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Trips, Journals, Photos |
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More "Trips, Journals, Photos":
Basic Web Sites for Sierra Leone Travelers
2005 Survey - Table of Villagers' Needs
2006 Trip (#1) Travel Journals: Jewell à
2007 Trip (#2) - "Images of Sierra Leone"
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Trips, Travel Journals, and Photos ---
2006 Trip #1--Travel Journals with Photos ---
"Sierra Leone Journal: Two Weeks in the 2nd Poorest Country on Earth"
Entry
I: Days
1-2, May 7-8 (Su.-M.), 2006.
We are headed for
Why is it so poor? Sierra Leone's great contemporary tragedy is the civil war it suffered in the 1990s, one of
First we fly overnight from
As we travel, it is good to talk with others in our group of fifteen. I expect we'll get to know each other well during our two week trip, as bonding is stronger when you are share something intense.
Who are we? While most (but not all) of us attend a big downtown Minneapolis Protestant church—Plymouth Congregational—we're more specifically an older group of economically-comfortable, sometime-world travelers who love this chance to actually stay in three African villages—most for the first time—and help. We are short-term missionaries. In The New York Times Magazine, award-winning journalist Daniel Bergner provides totals suggesting that at least 500,000 missionaries per year work in underdeveloped countries, about one fourth in Africa. Some proselytize; others do good works. Proper Congregationalists that we are, we form study committees.
My
wife and I and a third person, all of us college teachers, are, for example, the
Education Committee. The three of us
will talk with schoolteachers in the three villages and survey parents about
their children's schooling. When we
return to
Our recommendations will lead to action. Already, our overall group, partly from the church and partly not, has given almost $200,000, most of it so far for corrugated-metal roofs at 500 each. When villagers use these instead of temporary U.N. tarp roofs or traditional thatch, walls no longer need yearly repairs or replacements because of damage from the heavy tropical rains of more than 120 inches per year. As a result, people can spend much more time farming. We also have provided tuition scholarships for almost 80 junior and senior high and college students this past year.
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In
This
reminds me of our visit to our daughter Jess and her husband in
So, as we prepare to fly to
I try to imagine one-third of all children in Minnesota dying before kindergarten. One of my own kids would not be here. If I were a porter, how bad off would I have to be to steal that $150,000 laptop? I lock my bags carefully and do not judge.
Entry
II: Days
2-3 (M.-Tu.),
We've arrived! Some in our group applaud when the airplane touches down late at night. We traveled with two or three hundred others, most of them Sierra Leoneans visiting or returning home—each bringing the maximum of about 124 lbs. of goods and gifts per person.
With
all this luggage, the scene in the airport is a madhouse.
Dozens of freelance porters try to move our luggage for us so they can
get tips for their work that is their livelihood.
We switch to a helicopter that holds eighteen people and then to three
cars. At each point, more porters
call, shout, sometimes nearly beg to help us with our luggage.
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Outside the helipad building in
Normally, a West African woman does not so readily offer a smile to strange men. Muslims are 60-75% of the population and Christians 23-30%, says Macmillan's Atlas and the U.S. State Dept., with religious leaders of both often espousing 19th century ideals about a woman's place.
It is a
difficult place. The childbirth rate
is 6.23 per woman, there are mouths to feed with too little food, and often the
family has one or two orphans and elderly parents to care for.
Female circumcision also is rampant here.
According to UNICEF, female circumcisers make a living by excising the
tip of 90% of adolescent Sierra Leonean girls' clitorises.
Rates are even higher in the interior.
This young woman, however, could be a Krio—one of 60,000 descendants of
freed slaves from Great Britain, America, and slave ships on the high seas
who settled in Freetown. They do not practice the ritual. I
wonder whether she is able to smile at men so freely because she has not been
cut. Either way, she likely is a
prostitute. Part of what suggests
this is that she looks like a student. All
secondary schools—junior and senior high combined—charge tuition or fees
like colleges. Only a few families
can afford them. According to the
U.K.'s Sunday Times, the nongovernmental organization Save
the Children estimates that in a
nearby capital,
Other Sierra Leoneans are very gracious. From airport to hotel to our rooms, professional porters and hotel workers offer us warm smiles, handshakes, and hellos (even a few high fives). Most are male, but the hotel has two female managers who, though properly circumspect, also make us feel welcome. My first question upon meeting all of these friendly people is, how in God's name could such a horrible, violent civil war have erupted in this land in the '90s? Its leaders beguiled children and young men to chop, maim, and kill tens of thousands. I remind myself that in every country, including our own, a minority who love violence and pure power hide secretly among the peaceful majority. |
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Our first full day in
We escape this embarrassment and head for two marketplaces.
