’ve tired,” calls an elderly woman; “don’t give up.” A crowd of children from one household laugh and sing, and two small girls – barefoot and bare-chested – stand along the path with their hands outstretched, offering high-fives to the panting runners. On one particularly exhausting trek through the steep hills of the city, the group passed through a tunnel of cheering, chanting, clapping crowds, all happy to help motivate the runners through that last difficult stretch, much like committed spectators do for Boston Marathoners along the famed Heartbreak Hill.

Between that and my equally enthusiastic fellow runners, I can’t help but push myself a bit further, and maybe a bit faster. And listening to the laughter and warmth of Sierra Leoneans, and looking around at the gems of Freetown’s lesser-known quarters – a cozy domestic scene, with women plaiting each other’s hair while children play in the dust; a dirt lot turned football field, packed with talented young players; a sudden glimpse of a steep valley stretching to the ocean, with the setting sun behind – I can’t help but be reminded how much I love this city.

Election finale

2007-10-30T10:50:00.000Z

I just realized I left the election story a cliffhanger. My apologies!

It seems ages ago, but here’s the barebones outline: the then-opposition All People’s Congress (APC) won the run-off by a comfortable margin (950,407 votes to the Sierra Leone People’s Party’s 789,651), and Ernest Bai Koroma was sworn in on September 17, 2007.

There were some dramatic final moments. The independent National Electoral Commission (NEC) invalidated 477 polling stations for apparent vote-rigging (including obviously faked tally sheets and vote counts well over 100% of registered voters). Most of these were in strongholds of the (then-ruling) Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), which prompted accusations of bias by the SLPP and a last-minute weekend appeal for the courts to halt the count. At 10 a.m. Monday morning, with the court case still pending, the NEC called a press conference at which they surprised everyone by announcing the final tally, arguing that the invalidated votes did not affect the outcome. Hours later, the new president was sworn into office.

Some in the SLPP cried foul, but the party’s leaders – both former President Alhaji Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and former Vice President Solomon Berewa – accepted the results and attended the swearing-in of president-elect Koroma. Most independent observers praised the NEC’s handling of the situation, and just about everyone breathed a sigh of relief that the results were accepted without violent incident. Some SLPP members are still grumbling and calling for an investigation, but I tend to think they should be most angry at their party members who tried so blatantly to stuff the ballot boxes, and therefore led to the disenfranchisement of large areas of SLPP support. (Though by NEC’s calculation these votes would not have changed the outcome even if all went for the SLPP.)

In the end, most people – in Sierra Leone and internationally – were delighted with the election. Despite some sporadic violence during the campaign period and in the immediate celebratory aftermath, the whole experience was impressively peaceful. Remarkably for a country in which military intervention in politics is more a norm than an exception, the army and police handled themselves with restraint. And the Sierra Leone electorate – in roundly rejecting a president they elected by a large margin just 5 years before, but who was largely perceived to have delivered too little in the post-war period – proved itself to be politically and democratically sophisticated.

Since the final vote was cast, President Koroma seems to have impressed almost everyone, including many of his critics. His speech at the opening of parliament was impressive, and his nominees for cabinet ministers drew praise from many quarters, though also criticism for including too few Mende-speaking southerners. For my part, I’m delighted to see the strong, independent (and female) voice of Zainab Bangura – by most accounts one of Sierra Leone’s most impressive individuals, and one not afraid to speak her mind – filling the spot of Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Relations.

On the streets of Freetown, it is clear that Koroma is the darling of the capital city, which voted for him more than 2 to 1. Unlike former President Kabbah, an older and reclusive man rarely seen outside of the Presidential Lodge where he both lived and worked, President Koroma seems to be everywhere. He drives around town in a caravan of SUVs, escorted by police with sirens blaring, and people flock to catch a glimpse. In what has become his signature move, he always has his window down – the only exception in a row of tinted obscurity – and waves at the people lining the streets. They, in turn, love it.

Koroma’s honeymoon will soon pass and he will have to show genuine progress to keep the people’s affection. But for now there is an air of optimism in the streets that is like nothing I’ve felt since my arrival here nearly two years ago. The people’s expectations are sky-high, and they are watching Koroma and his APC government closely to see if they will deliver the new and better Salone they promised.

If they don’t, I think the electorate – as proven in the just-completed elections – will not hesitate to toss them out.

The vote count continues

2007-09-13T19:24:00.000Z

Hi all. Below is an update from my intrepid guest-blogger and vote-watcher Adam. As the results roll in, so do many stories of obvious vote-rigging. These include multiple polling stations in which the number of votes cast exceed the number of registered voters -- a clear sign of trouble. The electoral commission is tossing out any such results, and will also investigate all polling stations with 100% turn-out and any polling stations with a turn out above 95% for which someone filed a formal complaint.

Some people have asked me what the rigging actually entails -- i.e., how do people mess with the votes. I'm not sure, but the conventional wisdom is that rigging is most prevalent in areas that are strongholds of a single party. If there are no independent observers or observers from the minority party, and everyone present is a supporter of the majority party, then perhaps no one objects if people vote multiple times or otherwise stuff the ballot box.

Anyway, by most accounts the rigging is pretty evenly split between both parties, and will not be decisive in determining the winner.

The key now is whether people accept the results once finalized.

********************************

Count is now on 76.1 percent and we're getting extremely close to being able to declare APC as the winners since on current votes they are ahead 60-40 (a huge lead of nearly 300,000 votes). The SLPP would need all but 5 percent of the votes yet to be declared to win, which to be frank doesn't look likely.

Incredibly, the APC currently has 43 percent of Bonthe votes with 94 percent declared, and 38 percent of Moyamba votes. The Margai factor has been huge. The projection is that the numbers will narrow a fair bit, to 55-45 since there are quite a few SLPP votes still to declare, but that would still be a big winning margin (around 200,000 votes in fact).

This will be my last message, as I am flying out tomorrow and there is no press conference now until Monday since it seems that the last 25 percent are mostly the subject of investigation. NEC [the electoral commission] are investigating all results with a turn-out of over 95 percent which have official complaints lodged, investigating all incidences of 100 percent turnout and invalidating all results with over 100 percent turnout, and, reading between the lines, this would seem to involve much of the final quarter of results.

Looking at districts still to post significant results, and if what NEC says about investigations on suspect turn-out mainly applies to these stations - as appears to be the case - then Pujehun, Kenema and Kailahun are the main suspects from an SLPP perspective, and to a lesser extent Bombali and Kambia for the APC.

If you add the votes remaining from the Northern districts yet to declare you get an estimated 80,000 APC votes which would take them very, very close to the mark. Meanwhile if a lot of these suspect results are cancelled then the APC will win by a country mile anyway. But the process will take a while yet, and there have now to be concerns about renewed violence in the meantime.

All the best from a very sunny Freetown.
Adam

The count begins

2007-09-10T20:48:00.000Z

My friend Adam is putting together daily updates on the runoff vote count, so rather than trying to redo that on my own, I'm going to post some of his updates.

Here is his account of the runoff on Saturday and the returns thus far.

Thanks to Adam for guest blogging.

******

We've been having all kinds of fun here.

Bits and bobs of violence in the run-up to the election, but Saturday was pretty peaceful all round. A bit of ballot box stuffing and intimidation was alleged by both parties in the other's respective core areas, but hopefully it will come out as broadly free and fair, which is certainly what Christina Thorpe [head of the electoral commission] is saying. It was a lovely weekend to be in Sierra Leone, and the sun is even shining again.

Early provisional results suggest the APC has done quite well onpicking up PMDC votes in Bo, Bonthe, Moyamba, Freetown and Kono, which with a continued strong showing in the West and North would probably be enough for Ernest Koroma (of the APC) to take the Presidency. The independent news network radio, who collect provisional results from outside polling stations, are giving Koroma 54 percent based on a spread of 35 percent of results from around the country.

Today's official results, based on 22.2 percent of the vote are even more striking, with the APC taking 64 percent to SLPP's 36. Projecting these out gives a 60-40 victory for Koroma. The APC are picking up votes everywhere, running neck and neck in Kono, taking 44 percent in Moyamba, 40 percent in Bo and even over 30 percent in Pujehun of votes declared thus far. The Freetown margins are huge, around 70 percent APC. Charles Margai seems to have been a big factor. There are no results yet from Kailahun, Kambia, Bonthe or Koinadugu so the projections will be more accurate when these come in, but if these districts even roughly balance each other out then it will be a massive APC victory, not even close.

This doesn't happen very often in Africa. Stay posted!

Election Update

2007-08-31T15:32:00.000Z

My apologies for not keeping this site up-to-date on the election results. I suspect many of you have seen coverage in the international press. Nonetheless, I’ll offer a little summary and update now.

The election on August 11 went very smoothly, and was deemed “free and fair” by most local and international observers. Sierra Leoneans were rightly congratulated – and congratulated themselves – for holding a peaceful election with very little violence or intimidation (though there were accusations of intimidation and vote rigging by both of the leading parties).

The opposition All People’s Congress (APC) quickly claimed victory in this first poll, supported by reports from the Independent Radio Network and other local media. Official results trickled in more slowly over the following two weeks, but eventually confirmed the early claims: the APC’s Ernest Bai Koroma won 44% of the presidential vote, followed by the current vice president, Solomon Berewa of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), with 38%. The bulk of the remaining votes (14%) were captured by Charles Margai, a former SLPP member who broke away and started a new party, the People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC), in January 2006. Parliamentary results were similar: 59 seats for the APC, including all 21 in the Western Area (the region that includes the capital, Freetown), 43 for the SLPP and 10 for the PMDC.

