I woke up to my alarm at six thirty, but the rains had commenced, so I went back to sleep to the soothing sound of the rain pounding against the zinc roofs outside my window. Life pretty much halts in Freetown when it starts to rain, and if one doesn't absolutely have to go somewhere, one simply stays at home, so I played Sierra Leonean and sat at the YMCA, writing and trying to figure out how to best spend the three weeks I have left in Sierra Leone.
I arrived at iEARN around noon and continued reviewing pictures with my students for a few hours, although the center was rather inactive with the rain I then met Rachel at the supermarket to buy food for dinner - Adam had purchased a kerosene stove and accompanying cookware. We decided to make curry and couscous, but we had problems finding a package of curry spice that had directions on the back - there's no "5 minute meal" on these curry packages. We finally discovered a package that had a recipe which involved chickpeas and a few other items. We stopped by the market to buy some fruit and vegetables - I just wanted to buy one mango, but the woman would only sell me six. Anyways, about ten of us enjoyed the curry which was incredibly spicy but still tasty. Moses and I made fried plantains, which, although not quite like Mama's, were delicious.
I followed the security guard down dimly hall, past closed doors, past mounds of moldy mail in United States Post Office plastic boxes, past empty bowls full of fish bones, past unlabeled hallways. The guard halted and pointed to an open doorway where rays of light poured out into the dusty corridor. My eyes adjusted to the sunlit room as a man behind a desk slowly scrapped the last of his bowl of rice and fish sauce. Boxes were piled around, most smashed and crumpled. Many were destined for a certain Alex in Zimbabwe, but it looked like they had been piled up here for quite some time and would likely remain here for all eternity. Nothing in the room hinted at the 21st century - the room looked as if it hadn't changed since the British left the country nearly fifty years ago.
Food fell out of the man's mouth as he motioned for me to sit down. I handed him my delivery slip. He slowly read it, then asked for ID. I handed him my driver's license, which he painstakingly copied down onto the back of the delivery slip. Then he stood up and disappeared into a locked room across the hallway. A few minutes he returned with a rather crumpled, but wonderfully familiar, blue and white USPS box. He sat down and motioned for me to do likewise, saying we would have to wait for the customs official to come and inspect the box. A second man came by and handed me a few envelopes addressed to various individuals at iEARN, saying he was a friend of Andrew, iEARN's director. This friend then brought me and the package over to a desk in the corner, where a man - clearly in charge of the room - sat on a chair behind a desk heaped high with papers and scales.
They talked for a bit in Krio; the boss turned to me and said "I'd like to help you." He paused, as if waiting for me to do something, before continuing, "the customs officer will have to inspect the package, but..."
I could take my chances with customs - but what if the customs official demanded the goodies sure to be inside?
I asked him "How much?" to which he replied "What are you going to give me?"
"Ten?"
The boss and the friend laughed. "Twenty!"
With no desire to spend the morning haggling over a suitable amount, I pulled out a stack of bills and counted out four 5000 notes and handed them to the boss. The friend waited expectantly. I handed him a single 5000.
Satisfied, the boss motioned towards my still unopened package on the desk and flicked his wrist towards the door. I walked out, back into the dim maze of dusty corridors.
- - - - - - -
I went with Osman for an early morning jaunt around town before heading over to to Crown Bakery, where I enjoyed sugar and lime covered pancakes with Amanda and Adam - it was Amanda's going-away breakfast, as she would be flying home to America later this evening. On the way back from Crown Bakery, I stopped by the (only) post office to pick up a package my mom had sent six weeks ago.
After an interesting thirty minutes at the post office, I went back to the YMCA for a bit. Dabney and I then walked over to iEARN with Sahr, one of our students who is a Liberian refugee who is stuck in legal limbo here in Sierra Leone - he has no documentation that he exists, so he can't leave. He's hoping to apply to university in the United States, but first has to obtain some proof of his existence.
I spent an uneventful afternoon at the YMCA before returning to the YMCA. Yet another intern arrived this weekend - Mags, from the UK, will hopefully be working with me on the photography project, but she might do some HR and non-profit management work with the staff at iEARN as well.
We returned to the YMCA and watched a beautiful sunset from the balcony before eating dinner at Kiemans. After dinner I walked into my room to find glass covering the floor, as the the light-bulb had exploded and sent glass pieces raining down on my belongings...thankfully, Mohamed came and soon had everything perfectly clean again.
“I give you nice price…say 40 thousand." "No no. 20!" "35!" "I'll give you 25 and no more..."
And so goes shopping in a country where everything is negotiable. Amanda and I were at the the Lumley Beach Market on a Sunday afternoon, purchasing a few touristy items to take back home with us. We had gone to Royal Hall in Aberdeen for a late brunch and after contemplating a few bush animals that roamed the grounds specificallly for the viewing pleasure of foreigners like ourselves, we walked down the beach to the market. After enough screaming and shouting at the market, we went to "Harri's Beach Bar" and chilled under a thatch umbrella, watching a seemingly countless number of football games that stopped only when an errant ball had to be retrieved from the ocean.
The owner of Kieman's, who we simply call Mama, had promised to show us how to cook Groundnut Stew, so Rachel, Amanda and myself went to Kiemans, where Mama had set up three chairs for us in the kitchen and taught us how to make her scrumptious groundnut stew - it was just like the Food Network!
As it was Amanda's last day, Patricia, one of the Miracle Corners SL board members, invited Amanda and Harry to come over to her house for dinner.
As I stepped out of her immaculate Mercedes-Benz SUV that she had picked us up in, I was so amazed by her beautiful house that I failed to notice my backpack was unzipped. My cameras toppled out and landed with a sickening thud on the concrete. Thankfully, my (well actually it's on loan from my father...) 35 mm film camera is nearly indestructible and was only scratched...but my brand new digital SLR didn't fair so well and, despite the exterior plastic not even showing any signs of damage, the lens mount broke in half. Thankfully, it it still functions as long as you hold the lens just right and don't move it too much....after returning home I managed to duck tape it all back together.
Patricia spent about thirty years working the US and has dual US-SL citizenship, but after the war ended she returned to Freetown where she now owns KTI travel. She had an interesting perspective on Sierra Leone as one of the few members of the African diaspora who manage to return to their home country. She's dedicated her time here in SL to promoting tourism - it's only a matter of time before Sierra Leone's beaches are once again filled with tourists from Europe. We had a fantastic dinner on her balcony overlooking Freetown as some "sentimental" music (what Sierra Leoneans call Celion Dion and the like) played in the background.
It was a wonderful break from the hustle and bustle of town...unfortunately, all things come to an end and we soon found ourselves in a taxi with a crazy man from Ghana who claimed to have spent "much time" in New York City, but when we asked him what part of NY, he said Boston. He was continually insulting the US and Sierra Leone - he insisted that Ghana was better becuase it has 42 embassies around the world while Sierra Leone only has 14...anyways, the Sierra Leonean taxi driver and the two of us were quite relieved when he finally got out of the car.