My wife, Ann, and I were in such markets four years ago in
One time, after haggling for a beautiful handmade cane for 30 minutes—with much emotional hand waving and fortuitous expressions of poverty on both sides—she came to us, apologetic and dispirited, because she could only bring the cane maker down to 20%. Comforting her was more difficult than buying the cane.
Mostly today our group members learn Market Survival I: look at the displays from the corners of your eyes, shake your heads no, make no eye contact, keep walking, and if you want something, come back later, acting very reluctant, especially if you have fallen in love with it. Beside the market is a rough but pretty park and basketball court where the teams welcome two of our own group's tall guys, one on each side. The rest of us stand under a huge, unfamiliar shade tree, wave, and cheer one side or the other.
Just before we are done, my wife, Ann, buys five bananas for one thousand
Leones—about 33 cents. The
seated woman who takes her money is one of the quieter market sellers, waiting
for customers to come to her. When
Ann hands her an Le 2000 note and asks for change, the banana woman unwraps a
double knot in her long cloth robe, takes an Le 1000 note out of the inner knot,
and hands it up—a typical cash transaction by people with no pockets or
registers. Then, as in markets I've
seen in
We return to our hotel. It is the nicest in Freetown, a palatial compound surrounded by razor wire where each large room costs us $150 per night, double occupancy—the equal of three weeks of wages for the average Sierra Leonean. It is as if one of us in the U.S. were staying in a room costing $9000 per night. From the balcony of the dining room, we can look out over this entire city of two million people and the warm ocean beyond. I find myself comforted that we have the money to be so safe and cared for, but uncomfortable in many ways that I am, these next few days, among the wealthiest 1% in this town.
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Entry
III: Days 4-6, May 10-12 (W.-F.), 2006.
Foindu-Maui, Kailahun District, near Kenema, Sierra Leone
After a long, dusty, all day journey across most of the country and after two flat tires on our three vehicles, we arrive in Kenema, a small city of several hundred thousand with many diamond-buying businesses. Sierra Leone has four districts: the western one is controlled by the capital, Freetown, but here in the east, Kenema is the provincial capital.
When we arrive, Jeff
Hall's local friend, Munir Shallop, gives us a quick but royal feast of Lebanese
food.
The Lebanese are the only non-African group who came to
We are all anticipating a big welcome committee. Instead, we get a solid human wall hundreds deep surrounding the road through the entire village--two thousand people singing, chanting, and waving banners that say, "WELCOME MR. JEFFREY" and dozens of people with white t-shirts saying "The Jeff Project" on their fronts.
Our leader, Jeff Hall, was in the Peace Corps here in the 1980s.
After the terrible civil war ended in 2001, he used letters and telephone
calls to find some of his old friends in the villages. They were
living in refugee camps sixty miles away or more. He encouraged them
to return to their homes and farms, overgrown by trees and bushes, to
clear, rebuild, and re-cultivate. While about half of
Tired, thirsty, long overdue for a bathroom break, we are overwhelmed. The joy is so great that several of us who are immersed in this outpouring wipe our eyes. Who would expect so much love, here at the ends of the earth? We divide into three groups, each for one village. Even as our own group of six drives away to another village, we see Jeff carried off over the heads of townspeople to their open-air town meeting hall. He shrugs comfortably and waves at us to go on. |
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At our own village, Foindu-Maui, a celebration begins once again for the six of us. Town chieftains speak, there is a Muslim prayer and then the Lord's Prayer, and then a traditionalist Mende tribe devil dances before us in a brilliantly colored costume and is vanquished so that we are safe. Then Jeff arrives as darkness grows and tells the leaders that we must be taken to our homes before full dark so we can unpack, and the rest of the celebration in our own Foindu is put off until the next day. Tired, amazed, with our adrenaline and surroundings (and our bladders) keeping us alert, we are taken to our host families.