The story doesn’t end there, however, because none of the presidential candidates attained the 55% majority required to avert a run-off. The country will therefore go to the polls yet again, on Saturday September 8 – nearly a month after the first poll, and two weeks after the National Electoral Commission (NEC) announced the official results. This time, voters will have just two choices, the APC and the SLPP, and the party that gains a simple majority will win the presidency. (Parliamentary seats are awarded on a first-past-the-post system, independent of the presidential contest, and therefore – barring legal challenges – are already decided).

The PMDC’s voters will be crucial in the run-off. Support in the first round for the APC and the SLPP followed traditional regional divides, with APC polling strongly in the Temne-speaking (and ethnically diverse) North and West, and the SLPP in the Mende-dominated South and East. The SLPP’s poor showing in the Western Area, where the APC won all 12 parliamentary seats plus more than 60% of presidential votes, was a blow to the ruling party, but the greatest damage was the loss of votes to the PMDC in the Southern and Eastern strongholds. Margai won a majority in one southern district, Bonthe, while polling a close second – 37%, 44%, and 36%, respectively – to the SLPP in Bo, Pujehun, and Moyamba, as well as Kenema (22%) and Kailahun (15%). Almost certainly the vast majority of these votes came from former SLPP supporters.

Now, for the run-off, the PMDC’s leadership has cast their lot behind the APC, and Margai is campaigning alongside Koroma in the crucial South and East. This is a dramatic (and probably positive) change to Sierra Leone’s traditional regional- and ethnic-based politics, and it will be fascinating to see whether the PMDC’s voters in these areas follow their leadership and support the northern-based APC or revert to their support for the SLPP. Truly, Sierra Leoneans are getting a lesson – as American voters did in 2000 and 2004 – in the fact that sometimes, their votes really do count.

Emerging Violence
On a less positive note, the run-off period has already proven more volatile than the initial election period. The stakes could not be higher, with both parties realizing they could either win or lose on September 8. (Prior to the first vote, many analysts and SLPP supporters were confident in a win for the ruling party, which carried 70% of the vote in the last presidential election in 2002.)

As a result, tensions are also running high. Supporters who feel their party was hurt by intimidation or vote-rigging in the first round are now confronting their opponents, sometimes angrily and sometimes with violence. Fights have broken out in Freetown and in the volatile Eastern region, where a dusk-to-dawn curfew was temporarily imposed on Monday August 27.

Just yesterday (August 30), dozens of young people in the southeastern town of Segbwema, near the border with Liberia, stoned an APC convoy. The pro-SLPP youths and pro-APC guards and supporters then fought with sticks and stones until the police intervened. The local SLPP office was also set aflame.

President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah announced that he would impose a state of emergency if violence continued, while a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon expressed concern about the violence and called “on all parties and their leaders to do everything necessary to prevent the situation from escalating.”

The first question, therefore, is whether party leaders really do attempt to calm their supporters. (Thus far, both have proven relatively willing to do so). The second is how much control leaders actually exert over rank and file members, and whether a call for peace from the top will translate into restraint on the ground.

A week of campaigning remains before the next vote, which will be followed again by a long and careful counting period, and then the crucial test of whether parties accept the results.

Stay tuned.

The Campaign in Photos

2007-08-10T19:17:00.001Z

Here is another photo essay from the BBC, this one with pictures of political campaigning.

A Freetown Slum in Photos

2007-08-07T14:01:00.000Z

Check out this BBC photo essay about one of the worst slums in Freetown. I used to drive by it every day. It really is that bad.

Artists for Peace

2007-08-06T15:32:00.000Z

Here are the Artists for Peace, mentioned in the last posting, on tour last week in Sierra Leone's "upcountry" provinces. (Photos are courtesy of Michelle Delaney, United Nations Development Programme.)

Artists for Peace on a peace rally through Kenema.

Another Artists for Peace rally.

Artists Daddy Ish from DX3, Camoflage and Wahid performing

Artists Cee Jay and Camoflage performing

Artists for Peace at a streetside concert

Vote vote, no violence...

2007-07-30T10:51:00.000Z

Have you heard that Sierra Leone has a national election on August 11? I think I’ve been avoiding writing about it because I wasn’t sure where I stood – optimistic or pessimistic, anxious or confident, APC or PMDC or SLPP. At this point, though, it’s becoming difficult to avoid.

The election is certainly the only thing anyone is thinking or talking about here in Freetown, and indeed nationwide. It has been looming for months, and by now is everywhere: in the larger-than-life photos of the ruling party’s standard-bearer, “Solo B”, adorning banners around town; in the red-shirted crowds outside the opposition APC’s headquarters; in the hysterical and uber-politicized newspaper headlines; in the obsession with what color – red, green, orange – are your clothes… umbrella… vehicle… loyalty. (The parties each have a color, and any display is considered a vote of support.)

This is Sierra Leone’s second national election since the end of the war, and the first conducted without the help (and safety net) of a significant United Nations presence. The UN agencies are still here – UNICEF, UNDP, World Food Programme – as are a small number of Mongolian peacekeepers guarding the Special Court, but the more extensive UN forces were withdrawn at the end of 2005 and have been replaced by a much pared-down support mission known as UNIOSIL.

As countless observers have pointed out, this is a crucial turning point for Sierra Leone. Pull off another democratic election without major violence or insecurity and you’ve scored a major point in proving – and securing – Sierra Leone’s peace and political stability.

Fail to pull it off, and… well, as a local commentator said recently in Freetown’s Concord Times newspaper, “Failure is simply not an option.”

Making things more challenging, but potentially more meaningful should the election go smoothly, is the recent breakaway from the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) of a new party, the People’s Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC). This third party has shaken up the electoral landscape for the two grandfathers, the SLPP and the All People’s Congress (APC), which between themselves have ruled Sierra Leone since independence in 1961 – the APC for 24 years and the SLPP for 16 years, including the last 9 – with the exception of various bouts of military rule.

Voting in Sierra Leone, as in much of Africa, is strongly regional and based in ethnic and family identity. Most places are strongholds for one or the other party – the APC in the predominantly Temne-speaking north; the SLPP in the Mende-speaking south and east – and truly competitive areas are relatively limited.

The splintering of the SLPP, however, has meant that areas that were previously strongholds for the ruling party are being hotly contested. Divisions have emerged within chiefdoms, communities, and even families, in places unaccustomed to political plurality. Moreover, the acrimony of the party’s own division and of the campaign thus far mean that this newfound democratic contestation could be far from civil.

The APC, meanwhile, is eager to capitalize on frustration and disillusionment with the ruling party, and to build on its recent electoral gains. After losing to the SLPP by a landslide in the first post-war elections in 2002, the APC gained ground in the subsequent local elections in 2004, including control of the Freetown City Council. Today, immensely popular songs by artists like Emmerson rail against what they call the corruption and ineptitude of the present government; one of Emmerson’s most popular, “Borbor Bele,” refers to the big round “bellies” of corrupt politicians, who “eat” (steal) money meant for public purposes, while his more recent “Tu fut arata” (two-footed rat) is a pointed indictment. Blasting from poda-podas (minibus taxis) and street-side radios around the capital, such songs serve as a sort of audio manifestation of the anger of those who feel they haven’t benefited from the last 5 years of peace.

The result of all of this is that tensions and emotions are high, and no one is sure – though many are hopeful – that the election will not spark serious violence.

Isolated incidents have already flared in several places: mild skirmishes between competing parades in Freeotwn on Sierra Leone’s independence day in April; a rash of house-burning in the southern province of Pujehun that many believe to be politically motivated; allegations of shots fired during a visit by the PMDC’s candidate Charles Margai in eastern Kailahun district; and, most recently, the beating of an SLPP supporter and former military officer named Tom Nyuma by the bodyguards of the APC’s Ernest Koroma, who claim they were averting an assassination attempt against their leader.

These events themselves are, sadly, not particularly surprising. Nor are they necessarily disastrous. No one expects the election to be completely free of violence; not in a country where thuggery was so recently (if not currently) used to promote electoral victory, and where so many people were so recently involved as fighters in a civil war. Observers of African elections (perhaps not unlike observers of Chicago elections not too long ago) expect a little political violence, though they hope to minimize it; they also know that such violence does not necessarily mean a slide into utter chaos and all-out war.

That said, there are some reasons for concern. Rumor has it that the APC body guards who assaulted Tom Nyuma – as well as his own guards – were all former members of the West Side Boys, one of the most brutal forces in a generally brutal war. Visitors upcountry report seeing guns in the hands of some of the political supporters, though all guns were supposed to have been collected during the country’s Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program. (Popular wisdom has it that there are caches of weapons hidden around the country, but that these are not enough to wage an all-out war against the Sierra Leone military – not to mention any international forces that might turn up.)

But perhaps most worrying are the comments of the candidates themselves. Both Ernest Koroma (APC) and Charles Margai (PMDC) have publicly accused the SLPP of planning to rig the election, and have stated that they will not accept the results of such a contest. Though their suspicions are not unfounded (vote-rigging has been common on all sides in past elections) their threats raise the possibility of post-election violence should the losing parties not accept the results.

That said, the election season is still young, and much can happen between now and the final tally. August 11 is just over two weeks away, but if none of the parties get the required 55% majority – an outcome that many consider possible, if not likely – then the top two go to a run-off on September 3. With any luck, by then the party’s leaders will have toned down the rhetoric, and their followers will be ready to let the election go forward violence-free.