Sometimes there's those days that stand out as fantastical, even though nothing extraordinary happened. Today was one of those days. It all started with an beautiful run through the city over to Aberdeen beach with Osman. Then I ate breakfast on Y balcony overlooking all of Freetown, still drenched in sweat from almost two hours of running. I strolled on over to PZ to say hello to the Mohammed the egg-seller, but unfortunately he had gone to visit a friend who was sick. I walked through town, intending to buy lunch off of someone's head, but then I walked past Crown Bakery and simply couldn't resist its air-conditioned goodness. I had a wonderful sandwich with two physicians working for Mercy Ships in Aberdeen - one a gynecologist from the US working on a VVF program, the other a German pediatrician doing general health and nutrition programs.
I then schlepped on over to iEARN and watched the youth at their "Saturday Debate." The topic was "Is Africa Poor?" which provoked a wide array of responses.
Then I went with Tamara up the hill to Wilberforce to visit Moses and his family. Although Moses lost his family during the war, he lives with his aunt and sisters; the girls were all busy doing their hair. After relaxing at their house for a few hours, we returned to the YMCA and went to Kieman's for dinner and then came back to the Y.
The exciting news of the day was that a picture of me was in "The Spark Newspaper." Amanda's MCW community center had a full page feature, and they used the pictures I had taken at the opening. For some reason, one of the pictures (they downloaded them from my Picasa site) was of me with the children at an orphanage in Makeni - it's a great picture, but it has nothing to do with MCW or the community center...quite typical of the newspapers here, unfortunately.
The apprentice had to compete with the music blasting out of the poda as he shouted out the poda's destination with the standard "Lum-Lum-Lum-Lum-Lumley!" A nod of my head and a few seconds later the poda pulled over and screeched to a halt. I clambered into the back seat by the open window, leaving the middle three steel and wooden bench seats for someone else - most people don't seem to mind being squeezed into the middle of an airless, stuffy poda, but I'm a big fan of the open window (which often means feeling the rain on my face as well).
I looked around a poda filled with people, staring straight ahead or off into space. No one talked unless it was to tell the apprentice to stop the poda and let them out.
A rosary and a palm tree shaped air freshener in American flag stripes and stars both twisted around each other as they dangled from the rear view mirror. Behind them, the windshield was covered with spidery fractures into the far corners of the glass emanating from a rock-windshield collision.
A "No food for lazy man" sticker shared space above the door with a "No justice for the poor" sticker. Through the window just below the stickers, a crippled hobbled about, eyes silently pleading at me as I gazed behind him at the rest of the busy street. Someone threw a coin out the window and the cripple crawled over to it, his hands pouncing on the 100 leone coin just before it rolled into the sewer.
Trees sprouted up from seemingly vacant grounds in between houses and businesses. Nothing unusual, until I saw the trees were growing inside the concrete shells of buildings scarred black by the rebel invasion almost a decade ago. Sometimes it is difficult to believe that Sierra Leone has received millions of dollars of funding for reconstruction when isolated parts of the city look as if civilization departed years ago, leaving its remnants to be slowly recaptured by nature's unchallenged growth.
The poda finally left congestion of town behind and we flew by Africell billboards proclaiming "yu fri fo tok til yu taya!" as we traversed the "Peace Bridge" over the Congo Valley River, which is not really a river but rather an aqueous mixture of trash and humanity clinging on for life as the torrential rain washes everything out to the sea.
We reached the more affluent western portion of town, where an influx of NGO spending on their Freetown country headquarter offices has largely masked the impact of the war. We went past concrete walls, graffied with "Stick no bill" and sprawling invitations for house parties of last year and plastered with campaign posters. We reached Aberdeen Junction, where I handed the apprentice Le 800 and ventured out into the rain for my walk to the Health Unlimited office, where we are safely isolated from the people we're trying to help with looming concrete walls painted with the HU logo and the EU, our principle donor, and topped with rolls of razor wire.
- - - - - - -
After a morning at HU and an egg sandwich at Marianella, I spent the afternoon to iEARN for the afternoon. The new intern, Leigh, a law student from the UK, walked into the center - somehow his arrival details never reached anyone at iEARN and so no one went to the airport to pick him up. Despite that, he managed to successfully navigate his way to iEARN by himself. My project is progressing ever so slowly - I expected to be where we are today five weeks ago - but hopefully I'll be able to pull the loose ends together in time for an exhibition, although the election chaos isn't exactly beneficial. I've spent the last week working with my students to select five pictures that they want to print, and barring any other complications, we should have an exhibition the first or second week of August.
Alpha sorting his pictures
Dabney and I ended up walking home to iEARN with two of our students, although it did pour for a bit, so we had to wait under an overhang for a bit. We went to Choitram's to buy Ramen noodles, juice and milk for Adam, who had just returned from the hospital and wanted . Osman, my running partner, visited me at the Y and gave me a picture of him from his 10th place finish at the race the previous weekend. He also brought a map of the race - I was trying to find out how far it was - but the map was just a list of street names, not the color-coded geographical course map I was expecting - but I guess they both serve the same purpose. Anyways, he joined us for a candlelit dinner of vegetable sandwiches at the Y, as the generator decided to give up in a giant cloud of black smoke.
A towel is one of the many things I managed to leave out of my suitcase in the rush of packing and repacking, trying to squeeze everything into two small suitcases. As my luggage was lost for the first week I was here, I simply air dried after taking a shower. I somehow never got around to purchasing a towel in the seven weeks I've been here, and, with only three and half weeks left, I didn't see much point in purchasing one.
Thankfully, Adam walked into my room this morning with a plush red towel he had purchased off someone's head for Le 3000. Let's just say I had forgotten how the fantasticalness of a towel.
A taxi driver from Guinea who kept trying to speak French to me drove me through the rain over to HU, and after a few hours of administrative tasks, I rode a poda back to Brookfields. I stopped by the internet cafe before going to Marianella for lunch, where John from Ireland insisted on sharing a few Stars with me. He works in the importing/exporting of heavy machinery to all over Africa and the Middle East, and was in Salone in the late '80s and early 90s until his convoy was ambushed by the RUF in 1994. He was shot up pretty badly, but somehow managed to make it out of the country. I also met Stewart, a Scottish man who is attempting to set up a national volunteering program at the Ministry of Youth and Sport
After a productive afternoon at iEARN, I returned home to the YMCA, but only for a few minutes, as Adam had gone to Blue Cross Hospital with a fever and suspiciosn of malaria. The main hospital in Sierra Leone, Choitrams, is run by Indian doctors, and while in an emergency it suffices, I wouldn't go there unless I absolutely had to, as one of my friends here had a terrifying experience there last month where the doctors said they were going to "open him up just to take a look." Thankfully, Blue Cross is much more respectable and is owned by Sierra Leonean doctor who is widely regarded to be the best in the country.