Our host family, Siaka and Musu Brima ("shock'-uh" and
"moo'-soo bry'-muh"), a younger family in their thirties with two
foster children and five young kids, take us in gently.
Like many farmers everywhere, they are shy and short spoken.
Their faces are pleasant to observe, one round and the other long, their
bodies short and thin. (A
"fat" African would in
He then walks us to the latrine, where suddenly he says a whole sentence in English.
"Oh, you know English!" I say.
This was not the case four years earlier in
He replies, "Oh yes, I am literate; I went to school."
"That is very good," I say. "I am happy we will be able to talk with each other." I am relieved that we are staying with someone intelligent with whom I can talk. A vocabulary of 500 or 1000 English words can speak an encyclopedia.
As we unlock the padlock on the latrine, he and a nearby friend, who also
speaks English well, show us the concrete room.
It was built just for our visit. I
expect a simple hole in the ground. Instead,
he has built a wooden toilet seat. "That
is very nice of you!" I exclaim (in
"We have built it for you," Siaka says. Later I learn that this latrine and another like it built for the other four in our group staying in Foindu are the fanciest bathrooms in town.
And now, twenty-four hours later, as I write this on our second night here, the terrible civil war that I first read about almost two years earlier in Daniel Bergner's In the Land of Magic Soldiers—the book I loved so much that I assigned it in my college classes, which in turn brought Ann and me to Jeff Hall and to this beautiful land—that war is far away. I now sit inside our guestroom. Outside, our first tropical rainstorm rages, with a downpour, thunder, and lightning like the worst of any Midwestern prairie storm. Tomorrow, our hosts will tell us this is mild—just a light foretaste of tropical summer storms. For now, though, I am glad to have the coolness blowing through our bedroom window, unimpeded by even a screen. The difference in the air is palpable: the night before, the air was so hot that I lay in bed with each limb stretched to the limit, sweating from every pore.
Ann, however, is taking a bucket shower, caught in the latrine by the storm. Siaka and Musu are concerned, but I know she is an intrepid camper. She is simply waiting it out. Soon we will sleep deeply in the cool air, then rise early to talk with our host family. They will give us fresh mangos, bananas, or even some fried plantain for breakfast. Then we will walk to the center of town for yet another celebration of our arrival.
Entry
IV: Days 7-9, May 13-15 (Sa.-M.), 2006.
Foindu, Kailahun District, Sierra Leone
Our real work in the villages soon begins. Our village is laid out on a simple grid with two main roads—which I have nicknamed in my own mind as Broadway and Main Street—at right angles. "Broadway" is a bush path—a dent through the surrounding forest—but Main Street has all the glory of a minor gravel road with potholes big enough to swallow a Volkswagen bug. Because the six of us in Foindu belong to several committees, we must ride back and forth among the villages each day. Our SUV driver who has driven us from Freetown, Robert, is a kamikaze bomber attacking each pothole as the six of us, lined up behind him on two benches facing each other, bounce and hold on for dear life.
Ann and I have our work cut out for us. During our visit, our own SLPP education committee composed of the two of us and another colleague, all from Twin Cities colleges, will visit three classrooms in each of the villages' three primary schools: nine classrooms in all. We also will talk with three sets of teachers; two student unions representing junior high, high school, and college students; three village education committees; and 24 households, which we will interview about their hopes and needs for education of their children.
As we visit each school, we find appalling lacks. One school has no roofs on two-thirds of its classrooms and bullet holes in the other one-third; when rain falls hard, school is cancelled. In a second, a teacher has 100 first graders in one room. In a third school, each textbook serves every five students and, through much of the year, there are no pencils and paper. In this school, I discover, no one has breakfast—at school or at home. The government pays for lunch Monday and Friday, but even then there is only enough food for two-thirds of the students at one time. We also discover, after talking with parents and "secondary" students (those in junior and senior high), that only the students in one village are within walking distance of a secondary school--and then the walk is at least an hour. In the other two villages, even further away, students must actually move to a different town to attend junior and senior high.
College students must go much further--to Kenema or Freetown. The cost of the trip is so expensive that they are lucky to come home once per year. They must either be rich to afford room and board or have relatives with whom to live. They eat very little and jokingly call their eating the "Zero Zero One Food Plan"—0 for breakfast, 0 for lunch, and 1 supper.