**************************

On that note, I attended launch last week of the Artists for Peace concert tour, followed by one of their first concerts. Twelve of Sierra Leone’s young and up-and-coming musicians, some of them relatively well-known and popular locally, have collaborated on a pair of songs promoting a violence free election. They are now off on a cross-country tour to give free outdoor concerts - at strategic venues like Lumley Roundabout and East End Police in Freetown, and major towns upcountry - promoting their message.

The artists launched the tour last Wednesday at Paddy’s nightclub. (Paddy’s is a Freetown institution where, legend has it, during the height of the war you could mingle with shady diamond dealers, humanitarian aid workers, and fighters from every side of the conflict. Today, still, you can meet nearly every swath of Freetown’s population at Paddy’s on a given Friday or Saturday night. )

The act might have be cheesy (“if you want peace, turn to your neighbor and tell them you love them”) but seemed to have a degree of resonance here in Sierra Leone that I cannot fully understand. The songs themselves are catchy and the artists both talented and entertaining. Possibly the strangest moment was when one of the artists, Wahid, capitalized on Sierra Leoneans’ fierce loyalty to English Premiership football teams to get the crowd fired up. “Arsenal, do you want a violence free election?” he said in Krio; then, “Manchester, do you want a violence free election?”, thereby inspiring vocal responses even if only in the name of the teams’ rivalry. (For you Americans, think Yankees and Red Sox.)

I certainly came out of the night a supporter of the Artists for Peace, and traveled to the impoverished and crime-ridden eastern part of Freetown on Saturday night to watch them perform in a parking lot alongside the main road out of town toward the provinces, at a place known as Shell Station for a now-renamed gas station. A crowd of several hundred people gathered to watch the Artists for Peace and their partner acts – a comedian, an MC, a drama group known as the Freetown Players, and for that night, a group of reggae artists known as Zion Lions – put on a high-energy free show. The crowd was rapt and engaged, actively participating in the call-and-response about violence and war and why Sierra Leone should not return to either, and then dancing and cheering as the musicians performed: “vote vote, no violence, vote vote, no violence,” as the catchy refrain of one song loudly proclaims.

I hope the crowds at future shows receive them with as much enthusiasm, and I hope their message is heard. You might think music is a thin shield against possible violence, but given its reach and popularity, it might be one of the best shields there are.

The artists themselves certainly think it is worthwhile. One of them told me he was somewhat nervous to go on tour, afraid they might be branded as supporters of one or another party, though they’ve been at great pains to remain neutral. “My mom doesn’t want me to go,” he admitted.

But he believes that music – the same force that can get a whole dance club bumping and grinding to the same beat – can also help promote a violence-free election.

I hope he’s right.

I’ll wash your hands, you wash mine…

2007-07-26T10:36:00.000Z

I’ve become quite accustomed over the last year to bucket showers, which I use not only while visiting villages upcountry but also in my own (and otherwise rather cushy) Freetown house. (For the uninitiated, a bucket shower is where you literally wash yourself from a large bucket, usually using a smaller bowl or tub to pour the water over your head and body.)

In fact, I’ve come to prefer a good bucket shower to a dribbly overhead shower: the rush of water pouring over your head at once is much more satisfactory than a feeble stream of water from a rusty showerhead.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the hardest part of your body (by far) to wash without running water is your hands. One hand must be holding the bowl and pouring water, leaving just one hand to soap and rub and rinse itself.

A common solution is for someone to help you wash your hands. Before a meal in local homes or eating spots, particularly upcountry, someone will turn up with a teapot-shaped plastic jug or small bowl. You soap your hands and they’ll pour the water over them – into a bucket or onto the dirt ground – while you rub them clean.

It’s rather a nice ritual. Children pour water for their parents. Friends do so for one another. Cleansing is a shared experience.

As I struggled with my one-handed hand-washing the other night, I realized that the luxury of modernity – running water – has eliminated this need to ever have someone help you wash your hands.

Somehow, that seems like a bit of a loss.

Di rain don com

2007-07-26T09:43:00.000Z

A member of my research team turned up in my office this morning soaked from his shoulders to his ankles. "U don soak!" I said in Krio. "Wetin happen, u no get umbwella?" He laughed. "I get!" he said, "I did have an umbrella. But an umbrella doesn’t matter in rain like this."

I won't wax lyrical about the rainy season this year, in part because I did enough of that last year, and in part because I am feeling less romantic and more depressed about the downpours this year, which came much earlier (it's already been raining off and on for a month) and, it seems, more intensely (we’ve already had days where you wake to a torrential downpour and get hardly a moment’s reprieve all day).

I will, however, show off the prowess of my new camera, which managed – with no help from its owner – to actually capture an approaching storm and then the dramatic rain and wind itself. (Note: These were taken nearly a month ago from my balcony, in one of the first rainstorms of the year.)

... And Lows

2007-06-28T15:12:00.000Z

On the other extreme, several English friends of mine have recently run headlong against the cold, unforgiving, soul-sapping wall of the Sierra Leonean health system (or lack thereof).

Sierra Leoneans will do all they can not to reach this wall, foregoing health care entirely or turning to native herbalists or quack pseudo-doctors, some of which are well-meaning and others pure crooks.

Foreigners often can’t understand this reluctance. “You’re clearly sick or hurt or dying,” we say. “You need to go to the hospital. Otherwise you will get worse. Otherwise you will die.”

So we get involved. We convince people to go to a “real” doctor. We help wrangle them a bed in a hospital. We talk with doctors and nurses. We buy drugs. We pay for treatment.

And only then do we notice that none of it is helping at all. That our money – for bribes as well as legitimate fees – is being sucked down a hole. That no care is being given. That the patient is being ignored, or even abused. That he is still getting worse, and is still going to die.

A friend is fighting this battle with one of the country’s best government hospitals, a place that has received extensive international support and a thorough facelift in recent years. The clean, freshly-painted facility seems from outside a cheery, healthy place, overlooking one of down-town’s main streets.

This is, in every way, a façade.

More than a week ago, my friend brought in an old man who lives in his compound, allowed to sleep under a zinc-roof shack in return for service completed years ago. He is given food and the occasional few thousand leones (few dollars) by the landlord, though he’s not really an employee any longer.

Recently, the old man became sick, and then sicker. No one else wanted to get involved in his care – not the landlord, not his own children – and seemed content to let him die on the concrete, in the rain, under his rusted tin shack.

But my friend, still filled with the optimism (naïve, perhaps) of the wealthy world, couldn’t allow this. He argued and persuaded and finally convinced the landlord to allow him to bring the old man to hospital.

At first, he couldn’t get the man a bed. Turned away day after day, he finally put in a phone call and pulled some strings with a well-connected doctor, and got the man admitted.

Then began the battle with the doctors and nurses. He gave them money: some legitimate fees, some bribes masked as the cost of supplies like gloves and syringes, and others outright requests for money for their own pockets.

The doctors diagnosed heart problems and prescribe a collection of medications. My friend bought the medication, only to be told it was the wrong medicine and he would have to give the nurses money to buy it themselves. (Translation: he should have let them buy the medicine in the first place so they could get a cut.)

He returned every few days to see how the man is doing, and found each time that no one had touched the man since he was brought to the hospital: not to clean him, not to treat him, and certainly not to give any real care. Unable to rise from the bed, the man lay in his own waste. His health had deteriorated rapidly, and as far as my friend was concerned, he hadn’t been given any of the medicine he'd purchased (twice).

Despite this, the doctors and nurses continued to demand money. “We haven’t been paid for months," they say. “We don’t have the supplies we need.” My friend argued and fought, but eventually paid – because, after all, isn’t this man’s life worth another $10? $20? $100?

After a week or so, the nurses and doctors started to mention death, and to prepare my friend for the significant costs involved if the man were to die in the hospital. My friend became convinced they were letting him die because it would be more profitable for them than keeping him alive.

All this made him wonder if the others had been right; if he would have been better just to let the man die in peace. He wanted to help, but was rendered helpless by a system of corruption and inaction, in which the patient’s well-being seems to be the furthest thing from everyone’s mind.

“What more can I do?”, he asked me one night. “And when do I give up?”

As for me, I keep wondering how you fix a system so thoroughly broken. Where do you begin? By paying doctors and nurses more, and hoping that in return they actually care for patients? By firing those who don’t and starting from scratch with recent graduates and new hires? By importing foreign doctors with foreign training and a foreign work ethic?

Another English friend is a medical student, here for 6 weeks to work in a children’s hospital. He listened to my story about the old man without a hint of surprise or horror.

After just a few weeks here, he’s gotten used to watching doctors ignore patients – even when those patients are children and babies. He’s gotten used to banging his head against the wall, trying to improve the quality of care, trying to save a life.

He’s gotten used to seeing babies die.

He came with us to the wedding on Sunday, and every time I turned around he was surrounded by small children and grinning like a schoolboy. There he is dancing with three little girls. There he is touching the head of a small baby, wrapped in a brightly-colored lapa in her mother’s arms. There he is sharing his camera with a crowd of kids. There he is lifting a grubby boy into the air.

“He's just glad to see children who are happy, and aren't going to die in a few hours,” someone said.

Amen.

Of Highs...

2007-06-28T14:43:00.000Z

I think I’ve said before, Sierra Leone is a country of extremes. A day is either a joy or a travail. A scene is either of breathtaking natural beauty or of breathtaking man-made misery. An interaction is either a model of warmth and generosity, or an inexplicable barrage of anger or sullenness. There is no in-between.