Tamara, Jyoti, Dabney, Moses and myself walked over to Blue Cross as the evening traffic had turned the roads into a parking lot. We just barely beat out the rain and delivered a few necessities (like toilet paper) to Adam and picked up his room key so we could get him some clothes as well. We all squeezed into a taxi back to town, and while the others went to dinner, Moses and I went to the YMCA and retrieved from Adam's room a few items which we brought back to Adam. He was doing fairly well hooked up to an IV and should be able to come back home tomorrow.
I've been reading a journal article the last few days that Adam's supervisor , Vivek Maru, published in the "Yale Journal of International Law" (Sumer 2006, Volume 31, Number 2). The article, entitled "Between Law and Society: Paralegals and the Provision of Justice Services in Sierra Leone and Worldwide" and reveals a perceptive understanding of justice in Sierra Leone and other developing countries.
After an uneventful morning at HU I went over to iEARN - I'm continually amazed by the students at there. I brought to iEARN an Apple iBook that was donated by a friend back home at Sewanee, and despite these students never using a mac in the past, they've managed to do things with that computer I never thought possible - although most of the time they're just playing Bugdom, a game they found on their own, as I simply set it up in the corner without showing them how to use it, which hasn't hindered them at all. (I can't get too upset at them for playing games, as I played the same game back in middle school during computer class...I think they've beat my high score already.)
The number of functioning computers has been decaying the entire summer, so Nam, a South Korean volunteering at iEARN, and I are attempting to repair a few of them, but without much success.
After an exciting day working at the center, I returned to the YMCA and cleaned my room a bit. A family of roaches moved into my suitcase and they scurry about whenever I disturb them. At first I attempted to fight the invaders, but there's been so much conflict in this country already I figured I could just let the little insects live.
My malaria medication-enhanced dreams were interrupted by an intense pounding on my door. I had no desire to move, although the streets outside my window were coming alive. I groggily fought the hinges to open the door to see the ever faithful Osman ready to run. He lives about a mile away, and while we are supposed to meet every morning at the cotton tree, he ususally ends up coming up to my room to wake me up. Today he was a bubble of excitement, as he had proudly told me he had placed tenth in the "marathon" (As the winning time was just under an hour, it was certainly not a full 26.2 mile traditional marathon) last Saturday - he's not a joking around with his running and I'm amazed he puts up with me tagging along every morning.
After panting around the city for 50 minutes, I took a deligtfully cold shower and had the usual bread and tea breakfast. I gave Mohamed money to purchase water and postcards (now I just have to write them - I promise I'll send them eventually, but if they every reach the USA is another matter entirely...). That's one person I'll miss about Sierra Leone - Mohamed does everything for me - he'll shop, do laundry, exchange money, body guard, be a dinner buddy, and a best friend who always has a smile on his face - all at the same time. Whenever he sees me he greets me with a massive "It'sssssssss Paul!" and I shout back "Mohamed!" He's hoping to attend Fouray Bay Collage, but his english score wasn't high enough to qualify him for political science, which is what he wants to study (although he could just read for one of the natural sciences instead) Either way, Fouray Bay costs $900 a semester for classes, not including room and board or books. While that seems practically free compared to college in the United States, Mohamed's family died during the war and the only relative he has left in his aunt, who is in no position herself to assist him with his education. Right now he's works at the YMCA, manning the front desk and cleaning the halls in exchange for a place to sleep every night - he receives no salary, although hopefully that will change when his year-long probationary period ends next month.
Moses arrived at the YMCA around 8 and led Dabney and myself out to Kissy, as I had promised the MCW construction team I would visit the site sometime soon. The three of us walked over to PZ, where there is no disctinction between market and road but rather one chaotic mass of humanity. We bought some frozen yogurt from a young boy pushing a stroller carrying not a baby, but a cooler full of clear plastic bags filled with frozen yoghurt and tied by hand. It tastes so good and only cost Le 500. I also bought a CD called "World Peace" by a artist named Culture...it's the music I expected to hear when coming to Sierra Leone, not the American hip-hop influenced fusion that dominates radio. Anyways, after pushing our way through the terrible congestion of PZ, we relaxed in the poda for the slow ride out to KIssy.
At the MCW site we hung out with the workers and talked with Alfred, the foreman. The construction team is one of the nicest groups of men I've met here - they were making blocks today and they even let Dabney and I make a few with them. They are only making Le 6000 a day - that's $2 - and yet they are quite happy and simply enjoy life. They were all very sad that Nick, the MCW engineer from the US who was supervising the construction, had returned home on Monday, so I promised to come visit again before I left.
Unfortunately, Amanda is running low on money for the Community Center due to a few complications with the donor organizations, so construction effectively halted around 11:30, as Alfred was out of materials and so sent the workers home for the day. Dabney, Moses and I then walked around Kissy and had just bought some roasted corn when the skies opened up and it began to pour. We squeezed under an awning watching the streets fill with water and waiting for the rains to stop, just like everyone else.
We then grabbed a taxi out to Kabala Town and ate lunch before heading out to Grafton to visit the Grafton Polio Orphans home. We interviewed all the kids on video and took a portrait of each of them. I'm always impressed by the children there - they all want to grow up and do normal things - taxi driver, nurse, teacher, pastor, doctor - and if they were in the US, they'd be able to do that. But here in Salone, it's unlikely they will ever be able even go to college. Although there's very little institutionalized, legal support for the disabled, it seems that people - or at least their close friends - here will do what little they can to help them.
I talked about the orphanage more in a entry a few weeks back. Anyways, I'll upload the pictures and video when I get a chance.
Dabney had brought a bag of Starburst from the US so she gave all the children one of the delicious little sweet chewy pieces of happiness before we then returned to Kabala Town and met with Victor. Victor runs two NGO's here in SL - the National Youth Awareness Forum, which is small organization that runs 20 informal schools in the villages upcountry, and is the Sierra Leonean director for IFFDO, a Canadian group that is hoping to fund orphanages for the disabled (Melrose's ophanage is their first project). Victor is an amazingly dedicated Sierra Leoneans who's working to bring Sierra Leone out of the war's devastation, and while the NYAF and IFFDO office is just two bare rooms that seem incredibly lacking by UN / INGO standards, Victor makes his impact felt upcountry. With a three year grant of only $30,000, he has enabled hundreds of village children to complete the first three years of school and learn to read, something they would never have been able to do on their own.
We returned to town via a relaxing poda ride, but traffic was so bad that we ended up just walking the last mile or so though the rain. We went for dinner at Kiemans and then I had a very interesting discussion with Amanda and Adam about development and democracy. As I know there's some people reading this with much more development knowledge & experience than I, I'll pose a question: Is democracy best for development, considering that in Sierra Leone the majority of the people voting - and therefore determining policy (at least in theory) - in that democracy haven't finished primary school?