While the per capita GDP for
Even with such lacks, the teachers we meet are as energetic as any in the
U.S.
The education interviews of households are equally fascinating. Each of the three of us on our committee interview an average of eight families. We try to gather the head of household, along with as much of the family as is there. Interpreters--often secondary or college students--help us. We look in particular for a mix of average and poor families, chiefs and the lowly, and widows with children.
My own most memorable interview is of a village imam—a Muslim priest. He has four wives (which is allowed in Islam if the husband can support them, but most have one or two) and seventeen children. Ten are adopted from his younger brother who was killed in the war. I assume one or two of his wives were his brother's, too. He is a big man, strong and Koran bound as priest and father, but I sense he is kind and fair. After we finish the survey, I ask him for his advice as an imam. I explain to him first that one idea we have discussed on the education committee is to offer loans to secondary and college students to be repaid to the villages. "Would such loans be acceptable to Islam if they are interest free?" I ask.
He says, "Yes."
"What if we charged a small amount of interest?"
He thinks, then replies, "I would be uncomfortable with that."
"Thank you," I tell him. "Your
opinion will help me as we talk more about this possibility."
We shake hands, the intelligence glowing in his eyes and, I hope, in
mine. Maybe we have connected.
As we interview, we also, almost incidentally, hear war stories.
We see no amputees but do learn of death.
In Ann's and my host family, the father of the oldest boy and girl, 20
and 15, was killed in the village by rebels. Other
people talk of relatives and friends cut down in front of them, usually by
gunfire.
Orphans and war widows are everywhere.
We thought to heal trauma by having one of us, a psychologist, explore
therapy for villagers. However, she
found villagers healing themselves.
Others like our hosts, Siaka and Musu, are nuclear families, but even they have close ties to hundreds. Both relatives and close friends are "brother" and "sister." Both are as blood. |
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It seems to us that most families have seven or eight children, though what we see here may be inflated by the number of orphans, like our own host family's oldest two. According to Macmillan's Atlas, the average birth rate is 6.23 per woman (but 32% do not survive past the age of five). In one school where we visit classrooms, I spend much of the hour interacting with 5th and 6th graders. At one point, I ask them about family numbers. "Imagine," I say, that someday you will be married and have your own families. How many children do you want to have in your own family? Please hold up the fingers on your hands to show me how many children you want." I suspect they understand, but they are so rarely asked questions like this, apparently, that they wait for the teacher to translate it into Mende. Surprise shows on their faces, but they hold up their fingers. It is my turn for surprise: the average number is about three. Now I am really curious: for most of human history in most places, parents have had as many children as possible in the hope one or two might support them in old age. How do they expect just three children to support them. Soon after, in an education interview with one of the town chiefs, I get part of my answer. He is old by African standards, perhaps sixty, the lines of his ebony face are deep, and his posture is stooped. In response to one of my interview questions, he tells me he wants high school and even college for his ten children.
"What if the only jobs they find will be outside of the village?" I ask.
He says, simply, like it's as obvious as the gray hairs on his chin, "They
will send money home."
Is it possible, I wonder, to create an
Each night as I go to bed, I hold close to my heart all that I have learned.
On this night, after my bucket shower, I return to our guestroom and find
myself sniffing my hands and my arms.
The scent is different. I smell of
Entry
V: Days 10-13, May 16-19 (Tu.-Fri.), 2006.
Our leader, Jeff, has told the villages they must combine to have one send off, not three. We are feted through the final afternoon under several gigantic shade trees in a field at Jokibu's school.
Maybe a 1500 people show
up, along with a phalanx of chiefs and Big Men, a local representative in
As dusk falls, we six from Foindu return there for our real goodbyes.
When the trip began, one in our
When we arrive at our guest house, we say goodbye to them, walk into the yard, and sit on the recessed front porch to talk with our hosts. We speak of final things. "This visit has meant very much to us," Ann and I say.
"And to us, too," says Siaka. Musu and the kids nod.
"We hope to stay in touch with you and maybe come back some day."
"You want to come back?" asks Siaka.
"Very much so," we tell him.
"That would be good. We would like that," he says.
