People

Thursday, 7 June

The man sitting on the sidewalk calls out "White man, money? please!"

Ignore him. Beggars don't deserve your money. Keep walking.
Just give it to him. He needs it more than you ever will.
But that's not sustainable development at all. Giving money to beggars only furthers the cycle of dependency.
But it'd just be a few hundred Leones. That's only a few cents. It won't matter in the big picture.
You can't help everyone in this country, so why even try to start?

"white! money?" he shouts again.

The poor guy doesn't even have an arm. The rebels chopped it off. He can't get a job.
That doesn't matter.
He probably has a family starving at home - what about his children?
Let them starve. Someone else will give him some money.
Everyone in this country is after money. They aren't going to share any with him. You could at least say hello to him.

"Please sir?"

I keep walking.

- - - - - - -

I showed up at the center at ten, ready to teach with a freshly printed lesson plan after being rained out on Wednesday. I had instructed the students in the morning session to be there promptly at 10:30; they had eagerly nodded their heads in agreement and Andrew, the director, reminded them to be on time. Andrew, the director, said he would attend the first class as well.

The students didn't stumbl in until around 11:15.

The morning class, thankfully small with two boys and two girls, was fantastic once we finally got started. We worked on learning how to "read" photographs; it was quite interesting as their interpretations reflected growing up in a desperately underdeveloped country, all the time idolizing the wealth of Europe and America. We looked at "New York" by Helen Levitt and "Sheryl Stevens" by Milton Rogovin before looking at some examples I had taken from Ewalds "I wanna take me a picture" Literacy through Photography book. After a rough start, I was actually getting something accomplished. It was a relief just to be doing something.

Sara and I went to lunch with Amanda, a former iEARN SL intern who is now working for the New York-based NGO Miracle Corners of the World. She is supervising the construction of a community center in Kissy, in eastern Freetown. We had potato leaf soup on rice, which, of course, comes with fish. Besides the omnipresent fish, it was superb.

After lunch, I tried to help Frederic re-install Windows XP on the computers at the center. While we managed to reinstall Windows on a few of them, they almost immediately became re-infected with viruses, as the students will open just about any email promising "LOOK! Your the winner of 5 million dollars!!!!!" and other such spam and virus-ridden messages. Also, a few have USB drives which are all infected as well. Hopefully I can show Frederic some proper internet security procedures and install some antivirus software. While I was teaching and helping Frederic, Sara worked on heavily revising and rewriting a few newsletters that needed "professionalizing" before being released to iEARN's donor community.

The afternoon photography session was scheduled for 2 p.m. 12 youth had signed up, only 6 showed up by 2:15. They were all guys, and for some reason I simply couldn't connect with them. The three who effectively dominated the discussion all are involved in the "Positive Music Project," and a result, just about everything revolved around that - for example, a picture of a woman in a factory in South Africa was, in their eyes, a woman in a recording studio in New York. I wish there were a few girls in the group. (There are, but none of them showed up.) My style of teaching it to simply try to point the discussion in the right way, but it was nearly impossible to keep them on track and as a result, after an hour with them, I was completely drained. I was quite enthusiastic after lunch with Amanda - the first Westerner we had talked to in a week - but 60 minutes with those boys plummeted me back into depression. Never before this trip have I been able to go from utter loneliness and despair to complete happiness in a span of a few minutes - and then fall right back down again.

I was supposed to teach a third session at 4pm, but only one of the students was on time, so I canceled class and went upstairs and crashed onto my bed for a nap, after which Sara and I headed into the city around 5:30 to visit Amanda at the YMCA where she is staying.

Before we left the stadium, we stopped by the iEARN center, as Andrew had finally arrived. The girls for my 4 pm class walked in as well, but I simply refused to teach a class when the students show up an hour late. If they want to learn, they can show some interest by showing up on time.