If an uneventful, typical day is possible for an American in Sierra Leone during election campaigning, today was that typical day. I stood in the rain, waiting for a taxi that was both going to Murraytown and with a reasonable driver not demanding more than Le 3000. I prefer to pay Le1600, which is the going price, but ususally don't feel like arguing more if I can get it down to Le 2000. I'll pay Le3000, but I won't be a happy camper about it. I finally found a taxi who only demanded 2000, but said he would have liked Le3000, claiming the traffic was heaby. His son had just died a few weeks ago, leaving behind a child right after graduating from Fouray Bay Collage, which cost the family a fortune.
Despite the windows being closed and the heat being on full blast to compensate for the "frigid" rain, I was still in a good mood - probably because while we were stopped at the gas station, a lady sprinkled FOM! laundry detergent all over the windows for three block (Le300) and washed the windows in the rain - so I ended up giving him 3000, even though he was nice enough to try and give the extra 1000 back.
After a quiet morning at HU, Ibrahim, the HU driver, dropped me off at Brookfields. I stopped by the internet cafe and walked over to iEARN, failing miserably to avoid the cars splashing water onto the sidewalks. I spent a few (unproductive) hours at iEARN and went back to the YMCA with Jyoti. I also brought Rajai, one of my students, back to town with us. He had borrowed my video camera to film a few things around his town and I had promised to show him how to edit the video once the generator at the YMCA turned on at 7. For barely having used either a video camera or a computer, Rajai's film turned out pretty well, although we still need to add subtitled translations of the Krio and maybe shorten it a bit.
Rain drizzled from the sky, silently rolling off the grass roof, a change from the constant, reassuring din of the zinc roofs outside my window in town. We were at Lakka beach, having just enjoyed grilled barracuda and lobster, the fruits of Paul B's wonderful culinary skills.
I sat in a ubitquious white plastic chair, gazing through the misty rain at the ocean and reading "The Shadow of the Sun" by Ryszard Kapuściński, a Polish journalist who captures the real Africa, not the one you see on CNN or in the political science books. Here's a quote from the prologue:
I lived in Africa for several years. I first went there in 1957. Then, over the next forty years, I returned whenever the opportunity arose. I traveled extensively, avoiding official routes, palaces, important personages, and high-level politics. Instead, I opted to hitch rides on passing trucks, wander with nomads through the desert, be the guest of peasants of the tropical savannah. Their life is endless toil, a torment they endure with astonishing patience and good humor.
This is therefore not a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there, about encounters with them, and time spent together. The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say "Africa." In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.
I was absorbed in his wonderfully accurate descriptions of such a non-existent place when Patrick (an Australian working at a nearby NGO) returned from a walk down the beach with a Sierra Leonean in tow. Patrick, looking quite shaken, came up to us and had just seen the lifeless body of the man's dead five-year-old daughter - she had died earlier that morning from "the water" - probably meaning typhoid, one of those many diseases I received a vaccination for before even setting foot in Africa - but most people can't afford vaccination or treatment, so typhoid still ravages through Sierra Leone. I kept reading my book and barely looked up as I handed Patrick a few dollars worth of Leones, as the man needed money to enough money for a proper funeral and to pay the gravediggers.
It didn't even bother me that the child had died. Then, when I realized I didn't even care, I began to worry - not about the man or his family, but about myself.
At first glance from an air-conditioned Land Cruiser, Freetown is just another city. It is only when you leave behind that imported western amenity and enter the real Sierra Leone, when you walk down the street with the mud squishing under your sandals and splattering onto your feet, that you see the beggars, the amputees, the devastation of a decade of war that's slowly fading into the past. The first time I entered that Sierra Leone, I was overwhelmed - just read the first few weeks of blog entries. But after a while I simply accepted that poverty as an unfortunate reality. To some extent, that apathy is necessary for a Westerner to survive here. But is my survival more valuable than the man crawling on the side of the road, waiting for change from passing cars? Westerners ignore him; Sierra Leoneans might toss a coin or two out the window for him to chase down. It's easy for the Westerner to spend the working week at the NGO office, sometimes having to encounter that reality, but always being able to escape back to the razor-wire compound with a generator that runs long into the night.
The six of us - Amanda, Nick, Michelle, Rachel, Patrick and myself - squeezed into a taxi for a subdued hour-long ride back to Freetown. We accidently ended up in a bit of a parade, as one of the political parties was out campaigning with a few Land Crusiers decked out in megaphones and posters. We were treated to a dance party, as all the children alongside the road danced to the music blared out of the politician's loudspeakers.
Upon finally arriving back at the Y, we made vegetable sandwiches for dinner. Saidu and Ahmed, the egg seller, came over and chilled in Adam's room for the evening. Talk turned to health and before long I soon realized the necessity of the signs "HIV EXISTS!" as Ahmed said "I've never seen anyone die of HIV, so I don't believe it's real." There is no room for a virus in a society that bases knowledge on what can be seen and heard with one's own eyes and ears.
After spending a few hours writing a mid-project progress report on my work with the students at iEARN, I ventured out into the streets. There's a group of muscians who are all unemployed and play their drums on the steps of one of the buildings along Wesley Street. They all look up to their leader Raymond for food and support.
Raymond and Henry, one of the more vocal men of the group, were quite upset this morning. They had been arrested Friday morning by the police - they claimed it was because they were playing their drums in support of the APC and the police are SLPP supporters. However, it's often hard to separate politics from money. After talking to them further, the story came out that they had been smoking ganja (marijuana) - which, although illegal in theory, is nothing unusual in Freetown - while also playing their drums. A policeman looking to make some money happened by and arrested them. When arrested, you have two options: go to jail and wait months for a trial, or pay off the police officers. They coughed up Le20,000 each - an enourmous amount for the average person in Freetown - and were promptly set free.
I continued on my walk and encountered a gaggle of young children who demanded I come visit their home on 54 Pademba Road. After the requisite pleasantries and the seemingly hundreds of children appearing out of thin air to stare at the visitor from America, I headed over to iEARN for the afternoon. The youth were busy with a girls club meeting. Agatha led the discussion, which touched on everything from teenage pregnancy to the elections to sharia law to the role of government (as opposed to the individual) in development.
Agatha clarifies an issue as Mamadu (foreground) listens
After the girls club meeting, the youth held a formal debate, complete with judges - Franklyn (iEARN staff member) and Jess (iEARN intern from the US). The topic "Are teachers or students responsible for success in education?" provoked a wide range of opinions as the youth argued their points; the discussion came quite close - and even surpassed - some I've witnessed in the classroom back home in the US.
Emile argues his point
I then returned to town and visited Karim, a friend who lives at The City of Rest, a rehabilitation center next to the YMCA. 17-year-old Karim, apparently the son of the Sierra Leonean ambassador to the UK, was living a "crazy life" in London, but has since returned to Freetown to live with his grandfather and uncle at the City of Rest.