Sunday was a day of light and celebration, and a reminder of why I love this country and its people.

My housemates and I were invited to attend a wedding in Kissy, a neighborhood in the poorer eastern part of Freetown. The bride, Sento, was the daughter of one of our guards, Santigi Bangura. We were delighted to be invited, and he was ecstatic that we would attend.

The wedding was held in the rocky courtyard behind his home. A makeshift mosque – rough wooden poles covered with a blue plastic tarp, with rows of plastic chairs and the ground covered with prayer mats – housed the ceremony and the Muslim revelers. Other friends and family members spilled over into the surrounding courtyard, perched on chairs and stairs and walls.

As is typical in Sierra Leone, we were welcomed with overwhelming warmth, and – as the “strangers” at the celebration – treated like gold.

We were also swept immediately into the heart of the festivities: I was enlisted as an unofficial official wedding photographer, and even invited (nay, dragged) into the mosque itself, and to a spot on the ground just between the bride and her father. And my housemate Tom was spotlighted as the special musical guest, singing songs of his own creation to the amusement and enjoyment of the Sierra Leonean crowd.

I think the pictures speak for themselves, but suffice to say, it was one of the best days I've spent in Sierra Leone.

Poor, Poorer, Poorest

2007-05-31T13:59:00.000Z

Apologies for the long silence, and I hope I haven’t lost your attention entirely. I should be posting more frequently now.

***
If you spend enough time in development, you are likely to start playing the “poorest of the poor” game. As in, “I work with orphaned children because they are the poorest and most marginalized children among millions of poor and marginalized children,” or “I work in post-conflict countries because they are so much more destitute and devastated than other poor countries.”

I guess on some level, that’s how I ended up in development in the first place. I was originally interested in poverty reduction and health promotion in the U.S., focusing on pockets of poverty in the inner cities, Native American reservations, and Appalachia and the deep South.

Soon enough, however, I figured out that even the poorest of the poor in the U.S. are well-off by global standards, and I set off for the developing world. I started in South Africa, a country with devastating poverty in the midst of dazzling wealth, with staggering rates of HIV and AIDS, and with the brutal legacy of apartheid still alive and well. And I spent time in Latin America, a region I love and in which misery persists – particularly among indigenous populations and other marginalized groups – even as countries stabilize and incomes rise rapidly for the middle- and upper classes.

But then you look around Mexico City or Johannesburg, and you realize that these are far from the neediest cases. These are the stars of the developing world, countries with growing economies and improving standards of living, countries with systems – private, state, civil society – that function more often than not.

And so you end up back in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with 34 out of 50 of the world’s Least Developed Countries. And you end up in a country in the “real Africa” (in contrast to South Africa), a country where the needs are immense and immediate.

You end up someplace like Sierra Leone.

And in a strange way you become accustomed to the conditions there. You become accustomed to the fact that the health infrastructure is somewhere between non-existent and barely functioning; that teachers don’t get paid and therefore don’t teach; that roads outside the capital are treacherous tracks of dirt and rocks; that there is virtually no public provision of electricity in the capital city (let alone the rural areas); that the government does little and the people expect even less.

And you start looking even within Sierra Leone – one of the poorest countries in the world – to find the poorest of the poor. Do I give a few coins to that begger? No, he’s able-bodied and only slightly disfigured by some disease or disaster. I’ll give them instead to the double amputee, whose arms both end a few inches below the elbow. Will I give my leftover breakfast to the Polio Brigade, an amiable gang of teenage boys in wheelchairs, racing on the strength of well-defined upper bodies while their gnarled and shriveled lower limbs fold pretzel-like below them? Nah, they seem pretty happy anyway, and at least they have wheelchairs and friends. I’ll give the breakfast to the woman by the cotton tree, either mad or dull or both, staring without comprehension at the world passing her by.

It’s a strange and vicious cycle, a sort of sympathy triage, and one consequence is that you start to overlook the misery of those along the way. If you’re not the most desperate person in the room, the most miserable I’ve seen today, then you’re not worth my time and psychological energy.

Another consequence is that you start to forget how extreme your situation is, that even those deemed “A-Okay” in your local triage are desperately poor and infinitely deserving by any comparative standards, that your own world is so uniquely destitute as to be almost beyond comparison.

Traveling to Malawi was a bit of a reminder for me of this latter consequence, this skewing of perspective that comes from living in the world’s second-poorest country.

Not that Malawi is exactly prosperous: according to the Human Development Index – a composite measure that takes into account income, education, and health indicators and then scores and ranks all the world’s countries – Malawi is 166th out of 177 countries in the world, just 10 countries “ahead” of Sierra Leone. The tiny, land-locked country is virtually devoid of mineral resources, and is one of the most densely populated countries in sub-Saharan Africa; as the U.S. State Department puts it, Malawi’s 12.5 million people live in a “land the size of Pennsylvania, with a lake the size of Vermont.” Nearly 90% of the population ekes out a living through subsistence agriculture. 14% of people aged 15-49 are HIV-positive; life expectancy at birth is just 39.8 years; and each woman will give birth, on average, to 6.1 children during her lifetime.

In short, Malawi, like Sierra Leone, is unacceptably poor. And yet, in the game of “the poorest of the poor,” Sierra Leone wins hands-down. Two thirds of Sierra Leonean adults are illiterate, compared to a third of Malawians. Half of Sierra Leone’s population but “only” a third of Malawi’s is undernourished. In Malawi, 17.5% of children die before their fifth birthday; in Sierra Leone, that number is 28.3% – nearly one in three.

Visiting Malawi for a few weeks, I was struck by the visible differences. The capital and even smaller cities are peppered with international corporate chains (Nando’s chicken, Shoprite supermarkets) as well as some (admittedly minimal) manufacturing. And there don’t seem to be nearly as many people lounging around with nothing to do. (In Freetown, street corners are filled with young men with nothing better to do than loiter, perhaps hawk some meager wares or money changing services, and watch the world go by.)

Paved roads stretch throughout Malawi, even along steep mountainous tracks, and though far from the smooth raceways we enjoy in the US, they are of reasonable quality. (In Sierra Leone, even the major highway between Freetown and the “second” and “third” cities – Bo and Kenema – is only smoothly paved for 20 miles; the rest is a mess of crumbled half-pavement, gravel, and dirt and rocks.) Government workers like teachers and nurses are provided with decent brick houses, a factor that might help ensure they actually turn up to work (though it doesn't ensure the clinics and schools have the supplies they need.)

All this is not to say Malawi isn’t in need of help. As my brother can attest, there are health problems and educational deficits and poverty to spare.

It’s just to highlight that there is a hierarchy of poverty in this world, and Sierra Leone sits near the very bottom. And it’s to remind me – and you – that Sierra Leone is hardly representative of the continent of Africa (and less so of the rest of the developing world.) Much of Africa is growing and developing and scrabbling its way into some share of global prosperity. The continent’s larger, wealthier, and/or more successful members – countries like Ghana, Kenya, or Botswana – increasingly sport a level of development and standard of living that contradict the common image of Africa, one of starving children, AK-47-toting militias, and bullet-scarred capitals.

Sierra Leone is an extreme, a country emerging from a decade of civil war and decades of governmental mismanagement, and with dramatic shortfalls in infrastructure, industry, and governance, as well as every measure of human well-being.

So when I describe Sierra Leone, don’t imagine that I’m talking about Africa as a whole. The Kenyas and South Africas – not to mention Malawis – of the continent would be very disappointed if you did.

Taaaaay Tambaka -- Stories and Photos

2007-04-02T11:07:00.000Z

I’m heading off on a family trip to Malawi later today. People back home often think of Africa as a single neighborhood -- “Oh, you live in Sierra Leone?” they say, “My neighbor’s son’s girlfriend is spending the summer in Namibia. You should go visit.” In fact, the continent is massive, the world’s second-largest: 11.6 million square miles, spanning desert, jungle, savannah, mountains, and everything in between. (The U.S., in contrast, is 3.7 million square miles, and all of Europe is less than 4 million.) And getting around is never easy. Flights between African countries are generally infrequent, unsafe, and expensive. Often it’s easier and cheaper to fly via Europe. Trains are generally non-existent, except in southern Africa where colonial relics still ply old trade routes, and roads – well, let’s not get into the roads. But here I am, off to Malawi – 3,493 miles from Sierra Leone – where my baby brother is working as a Peace Corps volunteer. We thought we were smart, moving to Africa together, but his placement is probably as far away from me as it could be. Oh well -- $1600 and 16 hours of flying (via Accra and Nairobi) will get me there, eventually. **********************************************************************************

Last week I was at the border of another (much closer) country: Sierra Leone’s northern neighbor, Guinea. Nestled in a crescent-shape from the Atlantic on one side to Cote d’Ivoire on the other, and hugging Sierra Leone and part of Liberia in between, Guinea is as desperately poor as its neighbors and was recently named the most corrupt country in Africa. Strikes and civil unrest crippled the country in January and February, though things are now reportedly calm. (http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L29611307.htm)

I was with three of my researchers, exploring a very poor and remote part of northern Sierra Leone: Tambaka chiefdom, Bombali district. To get there you drive for 3 hours from Freetown to Makeni on a good road, then another 3 hours on a bad road to Kamokwei, then another hour on a worse road to the Kabbah ferry. The ferry itself is a glorified raft pulled by hand (with the help of steel cables) across the broad and deep river that marks the border of Tambaka chiefdom. (The picture above is actually another ferry, at Tamparay, which we were forced to take in one direction because a van had gotten stuck on the Kabbah ferry.)