Sara and I hailed a taxi for the city. The National Stadium compound is in what could be very loosely called the suburbs, if one realizes that that just means there are no buildings more than two or three stories tall. This fairly safe area is in-between the downtown area with the markets and stores, and the touristy/NGO peninsula of Aberdeen which juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. While the stadium compound itself has gates and is quite safe, at least during the day, the surround community is no better off than the slums elsewhere. There's an entire slum invisible just beyond the fence surrounding the compound. We met Amanda, and after dropping our bags off at her room in the YMCA as the city is notorious for pickpockets and bag thieves, she took us to an (air-conditioned!) Western supermarket. Every item had a price label next to it - there was no bartering. We could even buy Cheerios! We purchased a can of peanut butter - at an actual checkout lane - for 12000 Le to go on some bananas we bought from a street vendor. Amanda and I both bought Snickers bars for 3000 Le each. It made my day. Maybe even my week.

We went back to the Y and sat on the balcony overlooking central Freetown. Amanda, recovering from a week with typhoid fever and trip to the hospital, couldn't eat much, but Sara and I enjoyed a Guinness while eating peanut butter and bananas. What a wonderful night. Amanda's room has a screen on it, so she doesn't even have to sleep under a mosquito net. And her bed actually has a real mattress - not a shattered board. And her wall sockets actually work in the evenings, unlike ours. To be fair, their next door neighbor is a drug rehab clinic, but considering that our current neighbors are some crazy Chinese guys who pace around backwards up and down the outdoor hallway every night, a drug rehab clinic can't be too bad.The Chinese refurbished the National Stadium Complex sometime before the war, and simply never left, as far as I can tell.

We tried to watch a few bootleg movies that Amanda purchased on the street, but one had no audio and the other was recorded in the back of the theater complete with people walking in front of the camera, so we chilled and talked about Salone.

Simply existing in this country is exhausting. The water is contaminated, and only the wealthy can afford running water. Westerners, with weak immune systems, can only safely drink bottled or bagged water. There is no electricity, and if you want your generator to run - if you can afford one - you have to go the gas station and fill up a plastic yellow jug. Laundry is done in the sink or in a bucket by the numerous streams running down to the ocean, which also serve as the sewers. Transportation is on foot, in a taxi with negotiable prices that can increase thousands of Leones if you are white, or in a puda-puda. There are no traffic signals and the streets are filled with beggars demanding money and street vendors who poke their heads into a taxi to convince you of the need to buy nuts in a plastic bag or bagged water or random black shoes or brightly colored towels or cell phone faceplates or a rubber mat for a car footwell. White equals money and a potential sale. People will come up to me on the street and say they need to talk about something - usually about helping them emigrate somewhere else in the world - so instead I simply say I'm busy right now. Then they'll usually leave me alone.

This country has undergone so much within the last one hundred years - and especially in the last fifteen - that it's impossible to blame people for being so desperate - you have to be, or you perish. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Freetown was considered the "Athens of West Africa." It had the best schools and a thriving community. As nationalism and the independence movement began the drive to remove the colonial English rulers, who were quite willing to return to England, as the British Empire was rapidly collapsing in the face of the Cold War, this prosperity appeared to be primed to only increase during the enthusiastic post-Independence years. However, the British simply left the country and left behind a rudimentary infrastructure and very few trained politicians or administrators. Corruption became endemic in government and gradually consumed the national budget, as officials realized there was nothing preventing them from siphoning public funds for private "loans" never to be repaid. Such a cycle occurred all over West Africa.

While this story did little to benefit the common person, it was fairly stable and generally peaceful. The occasional coup or assassination, always by leaders promising reforms to benefit common man, momentarily disrupted the pattern, but even the most radical leaders were soon won over by the luxuries of rampant corruption. However, the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990's destroyed any sense of stability. In Sierra Leone, the wars were not limited to simply the border regions or the diamond mines, but spread through the entire country. Everyone alive today in Sierra Leone was affected by the war.

Almost immediately after the war officially ended in 2002, money began pouring in from the donor community for reconstruction. However, with no remaining infrastructure, much of the money goes right back out of the country to foreign businesses or into the pockets of government officials. People will say the only way for SIerra Leoneans to become wealthy is to work for the government, UN, or an international NGO.

Please note that I am in no way an expert on the topic of African history and politics and am writing solely from memory and conversations I've had in the last few days, so if I've made an inaccurate statement (I'm sure I have), please correct me. If you want to read more, I heartily recommend Meredith's "The Fate of Africa."