I ventured down Fort Street to Kiemanns, where Michelle's birthday party was in full swing. Michelle, Rachel and Tamara are students from Birmingham University in the UK who are interning and doing research with local NGOs while staying at the YMCA. After a delicious dinner, the party moved back to the YMCA where Tamara had a birthday cake from Crown Bakery waiting for Michelle. The smart people then went to bed, but those of us who weren't so intelligent chartered a poda (we filled it up!) for a late night and early morning at Paddy's. Although the dance floor is usually deserted until after 2 am, Madonna's "Like a Prayer" came on, and we were all so excited to actually hear a song that we knew, so we all went out and danced while the Sierra Leoneans stared in confusion...
A rainbow of colors dominated the market. Traders sold everything from live chickens to imported towels. People sold shirts from NHL All Star games next to traditional African dresses. Others cookies from Sri Lanka, Brazil, Turkey, Lebanon. Some sat in wooden stalls, others sat under umbrellas plastered in cell phone companies' logos. Some sold packets of water, others grilled chicken or beef. Some sold eggs, most of which were imported from Holland or Guinea. Today I tried my business abilities and joined the egg sellers after a busy day at HU and iEARN.
Adam, an American grad student who is staying at the YMCA while interning at Timap for Justice, befriended Ahmed, a young egg seller at the PZ market. Ahmed is orginally from Mile 91 (a town 91 miles from Freetown near Makeni) but has been living in Freetown, selling eggs six days a week. Some of the eggs are locally produced, but most are imported from Guinea or Holland. Each day Ahmed picks up his crate of eggs from his uncle, who owns Ahmed's egg stand, and carries them balanced on his head to the market. He stays from 8 am until dark, at which point the market becomes a deserted maze of empty wooden stalls.
Unfortunately, business wasn't going too well today - Ahmed blamed it on his customers saving their money due to the upcoming elections - and no one bought any eggs from us. The going price is 5 block (Le 500) for one egg, or Le 6000 for a dozen. Ahmed is just one of many egg sellers - there are several wooden stalls which are each shared by four or five different traders.
Adam and Ahmed selling eggs
After the murky darkness descended on the market, Ahmed took us by his room, which is just down the road from the market. He lives with several other friends & family from Mile 9; as they are Timni, it was bit difficult to understand the converstation at his house. The dominant Krio lanuaage is a derivative of English, so even if I can't speak it very well, I can usually get the gist of what people are saying - but Timni was utter gibberish to me. Ahmed's view was pretty fantastic:
We then met up with Saidu, a friend of Ahmed, and went back to Kiemann's for dinner.
Today I was walking down Wilkinson Road when two young men called out "hey!" Usually I simply turn and smile, but there was something unusual about the way they shouted out, so I walked on over. It turns out Weah and Michael were Liberan refugees returning from Mali. They had left Liberia in 2003 as fighting raged through Monrovia and went across West Africa, eventually learning French and working in Mali. (Knowing Spanish has been completely useless here in West Africa - French or Arabic would be much more beneficial.) They had seen Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first female African president, on television and decided to return home, and so were hitchhiking back to Liberia. As I needed to go to lunch myself, I bought them some cassava and rice at a small restaurant on Wilkinson Road. I must admit my motives for buying them lunch were slightly skewed, as I really just wanted to have Liberians write in my happy book. (The happy book is a journal that anyone can write in - you simply write whatever makes you happy.)
Anyways, I left Weah and Michael behind - they were heading over to the UNHCR office to try to see if the Liberian refugee repatriation program was still continuing - and went to iEARN, where I taught for a bit before returning home to the YMCA and another fantastical dinner at Kiemann's. I was expecting to lose weight on this trip but Momma (as we call her) and her daughters have ensured at least one delicious meal every night. We never order - the food simply comes out around 8 pm everynight. Our usual meal begins with rice and a sauce of some sort, such as groundnut soup or boil stew, although sometimes curry or jollof rice. She even makes us two different sauces, as there's several vegetarians in the daily crowd, so she ensures one of the sauces is meat-free. Then Mariam, Momma's eldest daughter, brings out fried plantains and sweet potato chips (french fries in America). A plate of sliced vegetables usually appears at some point and then Mariam brings out the highlight (at least for me) of the meal: a giant stack of succulently grilled beef skewers.
After a taxi ride with a Guinean driver who had moved to Liberia and then to Ivory Coast and then here to SL about a year ago, I walked down Barracks Road (where HU's office is) when I was suddenly greeted by a very large crowd of APC (All People's Congress)supporters decked out in red. They weren't doing much besides some off key shouting with a megaphone of "party packed fo go," a popular song about the elections. I went in to HU and tried to work, but the clamor continued. Some had soda bottles and sticks which they banged together. Others were just decked out in red clothing - some guys were even wearing dresses.
After sufficiently making it impossible to get any work down, the red mass of revelry marched off towards town. I followed a few hours later, as I had to go to iEARN. It took me a while to find transport as all the taxis and podas were filled with exuberant APC supporters. Others marched down the sidewalks. When I finally reached the National Stadium area, the streets were clogged with APC people. It turns out they were having a rally at the National Stadium. As I still had my backpack - and with no desire to enter huge crowd with all my equipment on my back - I stopped by iEARN and dropped off my belongings, and then came back to the rally with my camera and a few of the students.
Thousands of people, all decked out head to toe in red, reveled about the National Stadium. Some shouted political slogans, but most simply made noise. Most carried beers or stout, bought off the head of the street sellers who had come with the crowds. The APC leaders were supposedly speaking as well, but I could neither see them nor hear them. It was more of a drunken street party than a political rally.
I meandered about taking a few pictures when suddenly Jokella and Ibrahim told me to put my camera away. The next thing I knew I was surrounded by people desperately urging me to put the camera in my pocket. With an almost religious fervor, they pleaded with me to go away. I couldn't tell if they were concerned for my safety or for their own - and before I could find out, Ibrahim grabbed my hand and rushed me out of the stadium.
Jokella explained that there was a man doing black magic on himself to ensure the elections would go well - he was taking out his eyeballs and his heart while still alive - and that terrible harm would befall anyone who tried to photograph him. While everyone says that their religion - Islam or Christianity - forbids black magic, they usually are still very scared of its powers. Jess, one of my fellow iEARN interns, also went over to the rally a little later, and said that the black magic guys were covered, head to toe, in traditional African cloth and were dancing up and down, with those around them following their motions - if they don't, the black magic will apparently kill them...
After returning to iEARN, I sent Ibrahim, one of my students, over to the rally to take some pictures:
Meanwhile, I taught a photography class. The center was unusually crowded, as the Positive Music Project students were silk-screening t-shirts to use at their debut at Paddy's this week, which they are all very excited about.