Once over the river, the roads get even worse – narrow dirt tracks, often climbing steeply over bare boulders and across treacherous bridges. (The bridge above, located just before the Tamparay ferry in Sella Limba chiefdom, was actually one of the bigger and better-maintained bridges on the route.)

The chiefdom feels more wild than other parts of Sierra Leone, with sparse population and dramatic vegetation (such as enormous green ferns right out of Jurassic Park.) You drive for miles and miles between villages, and there is often little sign of human habitation. On one end of the chiefdom lie the Otamba-Kilimi national parks, probably the only place in Sierra Leone to see animals like elephants and hippos. We stopped by the park one Sunday morning and hoped to catch a boat (canoe) down to the hippo pools, but the park was short on paddlers and we were short on time. The views from the launching pad (see photo) were worth the stop, however.

Tambaka chiefdom is deeply neglected and breathtakingly poor. In the whole chiefdom – one of the largest in the country in terms of geographic area – there is not a single junior or senior secondary school, meaning children wishing to continue past primary school must travel dozens of miles (and cross a ferry), on terrible roads and with essentially no public transport, to attend school in bordering chiefdoms. Needless to say, very few do so. (See the picture above of a primary school in Taneneh village, with two elders in front of a blackboard with an English lesson. This is a community school, in which the teacher is paid not by the government but through contributions from the poor villagers themselves.)

Health facilities are similarly lacking. In Sanya, the section headquarter town nearest the Guinean border, elders told us they lost 2-3 pregnant women per month because there was no transport to bring them to the nearest facility in Kamokwei. Recently, 5 women died at once because the local dispenser – the only medical professional in town – had gone to Makeni or Freetown to collect medicines.

In such a setting, many people in Tambaka say they’ve been forgotten by Sierra Leone, and in many ways they are more connected to Guinea than to their own country. (At a weekly trade fair in Sanya, for instance, the traders selling fabric, ground peanuts, and flip-flops quoted prices in Guinean francs, though they accepted either currency.)

Back in Freetown, friends ask where I was last week and I tell them I went upcountry. Looking for props, I add that I went “Taaaaay Tambaka,” which means (with emphasis) “Aaaall the way to Tambaka.” But even Sierra Leoneans look at me with blank faces. Maybe Tambaka really is forgotten.

The last photo is of a taxi from Guinea as it passes through the Tambaka chiefdom headquarter town, Fintonia. I can't imagine how these Peugeots navigate the roads we struggled to pass with a sturdy 4x4, but I'm told they manage -- though with many stops along the way for passengers to disembark and even help push.

Salonian Hits: Tutu Party

2007-03-06T14:51:00.001Z

Click here to see a video of "Tutu Party," one of the most popular songs in Sierra Leone. It's been on the top 10 list for years, and is played at least 4 or 5 times per night at each of Freetown's dance clubs.

The artist, Emmerson, has some really interesting political music that I'll try to track down and link to this site. This song, though, is pure fluff. The lyrics are in Krio, but I'm guessing the video will give you a pretty good sense of what it's about... But just in case, here's a taste of the chorus:

"mek we rub rub bode to bode. if you wan enjoy fine, come tutu pah-ty"

As far as I can tell, this means (roughly):

"let's rub our bodies together. if you want to have a good time, come have an ass party."

(Apologies to any Salonian readers for my atrocious Krio spelling, and an invitation to correct my translation if need be.)

The wheels on the bus

2007-02-27T13:42:00.000Z

My car is out of service at the moment so I’m back to taking “transport”: the system of shared taxis, shared mini-bus taxis (known as Poda-Podas), motorbike taxis, and the occasional large government bus, which – along with old-fashioned foot power – serves to move most of the million or so residents of Freetown around town.

A product of individual initiative, market forces, and very little government involvement, the transport system is one of the few systems in town that work relatively well. Sure, there is a certain amount of chaos to it, and you’ll probably have to walk awhile and wait awhile longer, and your ride may be far from comfortable… But basically, you can start at almost any Point A within the city’s perimeter (and beyond), and get to almost any Point B. This contrasts favorably with, for instance, the postal service.

For me, my commute begins with a 10-minute walk from my house up to the main (tarred) roads nearby: Aberdeen and Wilkinson Road. My own street is actually a relatively well-trafficked residential area, but the road is dirt and rocks and pretty rough, and taxis prefer not to venture down.

I don’t mind the walk. I chat with neighbors, enjoy the array of brightly-colored school uniforms (or grimace when the kids hassle me for “2 block”, 200 leones, for candy or a cold drink), and buy my breakfast – perhaps a bunch of bananas or roughly-peeled oranges, or a small loaf of freshly-baked bread or freshly-fried donuts – from roadside venders along the way.

When I reach Wilkinson Road, I join the crowds of people lining the road to wait for transport: dodging traffic, calling out to passing taxis, or clambering into battered poda-podas.

Most taxis are small red or white sedans or hatchbacks – the Nissan Sunny is the most common – with a thick belt of sunshine yellow paint around the waist, roughly where the wood paneling on a 1970s station wagon would be. There are also a collection of battered Peugeot station wagons on the road, modified to add a third row of seats in the back for a total of 7 passengers (or more), plus the driver.

When a taxi has room for more passengers, it will honk and slow slightly (but not stop), and you yell out your destination as it rolls by: “John Street”, “New England,” “Congo Cross,” “P-Zed.” I yell "Siaka Stevens, Two-way" to indicate that I'm willing to pay a double fare for the relatively long ride to my office. (The normal rate for a ride is 800 Leones, approximately 25 cents, for both taxis and poda-podas, but the taxis charge more if you're going a long way. Poda-podas usually ply longer and more established routes.)

If the driver wants to take you, he’ll give a subtle and often indiscernible gesture and pull slightly toward the curb. When I first got here, I was often confused as to when I was being offered a ride and when I was not -- a cause of frequent embarrassment. Once flagged to enter the car, you clamber in quickly lest the driver change his mind and pull away. (At peak times, demand far exceeds supply, so the drivers can get downright snippy and dictatorial about their cars.) If you're lucky, you get the front seat and can sit out the rest of the ride in (relative) comfort. If not, you climb in the back with two other people.

All the passengers in one car are – or should be – heading in the same general direction, but all have different destinations, so people climb in and out of the car as you go. You may start on the right side by the door, get out a few blocks later to let the middle person depart, shuffle into the middle yourself when the driver stops to pick up someone new, and shift to the left door once that person gets out not far from your own destination. It’s like musical chairs without a prize. And then there are the drivers that insist on adding an extra passenger or two: a fourth in the already-crowded back seat, a second in the front passenger seat. You can (and sometimes do) protest, but that usually lands you back on the street.

The taxis themselves are a trip. Door handles and locks almost never work; often the driver must reach around and jiggle the handle from the outside to get it open. Windscreens are frequently cracked, and the seats are torn and worn and probably infested. Windows are left open, and if it starts to rain you’ll have to ask the driver for “the winder” – the handle used to roll up your window – because the car has just one, kept in the glovebox and passed around as the need arises. And then there are times when the window is lodged in place by way of a bit of plywood, wedge of folded cardboard, or scrap of wire, and “rolling it up” is just a matter of removing that stabilizing piece long enough to yank the glass upward.

But this is nothing compared to the poda-podas. This is the local name for the battered mini-buses which form the main form of transport throughout Africa, usually second only to walking. In Salone, the poda-podas are decorated outside with declarations of religion, politics, philosophy, or sport, and with giant stickers and decals (a favorite for poda-podas and taxis alike is a 1980s picture of pop-star Madonna). Inside, the original seats – and all other fixtures – have been ripped out and replaced with four rows of metal benches. On each are crammed four adult bodies (and perhaps a child or two on laps), wedged tightly from one metal wall to the other. As each row fills from the back, the bench ahead is extended by way of a sliding fourth seat on the right-hand side, so ultimately the van is packed with bodies like a can of sardines, without aisle or breathing room or a ready means of egress.

Once on the road, the poda-podas careen recklessly, blaring musical like a carnival and dodging fellow vehicles, small children, old blind men, and stray dogs with equal abandon. Many people – particularly professional drivers that drive SUVs for the UN, NGOs, or government officials –dismissively call the taxi and poda-poda drivers “DDR drivers.” This refers to the Demobilization, Disarmament, and Reintegration (DDR) programs that the international community sponsored at the end of the war, by which former combatants were invited to trade their guns for job training and other efforts to reintegrate them into civilian life. Apparently, in Salone a favorite option was a driver’s license. Upcountry, where motorbike taxis are the primary and often sole form of transport, this DDR denomination is particularly apt, and I can't help but picture a rebel with an AK-47 whenever I see a young guy speed by on a Honda bike, with a passenger clinging to the back.

Many foreigners (even those that do deign to take taxis) refuse to take poda-podas, and I understand. They are intensely uncomfortable and unsettlingly unsafe -- though they are never driving much faster than 10 or 15 miles per hour in rush-hour traffic, so the potential damage is limited.

But my evening commute is almost always by poda-poda, because it’s impossible to convince a taxi to brave the evening traffic from downtown to my home on the west side. (Taxi drivers have an oddly anti-capitalist, seemingly self-defeating approach to pricing: most will turn down an expensive charter fare because they don’t feel like driving in that direction. Asking one to name a price to take you on an undesirable route will provoke not an astronomical price but a simple shake of the head.)

