"Thank you"

We've been walking down to work from Wilberfoce; I've pulled out my camera without being mobbed by children or asked to put it away - maybe I can finally take a decent picture. No one is around besides that guy standing over there. He looks too tired to care.

I line up the camera for a panoramic sequence of Freetown. All the city is below me. If only this overhanging vegetation wasn't here I could get a decent series of pictures. I move a few steps off the path. That'd should be better.

I press the shutter release; look at the image on the screen.

Too dark. I switch to manual exposure mode. I'll need the constant exposure anyways for the panoramic; otherwise they won't blend together well in Photoshop.

Focus is set; I switch that to manual as well.

Better lengthen the shutter speed a bit. Can't change the aperture much since I'll need all the depth of field I can get to capture the shacks on the side of the hill in the foreground.

I should probably change lenses. There's too much distortion in this lens; that won't due for a panoramic. But Moses and Sara are waiting for me. I guess I'll just take it now and try to ignore the distortion.

I take another picture. Looks good. There's detail in the sky and the city is still light enough.

Hmmm. I still have the overhanging tree branches in the top half of the frame. That won't look good.

I shift a few steps to the left and recompose. Good. Should be able to crop the remaining branches out in Photoshop when I make the panoramic.

I do a final check on the horizon, don't want it too centered.

I pan all the way to the left and then take three slightly overlapping images, each to the right of the last one.

Better check the three quickly on the screen - I won't be able to retake those amazing clouds later.

Looks good.



I put the camera down and begin walk back to the trail where Moses and Sara are waiting for me.

I look down - the ground is too rocky not to - and see that I've just trampled through a garden. My path is littered with flattened corn plants. I look around - maybe the owner isn't around. No such luck. He's the tired old man standing by the corner, silently watching me destroy a month of labor. He motions with his hands for me to walk around. I stumble out of the garden with apologies pouring out of my mouth. He silently smiles. Then he shakes my hand and opens his mouth for the first time. I dread a well deserved verbal beating.


He says "thank you."

- - - - - - -

After receiving a plethora of "don't get discouraged" emails, I realized my portrayal of both Sierra Leone and my work this summer has been quite negative. While I've never been so emotionally challenged by my experiences, the last two weeks have been some of the happiest of my life. At first glance, you see destitute poverty on a nearly hopeless scale. A more perceptive look reveals something entirely different: individual people. People happy to simply be alive. People who insist on feeding me, an utter stranger who they will likely never see again, the cassava leaf and rice dinner intended for their family. People who ask about my family at home even though their own family all died during the war. People who find time to sit down and become my best friends, even though I'm just another American or Briton who will swoop in for a few months before walking up those stairs onto an airplane, never to return. People who share their bed with me, sleeping on the concrete floor instead. People who risk missing the only ferry to Freetown from the airport to help two strangers fill out missing luggage paperwork. People who smile and say thank you, even though I just trampled through their mountainside garden. People who interrupt their church service for everyone present to come greet the two visitors from America. People satisfied by nothing more than the chance to kick around a football. People singing and dancing in the streets.

The photography project itself looking quite promising, even if my own photographs have been limited by my status as an outsider. I've had to make some major adjustments, but every time the students see me they ask when they can go take some "snaps" of their city. iEARN Sierra Leone as an organization was a little different than I was expecting, but after realizing what it is doing for some of these kids, I'm more than willing to modify my expectations a bit. No other group in Sierra Leone is teaching skills as simple - and necessary in today's world - as sending an email. Those ten virus-ridden computers struggling to run Windows XP are the only ten computers that youth in this country can regularly use. Almost everyday new students walk into the office asking if they can "learn computer." The music project is also a beneficial initiative, as there are very few other opportunities for any sort of creative thinking and free expression as the school system, while actually quite excellent given the situation, is still centered around repetitive memorization.

On a quantifiable scale more suitable to our scientific world, development is coming to Sierra Leone. The streets are filled with the white SUVs of the various development groups - the government, UN and NGO's (non-governmental organizations). While the most effective methods of such development are up for debate, progress is happening everyday, slowly but surely. Reconstruction is continuing; in central Freetown the multistoried buildings are being rebuilt, gradually replacing the war-scarred concrete shells. People conduct their daily business without reference to the atrocities of less than a decade ago - the only significant visible reminders of the war are the amputee victims.

It's easy to lose sight of big picture and concentrate on the failures - I certainly do that everyday. But considering the state of this country in 1999 as fighting raged through the capital, the current situation is remarkable. There are no gangs of ex-combatants roaming the streets, no rebels contesting the government upcountry. People are turning to the democratic process, not to violent anarchy. Signs of the elections are everywhere. I've seen numerous political rallies gearing up for the elections in two months. The taxis are plastered with various Election 2007 stickers that are not promoting a political party, but rather encouraging voter participation. Religious leaders talk about, in their sermons, how crucial the elections will be.

I'd like to close with a few words from Harvard's 2007 commencement address by Bill Gates a few weeks ago. I'll post more of it later, but for now you will have to be satisfied with this excerpt:

"Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: "I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation."

Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.

The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.

The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem – and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.

At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don't. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion -- smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don't have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.

We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago."

Full text at Gates Speech