I chilled at the center with the kids for a bit, and then Dabney and I went back to town to the YMCA. After another fantastic dinner at Kiemanns, Gallon - the nickname of one of the guys who works at the shoe/clothing store across from the YMCA I wrote about last week - took me around to meet all of his friends on Fort and Soldier Streets.
He wanted to show me how some of his wealthier friends live, so we visited a lawyer who lives just down Soldier Street. As a barrister in the high court here, Mohammed's fairly wealthy. He lives with his brother, who is also his driver, and several neighborhood young men hang around his house, taking advantage of the generator and his open door. There were two TV's - one playing American films, the other the BBC reporting on how astronomers had discovered a new planet or something to that effect. Then the BBC switched to the "offbeat" and filled the screen with an American man who decided to go for a balloon ride on his deck chair.
While the young men gazed at the television screens, the lawyer told me how he's frustrated by the poor journalism here in Sierra Leone, which only compounds the problems inherent with ineffective government. Not only do journalists blatantly attack politicians in front page articles without any separation of fact and opinion, but will print ridiculous, outright lies - like the Standard Times did two weeks ago with the rice - that the people on the street believe ad then rise up in protest.
He wishes the Charles Taylor case was here in the Special Court, as he believes Taylor needs to see the people whose lives he destroyed. The Special Court was built primarily for this trial, and it's a shame to see such a expensive building with incredibly tight security go to waste as the trial takes place at the ICC - where, Mohammed feels, the officials are not taking the case seriously.
After tiring of politics, talk turned to American music stars - Notorious B.I.G., Dr. Dre, Tupac, Snoop, R. Kelly, DMX, Nelly and Akon, the current pop king, at least in SL. Originally from Senegal, Akon recently recorded a song in Dakar entitled "Mama Africa" which plays almost nonstop on the podas and the radio.
We left the lawyer's compound and walked through the streets. We only met one of Gallon's girlfriends, but he promised he has "many, many wives." He was upset because they've been cheating on him...
He also told me that HIV is "only down in South Africa - it's not real up here in Sierra Leone."
Gallon's wants the encumbent SLPP gone from office, saying that "the SLPP needs to go and then we'll see what leader God gives us." Such an opinion - about God choosing the new leader - is widely prevalent, but not surprising given the religiosity of Sierra Leone.
After leaving Gallon with his iPod on a very dark Fort Streets, I returned to the YMCA. As Dabney needed to get back the National Stadium Hostel, the two of us grabbed a taxi over to Brookfields. While the taxis are perfectly safe during the day, it's usually not the best idea for women to travel in one alone at night, although I guess that's normal in most cities in the world.
My taxi driver on the way back to the YMCA was quite the character. Abbas said he was born "December 26, 1937" and that he liked life back when the "colonial masters" were in power. He explained that today Freetown had "no bookshops, no water, no lights, no food." To emphasize his point, he turned off his headlights for a few seconds and we looked out at an otherwise pitch black street as he said "see? No light!" He said Sierra Leone had weak leaders and that the much-touted anti-corruption commission had made no arrests - despite millions of dollars of funding. Abbas wasn't sure about the elections, simply saying "I don't know."
Today was thankfully uneventful - I went in to HU and did some work on the fuel logs before going over to iEARN to teach for a bit. Dabney, a just arrived iEARN intern from the US, returned to the YMCA with us for dinner at Kiemans. Other than that, it was just another normal day in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
A friend sent me a New York Times article about African development; while some of its arguments are problematic, it does bring up some interesting points about development:
In Africa, One Step Forward and Two Back
By STEPHEN KOTKIN
Angola is sizzling. Its gross domestic product is on pace to expand 30 percent in 2007, making the economy of this oil-soaked African country perhaps the fastest-growing in the world.
Then again, in 2004, the combined gross domestic product (in constant 2000 dollars) for all the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa was $385.6 billion, or about that of New Jersey. And in Angola, up to 12 percent of G.D.P. vanishes, unaccounted for, each year, according to Transparency International, a global watchdog group.
Africa is enormous, and varied. Tiny Botswana, with 1.5 million people, is a success story, and big, post-apartheid South Africa is complex but inspiring. Still, by and large, Africa is struggling.
And more than ever, it appears to be everybody’s business. (Vanity Fair has a special Africa issue this month.) From celebrities and economists to economists who are now celebrities, the concerned want us to know that they have the answers to Africa’s challenges: more aid and microloans, antimalarial bed nets and mobile phones, debt cancellation and discounted drugs.
But here is a head scratcher: although globalization has transformed Asia, decades of assisted development have not produced sustained prosperity in Africa. Any more goodwill from the African aid industry, it sometimes seems, and the continent may be condemned forever.
Enter the judicious Paul Collier, a former research director at the World Bank and an economist at Oxford University who has long studied Africa. He previously wrote about a “conflict trap” — self-perpetuating civil wars that sidetrack development. But now, in “The Bottom Billion” (Oxford University Press, $28), he concedes that Malawi has been “conflict-free for its entire post-independence history, yet it still has not developed.” The book takes due account of other economic traps and fills out an ambitious Africa agenda.
Development, Dr. Collier argues persuasively, is both too narrow and too broad; too narrowly focused on aid, which often causes rather than cures problems, and too broadly focused on the entire developing world. Poverty has been plummeting for most of that world — a first in history — but circumstances for about a billion people continue to deteriorate. He wants to redirect development promotion to this bottom billion, 70 percent of them in Africa, despite the uphill rock-push that would be involved in relocating development types from Rio to, say, Bangui.
Four conditions can become economic traps: abundant natural resources, which emancipate elites from investing in and being accountable to the citizenry; landlocked geography amid underdeveloped neighbors (Switzerland can depend on Germany to build ports, but Uganda depends on Kenya); unchecked violence; and poor institutions, which convert what otherwise should be a boon — foreigners eager to invest — into a nightmare.
Free trade, for all its benefits, cannot lift the bottom billion out of these traps, Dr. Collier points out, not least because soaring, cheap-labor Asia now stands in Africa’s way.
He proposes a four-instrument tool kit. First (and least important) is smarter aid, linked to other tools. Second is well-executed military interventions. He celebrates Britain’s unheralded operation to bring security to Sierra Leone as “cheap, confident and sustained.” But many other blundered armed interventions, in Africa and elsewhere, would seem more predictive of future efforts.
About three-quarters of the Africans in the bottom billion, have lived through a civil war, which Dr. Collier estimates typically costs a country and its neighbors $64 billion. And once a state fails, it takes 59 years, on average, to return to functionality, at a cost of $100 billion, he says. These numbers (detailed calculations are omitted) undergird his view that it is more economical to act to forestall civil war or state failure.
Of course, the costs of intervention are chiefly borne by the taxpayers and the troops of rich countries, while the costs of failures are mostly borne by the bottom billion. But if you do not buy the economic argument, Dr. Collier also invokes security. “A cesspool of misery next to a world of growing prosperity,” he argues, “is both terrible for those in the cesspool and dangerous for those who live next to it.”