And to be honest, though the ride home is hot and long and uncomfortable, I do generally enjoy the poda-podas for their color and sense of camaraderie. From the main side door of a poda-poda hangs a young kid, the “apprentice”, calling the destination in a high-speed, repetitive, sing-song manner suggestive of a carnival: Aberdeen becomes “abahdeenabahdeenabahdeenabahdeenabahdeenabahdeen” and if you didn’t know in advance what they were saying, you wouldn’t have a clue.

Once inside, you join an instant community, brought together in shared discomfort and the usual African warmth. If the music is not too deafening, the passengers are apt to break into spontaneous collective conversation. No topic is taboo; this week I was in a poda-poda where talk turned to politics, a touchy subject these days with a national election on the way, and the whole van seemed to erupt into point and counter-point, barb and counter-barb, in an impassioned but polite debate on the leading parties. I stayed quiet and tried (mostly in vain) to follow the rapid-fire Krio.

A favorite topic, however, is the driver’s driving. If he (because they are, without exception, men) gets particularly reckless, or turns down a road likely to be packed with traffic, the 17 or so passengers get in on the act, yelling abuse and advice from the depths of the van. These back-seat drivers will then often start arguing with one another about the preferred route or safest speed, in a loud and lively but nonetheless perfectly civil exchange. (Sierra Leoneans are quick to raise their voices and love to argue, about anything and everything, at the drop of a hat. It can be off-putting until you realize that they are not usually as enraged as they sound, and that all will be friends again once the topic is closed.)

One day this week, on my way home from work, I ended up with a particularly, um, innovative driver. Taxis and poda-podas love to take convoluted routes along side streets and alleyways, supposedly to avoid the traffic but also (I suspect) to keep themselves entertained. I’ve been in Freetown for almost a year now, and I’ve seen a lot of strange and hidden corners of the city in this way, and have had countless rides where I could swear we’d somehow wandered into another city. But this poda-poda ride rivaled them all. At one point we’d traveled for 20 minutes on a series of rutted, rocky footpaths, squeezing between enormous broken-down trucks and crumbling buildings. We then lurched our way inch-by-inch down a steep gulley and emerged back on the tarred road... just a few blocks from where we began.

The most interesting part of this stand-out ride was when the poda-poda decided to brave a particularly steep hill usually avoided by the weak and battered transport vehicles (and thus a favorite route for me when I’m in my own car.) The road runs through one of central Freetown’s most decrepit slums, Kroo Bay, and is lined with open gutters and ramshackle houses and packed with pedestrians. Though a two-way road, it seems barely wide enough for one and is further narrowed by the inevitable smattering of parked cars and trucks.

At one point the road curves steeply upward from the sea-level depths of Kroo Bay. To scale this obstacle, my intrepid poda-poda driver decided to zig-zag his way up the hill, across both lanes, ping-ponging from one gutter to the other. At the top, instead of returning to his own lane, he joined a few other jerks and pulled into the opposing lane, passing the standstill line of traffic on our right. I was both bemused and annoyed, wondering how far we would get before meeting an oncoming car and becoming embroiled in an inevitable stand-off filled with blaring horns and vehicular chest-thumping.

Sure enough, we quickly met oncoming traffic and everyone was brought to a halt. Passengers in my poda-poda started shouting at our driver, who seemed unfazed. Then an irate policeman appeared, understandably furious but storming about in an unhelpful rage. He started demanding that our poda-poda, and the cars before and behind us, reverse back down the hill we’d just climbed. The driver resisted for awhile and tried to pull instead into the line of cars on our right, but then started making signs of complying.

Now, I am not a generally nervous person. But there I was, in the very back corner of the poda-poda, with 16 people between me and the door, and a driver who was contemplating a backwards drive down a hill too steep for him to climb straight in the first place. I peered behind me and saw people and cars and an ominous telephone pole in our route, and I started to sweat. I knew these poda-podas were barely roadworthy, and apt to break down or fall apart at a moment’s notice. And I knew this kind of backwards drive would test both the driver’s skills and the poda-poda’s brakes. And I knew I wanted to get out of the car.

I was not alone. My fellow passengers were shouting wildly and threatening to revolt. Several demanded that the apprentice open the door and let them out. One woman in the seat in front of me – so also packed near the back – stood up and started trying to push her way over the sea of bodies toward the door. I decided that if she made it out, I would follow – and if not, I would climb out the window to my left.

But just as the driver was about to roll the van over the edge, he pulled instead into an opening in the proper lane, and we breathed a collective sigh of relief. And then I started to giggle softly.

Because, all difficulty and misadventure aside, I really enjoy taking transport. Despite the fair amount of sweat, dirt, hassle and inconvenience involved, I tend to be much more positive about Freetown when I’m schlepping around in taxis and poda-podas than when I’m cruising by myself in my cushy and enormous SUV. Yes, there are times – particularly at night – when not having a car can put a damper on my mobility. And yes, there are days – like when a taxi driver starts bugging me for my phone number, or when I spend an hour in a poda-poda that smells of vomit– when I wish I could escape to my Nissan Pathfinder. But on the whole, I like the feeling of being part of this mass of people, and I like how interactive (and adventurous) a normal commute becomes.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night ...

2007-01-30T20:48:00.000Z

Forget the wonders of modern communication. It is the old-fashioned postal service that deserves our awe and admiration.

Seriously. You can put a stamp (purchased in local currency) on a letter in Anytown, USA and pop it in a little blue box, and you can be reasonably confident that it will turn up exactly where it was supposed to, in whatever corner of the world, intact and unopened. And it’s not a matter of American efficiency; the letter is passed from the US postal service to those run by any number of other governments – or vice versa – before finally being delivered to its destination.

Of course, it doesn’t always work this way. I was the recipient of a package, shipped to myself from Durban, South Africa, that arrived in Marlborough, NH in one piece – and still sealed – but mysteriously void of all valuable items. In the place of books and African crafts were rocks, hair products, and hair extensions.

And yet often, remarkably often, it does. Wanna send a postcard home from Timbuktu, Mali? No problem, it will get to Grandma in Three Forks, Montana. Wanna post a love letter to a heartthrob backpacking through Asia? Don't worry, he can pick it up in a village post office in Bangladesh. Wanna resign from your job in New York while sitting on the beach in Tahiti? Go ahead.

Sometimes this is a feat of logistical and political coordination. Doesn’t matter if the trip requires trucks, planes, boats, or donkeys; doesn’t matter how many oceans or mountains or borders it must cross; doesn’t matter how many thousands of miles… Hell, it doesn’t even matter if the two countries’ governments are on speaking terms. More often that you would imagine, the mail will get through.

One of my favorite “packages” was a coconut, still in the pod, shipped by my Aunt Faye from Hawaii to New Hampshire. She didn’t bother with a box or any sort of packaging – she just wrote our address in big black marker on the outside, stuck on some stamps, and sent it off with the good old USPS. We were so charmed, we didn’t have the heart to break it open.

Unfortunately, in this – as in so many other things – Sierra Leone is a bit behind the curve.

I just received a notice this week for a Registered Letter waiting for me at the Freetown Postal Service. I was delighted, and began imagining all the long-lost letters from my brother in Malawi and friends in the US.

So I found a few minutes to venture into the post office – just a few blocks down Siaka Stevens Street from my office – and made my way past the magazine sellers and fruit vendors and down into the dark, cavernous interior. I waited 20 minutes for the woman at the “Registered Letters” window to finish her conversation with her coworkers, dutifully provided my identification, and signed the registered letter form. She took out an enormous sack of letters, sorted through a couple of stacks tied with string, and finally pulled out a manila envelope sealed with packing tape.

Excited, I turned it over.

An application for a spot on my research team.

Sent October 20, 2006. More than three months ago.

From Freetown.

To Freetown.

*Sigh*

Tale from a former child soldier

2007-01-16T18:43:00.000Z

The New York Times Magazine this week features a first-hand account from a young man who spent his youth as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. It's a painful story with a happy ending, and is definitely worth reading.

Dust and Sand

2007-01-15T18:10:00.000Z

It’s Harmattan season in Sierra Leone. According to Wikipedia, the Harmattan is a dry wind blowing off the Sahara, considered a natural disaster and with implications for airline traffic and the moods of man and beast. As far as I’m concerned, the Harmattan just means an insidious reddish dust that invades every nook and cranny of my house, my car, my clothes, my cat, and my ears, and that keeps coming back – like the immortal cat of nursery rhyme fame – no matter what you do to drive it away.

When I returned from my holiday vacation at 1 a.m. last Monday, I found a house practically blanketed in dust. I literally had to wash down my bedroom floor (with a wet T-shirt, because I don’t actually own a mop) before I could sleep. I then had the whole house cleaned properly a few days later… only to find the dust had returned by this weekend. Yipes. My car is a complete disaster – inside and out – and the only upside of my newly-dust-laden cat is that I can see by her little red footprints when she’s been nosing around where she’s not allowed.