We then give Ibrahim and Hawa, the two oldest kids, final presents: two LED flashlights for studying at night in non-electrified rooms, a backpack for Abraham, and a nice white shirt for Hawa. We also pull them aside, out of sight of neighbors and younger siblings, and give them each Le 5000 for school supplies. The money is only $1.67, but to each of them it is like being handed a $100 bill. Startled, they smile happily, Abraham gives a Mende groan of pleasure, and they nod. Together they will leave after us in the morning for their twenty-mile walk to school, both with bags of rice to last a month on their heads, their school books and flashlights, and a change of clothes.
Ann and I awaken the next morning at five.
The alarm was set, but we didn't need it: the muezzin who sings the
At nearly the very moment we leave, a sea change comes to us. Ann and I experienced a profound cultural shift four years earlier after leaving our older daughter's village in Niger. We are expecting it, this time. It begins on our journey back. This time, though, we are even more disoriented. Part of the problem is that we have colds but do not know it, yet. We think, instead, that we are having an allergic reaction to something around us. I take medicine for it, but the medicine only makes me feel even more spacey. In addition, this time on the road, Ann and I have drawn the SUV that has two hard benches running lengthwise on each side and, along with them, the kamikaze driver, Robert. Robert drives hard and fast over two hours of potholes better suited for cross country motorbike racing. Being first is something of a badge of honor for drivers, and he speeds far ahead of the other two vehicles, then stops and waits for them to catch up. At one such stop, I speak for all of us and ask him if he could stay within sight of the others, especially as we already almost did not get through a checkpoint of armed national guards--with no passports on us. (Later, we suspect we were expected to bribe them, but Jeff is in another vehicle and none of us know the proper etiquette for bribing state police.)
Robert replies by chopping the air with his hand. "We stop," he says, "we stop." Chop. "We go, we go." Chop. End of conversation.
All of us are anxious to get back to Freetown, but soon we begin to feel like our trip is doomed. We start getting flat tires, each necessitating a stop to change it and another stop at the next town to fix it. Between flats, the front hood of the truck comes unattached at forty m.p.h. and flies up against the front windshield with a mighty "bang!." One of the people in the front seat said she threw up her arms and screamed. At another point, we join perhaps ten other vehicles stopped on either side of a huge tree that has fallen across the road, its trunk almost as thick as we are tall. A lumberjack from a nearby village accidentally felled in the wrong way, and he has spent the previous hour trying to cut a middle section of it, as long as the road is wide. When he does, people from the stopped vehicles gather on one side and roll the huge cut section of trunk off to the side.
The worst moment is when our own driver, Kamikaze Robert, gets upset with one of our tire repair bills. We are a few miles from his boyhood village, and for him it is a matter of honor that he not be overcharged. Angrily, he jumps in our SUV and takes off fast. The garage mechanic, equally angry, hops onto the hood and lies against the windshield in front of Robert. Though we don't know this until later, Robert--who has already accelerated to 40 m.p.h.--plans to drive the mechanic several miles to the village and pay him the full amount, from which point the mechanic will have to pay someone else the same amount to get back home. We all yell at Robert to stop the SUV. He finally listens, and he and the mechanic both jump into the road and yell at each other. Two of us have to separate them. The amount of overcharge is Le 5000 ($1.67), and so we pay the mechanic 2000 (.67) and send him on his way, Robert strongly protesting this compromise, and we finally get Robert back in the SUV to drive. In favor of his side of the argument, perhaps, the same tire goes flat half an hour later.
However, I think of two more of Robert's habits. One is that when he needs to go to the bathroom when we are on the road, he does not walk into the bush or down the road and behind a tree like other Sierra Leoneans; rather, he walks twenty feet away and stands in the road. Another of his traits is that in towns, the only time he politely stopd to let a pedestrian cross at an intersection (or anywhere) is when she is a young, pretty girl. Later, Ann and I speculate about whether Robert was a soldier in the civil war. At the very least, he is an example of the violence and lawlessness that lie beneath the surface, an unhealed blood wound beneath the healing scab of hope and democratic politics.
During the repair of our final flat tire--which has completely disintegrated to an almost unrecognizable shredded donut--we gather in the shade between two village buildings and sing. I should explain that this was not just any singing. Our church has one of the best choirs in the nation--it was nominated for a Grammy once--and two of our choir members and our pastor lead us. The rest of us aren't shoddy, either. We sing old favorites, secular and religious, in two- and three-part harmony.
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