A third tool for Africa is governance charters, Dr. Collier says. He envisions the creation and adherence to such a set of standards as analogous to qualifying for entry to the European Union, without actual integration, whereby norms are made clear and governments are rewarded for adhering to them.
Finally, Dr. Collier proposes an adjustment in global trade policy so that wealthy countries open their markets by removing tariffs against the bottom billion in cases where tariffs are in place against Asia, giving Africa a temporary leg up.
No world government exists to enact Dr. Collier’s nuanced proposals. International nongovernmental organizations (the ersatz world government) often have their heads in the Sahara, he shows in the book’s liveliest passages.
So he pitches his recommendations to the Group of 8 industrialized nations, which he identifies as one of the few global bodies with ostensible clout, and which has already put Africa on its plate.
Still, Dr. Collier soberly observes that “change in the societies at the very bottom must come predominantly from within.” In that light, we might be tempted to ask everyone just to leave Africa alone, to see if it can make it on its own. The problem is, cutting off aid would not remove outsiders’ hands.
That is where John Ghazvinian comes in. In “Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil” (Harcourt, $25), he reports on a six-month jaunt in 2005 through 12 countries and their putschists, preachers, kleptocrats, activists, child soldiers and foreign “oilfield trash” — that is, pot-bellied white men bar-hopping “with 19-year-old Naomi Campbell look-alikes.”
From Nigeria, where oil was first tapped in 1958, through the more recent gushers off Equatorial Guinea and into Chad and Sudan, the scrappy author, who has a doctorate in history from Oxford, details how every recalibrated program to finally enable the African masses to share in a hydrocarbon mother lode has crashed and burned.
Today, Dr. Ghazvinian notes, the United States is all over Africa, come what may, as a crude-oil alternative to the Middle East. And with China, the world’s second-biggest oil importer, also in the search — alongside South Korea, India and Brazil — the scramble is on. In Africa, things may get a lot worse before they get a lot worse.
Dr. Ghazvinian’s perceptive, at times self-dramatizing rough guide lacks the enduring sparkle of “Tropical Gangsters,” by Robert E. Klitgaard (1990) or the scholarly wallop of “African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis,” by Nicholas van de Walle (2001).
Still, “Untapped” drills home the point, acknowledged by Dr. Collier, that a thoughtful strategy to lift the neglected bottom billion must compete against the global oil giants going about their business — and the one billion people in countries at the top, and the four billion in the middle, whose consumption habits stand behind these multinationals.
As big consumers of oil, you and I are intervening powerfully in Africa — and perhaps unwittingly furthering graft and bloodletting. That meddlesome Africa industry that is helping to cause so much added grief? Look in the mirror.
If that was too much development-speak for you, here's an email a friend from home sent me. Hopefully the author won't mind too much that I'm sharing it:
I was on a run this evening, and I was thinking about experiences. What exactly are they? I mean, in American culture, we go places to experience things. New Orleans to experience poverty. The drop-inn center in inner-city Cinci to experience homelessness. But really, most of the time we don't need to go anywhere. As long as we be where we are, we can be changed. And we can change the world. I just wanted to remind you of something that I continually have to remind myself: we change our corner of the world simply by being in it. You are doing beautiful things simply by being Paul in Sierra Leone. If the cameras don't get returned or the kids don't pay attention exactly during your lessons, that's probably the perfect activity for them to do. And by being there with them while they experience life... that is enough.
We drove past men dancing in the streets. Some held plants over their heads, the green emphasizing their support for the SL People's Party. Others carried speakers. We drove past podas stacked high with cassava on its way to the Freetown markets. We drove past electrical transmission towers, but they had no power lines attached. We drove past NGO offices and cell phone towers. We drove past burned out buildings next to brand new huts.
Harry took Amanda, Nick and myself on a tour of central/northern Sierra Leone this weekend. We traveled to Makeni on Saturday to visit his step-mother and then even further north on Sunday to Kabala, where we stayed with his mother before returning to Freetown on Monday. As I simply don't have time to write about everything that happened, I've posted a few pictures - complete with captions - from the trip over at my Picasa site:
I just got back from a weekend upcountry, and so am a bit behind in posting...I'll try to catch up tonight. Here's a post from last Friday to tide you over: - - - During our run this morning, Osman stopped by his parent's house and introduced me to his family. He doesn't live with them, but instead with his relatives about a half mile away, which is a very common practice.
His father runs a small mini-market, where they sell the normal goods - freshly baked bread, Laughing Cow Cheese, top up cards for the cell phone companies, FOM! laundry detergent ("Dirts are not attached back!") and palm oil, just to name a few. These stores - the Sierra Leonean equivalent of a gas station convenience store - are everywhere and sell the exact same goods for identical prices - there is very little differentiation. This morning Osman's father sat inside the store surrounded by children as he worked with them on the Arabic alphabet. He teaches Arabic to the neighborhood youth in the mornings; Osman said that if I put my "heart into it and had patience" I could learn Arabic too. I never expected to need Arabic in Sierra Leone, but it would be incredibly useful with the large Islamic and Lebanese populations here. His father doesn't speak English, so it was rather difficult to converse, but I did get to meet the rest of his family. I had to promise to come back soon and visit more, as his mom was dissapointed I didn't stay very long.
Although I had little desire to start running again, Osman dragged me along behind him through the chaos of eastern Freetown's streets. A brand new, very out-of-place Land Cruiser flew down the road (it's more of a market that happens to have cars travel through than a road), sending people scrambling out of the way and scattering their loads of rice, charcoal, cassava, sunglasses, bread, and just about every other good imaginable, all precariously balanced on their heads. We both fell into a pile of sand on the side of the road. Osman just turned around with a grin and said "this is Africa" - as if being in Africa made it all ok.
After breakfast and a taxi ride to HU, I stared at Excel and made spreadsheets to log fuel for the generators and vehicles. We're also trying to track the progress we've made towards the one of the project indicators; specifically, the amount of time it takes between initial radio call for the ambulance and the arrival of the patient at the clinic, so I'm trying to set up a database to monitor if we're succeeding in lowering that time.
HU is usually a quiet office with little of the usual hustle and bustle so common on the streets. However, the upcoming elections have changed our peace into a continuous raucous. The APC (All People's Congress) nominated their vice-presidential candidate yesterday, who happens to live next door to the HU office. In a combination of celebration and campaigning, he has been throwing a non-stop house party for the last two days and blaring music into the neighborhood.
I went to iEARN for the afternoon and sat in on a discussion Andrew led about the digital divide - it was interesting to see the problem from the "other" side of the divide.
Below a very quick panorama I did of iEARN. Sorry for the terrible stitching together, but it gives a good idea of what the center is like, at least when the generator is not on - as soon as it is fired up, the kids all dash to the computers and the Playstation.