A benefit of the Harmattan is that the nights are much cooler, which makes it much easier to sleep (something I’ll have to remember when I’m sweating my way through humid March nights). The benefit of this, however, is somewhat offset by the corresponding agony of ice-cold showers. As if mornings weren’t cruel enough…

To escape the dust and celebrate my return to Sierra Leone, I joined a group of friends in sleeping over at one of the nearby beaches this weekend. This is something I discovered in December and swore I would do as much as possible. You pitch a mosquito net from the branch of a tree, lay your bedding on the sand, and pay the local guys to grill you fresh fish for dinner, build and tend a bonfire, and fry some eggs and bacon for the morning. Under the stars, with the sound of the waves in your ears – what better way to spend a night? And what better way to start the day than with a dip in the ocean, or maybe a quick turn on the surfboard (before the day’s beach-comers have arrived to witness your feeble attempts)?

Now, as I’m sure I’ve said before, the beaches of Salone are the most beautiful I have ever seen, and must be among the world’s very best. White sand, turquoise water, and brilliant green jungle-covered hills collide in a breathtaking coastline, virtually unmarred by any construction. At Bureh, the beach where we spent Saturday, there is nothing but a thatched-roof structure that serves as a kitchen – set back among the palm trees – and a few matching thatched-roof tables. If you are sharing the beach with a few dozen people, it’s a busy day – and you can always walk for 5 or 10 minutes down the beach and find yourself in perfect isolation, joined only by crabs and brilliant white seabirds.

Spending time in such a pristine, beautiful setting is always a treat, but spending the night there – sunset, sparkling stars, sunrise and all – is unbelievably refreshing.

As I can see it, there’s only one downside. Bureh has no shower, nor any fresh water at all that’s not bottled for drinking, so you return home the next day saturated with sand and salt. I can tell you from experience that a cold shower does not remove this seaside residue. And thus today, two vigorous showers later, I found myself heading off to work with distinctly salty hair. Moreover, as I climbed into my dust-covered car, I realized that the day’s Harmattan debris would only add to this mess, and I cringed.

A Bloody Past

2006-12-31T19:01:00.000Z

I’m home for the holidays and I just saw Blood Diamond, the new Leonardo DiCaprio / Jennifer Connelly film about Sierra Leone. Sitting between my parents in the tiny Latchis Theater in Brattleboro, VT, my stomach stuffed with seared scallops and pinot noir from the restaurant down the street, I watched blood-thirsty rebels and brainwashed child soldiers mow down their neighbors and family members in a fictionalized but relatively realistic 1999 Sierra Leone. Then, once Leo and Jennifer were finished gallivanting and proselytizing and falling in love, I emerged – slightly misty-eyed and a bit nauseous – into the clear night and snow-dusted streets, seemingly a universe away from Sierra Leone.

The movie was pretty good. Hollywood-ized, of course, with the requisite love story and journey of self-discovery, but powerful and with a point. And yet, to paraphrase Connelly’s character, it may be enough to make some people cry and others write a check, but it won’t be enough to make it stop. People are still killing one another in brutal ways in places like Darfur and Somalia, and we’re doing virtually nothing about it. “Sierra Leone is now at peace” reads the screen at the end of the film, but there are still “200,000 child soldiers in Africa.”

Meanwhile, back in a now-peaceful Sierra Leone, the memories of the war are achingly fresh. Peace was finally declared (after more than a decade of fighting) less than 5 years ago. The rebel invasion of Freetown, depicted in the movie, happened just 8 years ago. On that day in 1999, hordes of drugged-up, frenzied young fighters murdered, raped, and brutalized their way across the capital city, where I now live and work. Though much has been rebuilt, the city still bears those scars – shelled walls, burnt-out buildings – and so do the people within.

I’ve found that many Sierra Leoneans are disarmingly quick to recount their experiences during the war (or at least to recount a version of those experiences, however selective). It often makes me uncomfortable, hearing someone speak so openly and easily of events too horrible for me to even imagine. It’s a coping mechanism, I suppose – and perhaps a healthier one than the kind of collective silence that you find in many places – but can be strange for the listener.

As an example, I was sitting around with my local research team a few weeks ago at our guest house near Tombo, a fishing village not far from Freetown. We were chatting after dinner about this and that, and at some point talk turned to the war. Or, more accurately, to jokes about the war.

Now these “jokes” were not in the least bit funny to me or to my German colleague Tanja; to us, they were simply terrible (and quite possibly true) stories from the war. But to my researchers, trying – with newly-minted college degrees, new jobs, and hopes for the future – to escape the past and the memories that surround it, these “jokes” were probably cathartic, and definitely hysterical.

Let me give you a few examples. Just as we might say “A rabbi and a priest walked into a bar,” one of the researchers began a joke with “The rebels walked into a mosque…”

The rebels walked into a mosque and said, “Who is the most holy man here?”
People said “Our Imam” and pointed to an old man in the corner.
The Imam waved his hands and said “No no, I’m not the Imam.” The rebels said “Oh, because the Imam was the only person we were going to save.”
So the old man said “Wait, wait, I am the Imam,” to which the rebels replied, “Then you are the first man we will kill.”
Then they shot him.

Funny? The researchers thought so -- they laughed until they cried.

Or here’s another. Amputations were one of the more distinctive atrocities committed during the Sierra Leonean civil war. Men, women, and children alike were robbed of a hand, a foot, or multiple hands and feet, so their injuries could help spread terror of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, or of the other fighting forces. The practice is depicted in Blood Diamond, where a brutal commander says he is taking people’s hands so they will be unable to vote, saying “The government says the future is in your hands, but we have your hands, and we are your future.” (or something like that)

Also portrayed in the movie, and well documented in reports on the war, is the terrible question asked of many amputees: whether they wanted “short sleeves or long sleeves” – meaning whether they wanted their hands cut off just above the wrist, or above the elbow. Well, the Sierra Leoneans had a joke about this too:

A man was led to the cotton tree and his arm placed across the root. The rebel held a machete above his arm and asked “short sleeves or long sleeves.”
The man said, “you’re the tailor, you tell me what would suit me.”

Huh.

Now I don’t want to portray my researchers – or other Sierra Leoneans – as the kind of people who find such brutality amusing. These are good, intelligent, hard-working young adults, who would no sooner cut off your hand than cut off their own. That is part of what made the whole evening so surreal for Tanja and I. We were not listening to hardened warriors joking around the fire about the day’s exploits, but to the light-hearted humor of “normal” young people.

But these “normal” young people are also people whose youths and childhoods – not to mention friends and loved ones – were stolen by 11 years of civil war, and who were lucky to escape with their lives. Humans forced to withstand the kind of horrors faced in 1990s Sierra Leone must find a way to deal with that trauma, and one way is through humor.

Another way is to move on. Last night, as I grappled with the incongruity of watching my adopted country be torn apart on the big screen while sitting in a movie theater in tranquil small-town Vermont, one of my Sierra Leonean friends was being married in Freetown. If I hadn’t come home for the holidays, I would have been there with him – dancing, laughing, and making new memories to erase the old.

Somehow, that seems the best way to move forward from a bloody past.

For Want of a Cup of Rice (Another Tale of Woe)

2006-11-27T14:24:00.000Z

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Not for the (false) history of it – you know, all that jazz about the Pilgrims and the Indians sitting down together to a happy cross-cultural feast – but for the meaning it now holds. I know it’s sentimental, but what better premise for a holiday than to join together with the people you love and give thanks for all the blessings in your life?

In Sierra Leone, I am constantly reminded of just how lucky I am, and just how immensely, enormously, profoundly thankful I should be – thankful for a Thanksgiving feast on any day I want it when so many people here go hungry every day; thankful for my Ivy League education when most Sierra Leoneans would be lucky to finish primary school; thankful for my first-world health care when one quarter of children here don’t make it to the age of five.

So, at the risk of dampening your Thanksgiving joy, I want to recount another tale of woe from the last few weeks here in Freetown. I hope you take it as I do – yet another reason to give thanks.

For Want of a Cup of Rice

Two weeks ago my friend Pam and I were driving home around 11 at night, and saw a woman lying face-down on the side of the road, arms and legs splayed and the pot that she’d been carrying on her head thrown a few feet ahead of her.

We were on Wilkinson Road, the main artery through western Freetown, and my first thought was that she had been hit by a car and left for dead.

Pam jumped out while I pulled the car to the side of the road. By the time I joined her, the woman had regained consciousness and a small crowd had formed. One man knelt beside her, fanning her face and trying to find out what happened.

The woman – a young adult, probably in her early 20s – didn’t remember how she ended up on the side of the road. She did not seem to be injured, but was definitely confused and disoriented. The last thing she remembered clearly was leaving her home in Tengbeh Town (a neighborhood a mile or so from where she now lay) to walk to an uncle’s house a few miles further on.

As it turned out, she was lying unconscious by the side of the road not because she'd been hit by a car, but because she hadn’t eaten in two days. She’d left her baby daughter at home (alone)and set off to walk across town to her uncle’s house so she could beg him for a cup of rice.

With a loaf of bread bought from a passing vendor and a bottle of water from my car, she got a bit stronger and more alert – and more concerned about getting home to her daughter. So we gave her some money and arranged for transport to take her home, and then got in our own cars and drove home to sleep.

Of course, we all knew we were doing almost nothing. Probably the very next day she would take to the streets again, searching for a bit of rice to keep herself and her child alive. But what could we do? She and her child are only two out of literally thousands in this city alone (and thousands upon thousands more nationwide) who live on the razor’s edge between life and death.

From time to time we give band-aids – spare change, a loaf of bread – and the rest of the time we work at the big systemic changes needed to end this sort of misery. But such changes are slow and success is elusive, and often you’re not sure if things are moving forward or standing still – or even sliding back.

And sometimes it keeps you up at night. And sometimes it makes you want to scream. And sometimes – like when a young woman lies on the pavement for want of a cup of rice – it makes you want to cry.

But this week, at least, it makes me thankful.

Sorcerers, Thiefs and Curses -- A Tale of Woe

2006-11-21T15:43:00.000Z

Have been much remiss in posting to this site. My apologies to those of you who are frequent readers. At first I was just too busy, and a bit lacking in colorful stories. Lately, I’ve have colorful stories to spare but have been reluctant to share.

You see, it’s been a rough few weeks in Freetown – weeks that boggle the mind and test the nerves – and I’d much rather be a bearer of good news from this much-maligned part of the world than a dealer in the same old tales of woe.

But that’s not really fair either to you or to this complex country and its brave, struggling people. I should portray this place as it truly is – the misery along with the beauty, the frustration and backwardness along with the hope and promise.

And so, a tale of aggravation and woe.

Sorcerers, Thiefs and Curses

My job here is primarily to study how people in Sierra Leone resolve disputes and access justice. I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the barriers to justice, about differing understandings of justice, about competing rules systems and the complexities of a dualist system that combines English common law, various systems of customary law, and deeply held traditional beliefs.

I never expected to become one of my own case studies.

A few weeks ago, my friend and colleague Pam arrived from the States. We dropped off her stuff at the house and then went out to get a bite to eat. When she checked the next day, several hundred dollars were gone.

It wasn’t the first time that I suspected something was stolen (the most obvious example is that another American friend had $175 disappear when he was visiting, and I convinced him he’d been pickpocketed) but it was the first time that I was sure it disappeared from inside the house. Besides, I didn’t want to accuse anyone without proof, and the most likely suspect – the person who spends the most time upstairs in my apartment, and who sometimes is there without me – was the person I was most certain would not have done it.

This time, we were sure the money had disappeared from inside the house – and, more startling, while the house was locked.

The story gets a bit convoluted at this point, so I’ll spare you some of the details. Basically, one person (the person I trusted the most) told me he’d caught another person (who also lived downstairs) coming out of my locked apartment on two occasions, including the night when the money disappeared. He said the other residents confronted this guy and he admitted to having a key, but denied stealing anything.

The others said this story was false, and begged me for a day to investigate themselves before I told the landlord or the police. I agreed, and they called a “native doctor” – a sorcerer – to find the thief. Such practices are common here, both to uncover guilt and to punish the guilty (by placing a curse). Belief in this sort of witchcraft (called “juju”) is very strong among much of the population – so much so that the mere threat of calling a witchdoctor can often convince a thief to return what was stolen. I later regretted allowing it to go forward, but at the time I was just trying to let them deal with it as they saw fit, particularly as it was a family matter for them.

So the native doctor came to the house to investigate our missing money. I was at work (fortunately or unfortunately, I’m not sure) but I got the story later. All the neighbors and assorted family and friends came over, and the ceremony was conducted outside in full public view. Using potions and spells and a thatched broom, the doctor tested each person in the house in order to discover who was responsible.

Unfortunately, the sorcery turned up nothing, and instead determined that Pam and I were lying and nothing had been stolen at all.

I convinced the people downstairs that this was not true, but we were otherwise at an impasse. We just had no mutual language – in terms we use in our work, no common sets of rules – to deal with the situation. It was like some sort of Through the Looking Glass courtroom, in which the rules of evidence and logic were turned inside out and upside down. Evidence that you consider incontrovertible (X person was seen leaving the premises on the night in question, and was found to be in possession of an unauthorized key to said premises) is deemed irrelevant and inadmissible. Evidence that you consider meaningless and even ridiculous (the sorcerer determined that Y person was innocent and, in fact, that no theft occurred) is deemed incontrovertible. You are left befuddled and powerless. How do you argue your case when you don’t speak the same language? How do you access justice when the rules make no sense to you?

It’s appropriate that I found myself in this position, a parallel to what we talk about as barriers to justice for the poor and marginalized. When a poor, uneducated Sierra Leonean ends up in the “formal” courts – run in the British common law tradition, down to the robes and powdered wigs – she finds herself similarly befuddled and powerless (if anything, considerably more so). Court is held in English, a language she neither speaks nor understands. Rules of evidence are strange and foreign. The facts she considers most pertinent – not only the outcome of sorcery, but also family linkages and historical background – are deemed irrelevant and inadmissible. Even the outcomes are unsatisfying: in small communities (and overcrowded cities) where people must find a way to continue to live side-by-side, even after a nasty dispute, the emphasis is often on reconciliation: “restorative justice”, as those in the business like to say. People seek outcomes like a sincere apology (to “beg” in Krio) or reimbursement for harm done. When the guilty party is instead imprisoned or punished by the courts, no one wins – the victim gets no compensation, the guilty person gets no chance to make amends, and the community is ripped apart.

In my case, things were eventually resolved – after much screaming and crying by everyone downstairs, and many (generally unsuccessful) attempts at mediation on my part – when my landlord called from London and ordered the guilty party evicted and the locks changed. (Typical for Sierra Leone, it took the intervention of a powerful Big Man to resolve the situation.) Tensions remained high for a few weeks, and there were rumors of curses (more juju) against me and my heroic whistleblower, but eventually everyone settled down. They even admitted last week that the whole key story was true.

Now things are pretty much back to normal and I’m starting to feel more at home again, though I’m definitely more suspicious and a little jittery. The other day Pam and I noticed a large bullfrog on my back steps on our way to work in the morning. “Do you think it’s a curse?” she asked. We both laughed... but I was still relieved to find the frog was gone when I got home that night.

A few stunning photos of Freetown's environs

2006-09-26T09:54:00.000Z

My friend Ajay gets credit for these great pics.

First, the sky above the city.

Second, some kids at a school in Kroo Bay.

Third, a few scenes from that Sierra Leone-Mali game that I wrote about a few postings ago.

Thanks Ajay.

Things We Take for Granted -- Part 3: Emergency Responders

2006-09-22T11:52:00.000Z

Ambulances and fire trucks have been part of the backdrop of my life for as long as I can recall.

As a child, our house was filled with the endless chatter of a "scanner," the emergency radio that announced calls for the region's volunteer emergency workers. Holidays and family dinners were not infrequently interrupted by the sudden departure of my father or mother to answer calls for the volunteer fire or ambulance squad, and family road trips were occasionally diverted by the smell of smoke or the sight of a roadside accident.

Later, my brothers got in on the act, and I'd be left alone at the table, feeding my mom's dinner to the dog. It’s not that I didn’t want to help – I was a trained first aider and a CPR instructor, after all – but I just never felt the urge to join. Maybe I had spent too long being irked by the interruptions. At my high school graduation, the moment my family liked best was when my speech was interrupted by an ambulance carting off someone's dehydrated granny. The photo, they'll tell you, is priceless: me at the podium in black robe and yellow tassels, trying to look learned and grown-up; behind me, an ambulance with flashing lights.

With such a background, I guess I'm bound to notice that Sierra Leone is, basically, a country without emergency responders. (It’s also, incidentally, a country without fire detectors. Chief Manning, wanna send me a few?)

A man and his young daughter were killed recently in a fire in Freetown. My research assistant, Gibrill, spent most of the night – with the rest of his neighbors – carting buckets of water to douse the flames. The fire department (I guess there is one, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen a truck) turned up only after all was said and done.

Last Sunday, I was at the scene of a nasty accident. Two motorbikes hit one another and skittered off in different directions. One driver was badly scraped, but the other was much worse. He wobbled away but then collapsed, unconscious, on the side of the road. As a crowd gathered, a few people fanned his face to give him air, while others stared at the carnage: thick blood dripping from his mouth, shirt plastered with blood. Several others scurried around trying to arrange a vehicle to take him to the hospital, while a man with a whistle (why does he have a whistle? does he carry it always?) tried to slow the passing traffic.

I stood nearby in a state close to shock, wanting to help but not really knowing how, waiting for the familiar sirens but knowing that none were coming. I stepped through the crowd to check if the driver was still breathing. I told the man supporting his limp body not to move his neck or head. I turned to ask the policewoman if they had found a vehicle yet – planning to offer to bring him in my car, something I should have done from the get-go – but was told that a truck was ready to take him. More minutes passed. The man vomited suddenly, and I began to think he might die in front of me. I started to wish that my mom was there.

Eventually they loaded the man into a poda-poda and sped him off over potholed roads to the nearest hospital. I had precious little hope for the outcome: Too much time had passed, he was too badly banged up, and the hospital (once they got there) was probably too short on supplies and expertise.

As we climbed back in the car and continued on our way, I was overcome with emotion – most prominently, anger and disappointment at myself for not doing more to help. I should have stepped in from the very beginning, taken charge, ensured that his neck was kept as stable as possible and his airway kept open, had him put in my car without delay, sped him off to the closest doctor.

But I didn’t. I was paralyzed with uncertainty. I deferred to those who had already taken charge. I acted only belatedly, and only with hesitation. A half hour after we’d left the scene, I collapsed in tears, haunted by what I’d seen and (not) done.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t do more. Back home, I’m not supposed to be the one to take charge. I’m not supposed to be the hero. That role belongs to my family members – or to the others that arrive with flashing lights and blaring sirens. My job is to keep the person breathing, keep them still, stop any major bleeding, and call 911. That’s what the Red Cross taught me.

But here in Salone, calling 911 won’t get you anywhere. If you want to save someone’s life, you have to take a little more initiative.

Next time, I tell myself firmly, I will.