After sending two of the boys to buy batteries since I had forgotten to bring my rechargeables, I taught the writing portion of the family subject. As this blog is about Sierra Leone and not me (well, at least in theory...) I thought I'd include some of the writing my students are doing. The two I've included below are fairly typical stories and are in their original, unedited form:
The name of my Family is called the Kamara Family. We are four in numbers. I have two sisters and a brother. One of my sister is a student and she is in Class 6. We are not living together in the same place. I live with my aunty who take good care of me and always wanted me to be a better person in the future. I sometime wish to be together with my mother and father but because of some circumstances we are not together. But am really happy with the way my aunt treat me and I wish she could have been my mother. - Gbasssay Zealous, Age 22
I am feeling very angry when people ask me about my family because of i have lose them by killing them during the war. I have 3(three) brothers and 1(one) sister. all of us are not stay together. I am depend on my friend who call Ibrahim Kamara both of are attending the same school, sleeping together and want out to fine our living. -Musa, 18 years
What makes these kids so amazing is that they go on with life as if everything at home - if they even have one - is perfectly normal. They laugh, they smile, they tell jokes, they read novels, they study biology for their exams and they even ask me about my family - even though they, at the age of 19, might be the only surviving person in their family or are living on the streets, kicked out of the house by their step-mother.
I was running down Siaka Stevens Street - the main thoroughfare in Freetown - and trying desperately to keep up with Osman. I guess it showed, as a young lad sitting on the street called out "white man, white man, run run! black man go befo!"
Runners are rare, but not unseen, in Freetown, but I an American running with a Sierra Leonean (especially in the middle of town) is very unusual, as most of the expats from abroad stick together in their air conditioned apartments in the West, while the few Lebanese who do run usually run alone.
Anyways, after my morning run, I took at a taxi over to HU for work. This taxi driver wasn't particularly talkative, but he did have fantastic stuffed animal collection on the dashboard. A teddy bear in a black and white, jail-striped "Prisoner of LOVE" outfit shared the dashboard with a pastel Easter bunny and an red "I heart Philly" bear. An Arsenal Football Club sticker on the plastered over much of the passenger's side of the windshield guarded the animal collection. Unfortunately, I had left my camera at home (for the first time in weeks) but I do have a few pictures of other taxi interiors:
I worked on a few contracts for an hour or so at HU, but then left early to head out to the east, as I had promised to visit an orphanage in Grafton, and to take pictures of the opening ceremony of the Miracle Corners of the World (MCW) community center in Kissy. I met Tamara and Jyoti (fellow iEARN interns/YMCA residents) and Moses at the Y and then we hopped on a poda for the hour long fight through traffic to the east.
Orphanages are nothing unusual in Sierra Leone, but the Grafton Polio Orphanage is unique in that it only houses disabled children. Almost all suffered from polio and most have at least one other disability or illness, ranging from muteness to mental retardation to epileptic seizures - but you'd never know that from looking at them. They're all well-dressed, clean, and happy:
I'd never thought I'd meet a match for my own wonderful mother back home in St. Louis, but Aunty Melrose might come close. Confined to a wheelchair by a childhood bout with polio, she's the mom for the twenty-two orphans ranging from toddler to 16 years in age. She does all the cooking, cleaning and the daily chores, which are considerable, considering there is no electricity or indoor plumbing, with the nearest tap being a quarter mile away. She had quite a few wheelchairs for the children, but simple wear-and-tear, along with a thief who smashed many of the chairs and also stole her cell phone and savings, has resulted in most of the children only scooting along the floor. I first visited on June 27, at which point there was only a half bag of rice left - here's Abbas, the oldest boy at 16, with the last remaining rice:
When I returned on July 5, they were out of rice and reduced to only a meager amount of food. Jyoti and I had some extra cash, so we gave them Le 75,000 for a 50 kg bag of rice. While Melrose is doing amazing things for her children, there's much more that needs to be done, as there are literally thousands of similarly disabled children. To fulfill that need, Pearl, a Canadian who spent a few months in Sierra Leone earlier this year, has founded the International Foundation for Disabled Orphans (IFFDO) with the hope of establishing similar orphanages throughout Sierra Leone. There’s more pictures from the orphanage below:
As I had to get back to Kissy to photograph the MCW ceremony, we left Melrose and her children and took a poda westwards. The APC had a rally - essentially a dance party in the streets - and had blocked the main road. The podas all turned around in the road and went the wrong way, reversing traffic until we reached a secondary road that wasn't blocked.
We had made it about half the way to the MCW site with the Sierra Leonean music blaring when this second road as well was blocked, but this time by construction. We left the stalled traffic and walked through the construction site and grabbed a second poda on the other side, which took us the rest of the way to MCW.
The opening - held inside due to some early afternoon rain - was packed with people, with officials from MCW, the UN, various organizations, several journalists and, most importantly, the local community members themselves all attending. Amanda and Nick have been frantically preparing for it for the last few weeks, and it certainly shows. Eddie, MCW's executive director, was in West Africa for the AU summit last week and, although the building isn't completely finished, they had the opening since he was in the region. There’s pictures, both from the ceremony and the construction of the building, at the Picasa album linked to below:
It's days like this that inspire me after seeing so much suffering all over Freetown. It was fantastic to see the building filled with dignitaries and (and more importantly) children and community members, all incredibly happy to have a place to call their own.
After an early run around the city, I went to HU and prepared various financial documents requested by the London office for the audit of the Sierra Leone branch....not exactly the most riveting work, but I guess such audits are necessary in large organizations to ensure accountability and a corruption-free project.
I'm amazed by the number of people who know my name - I'll walk down one of the streets and inevitably someone calls out "Paul!" and comes over to greet me like an old friend - while I'm absolutely clueless as to their identity.
I returned to the iEARN and went to lunch with Jyoti at Marianella. The students finally returned the cameras I had lent them last Friday to take pictures of their family. Although I had stressed to them the importance of bringing the cameras back by Monday at 12pm so I could redistribute them to the next group of students, the rain on Monday and Tuesday effectively kept the students - and my cameras - at home. Thankfully, the sun was out in full force today, so they returned the cameras and I was able to teach again (for the first time since Friday). Two of my six cameras for the kids "disappeared" last week, so I can now only teach four at a time, and, when combined with students keeping camera for extra-long periods of time, my progress through the lesson plans has been severely constrained.
The self portraits weren't working out so well, so I skipped ahead to the family assignment, for which the students write for about twenty minutes about their families, their history, and their hopes for the future. Ideally, they then make a list of pictures they would like to take to convey those feelings, but usually that's overly optimistic, as they have found it very challenging to convert words into images. Once a few more students complete the family assignment, I will print out a few images from each student and we will write captions for them, describing both what is inside - and outside - the frame.
After class I hung around the center and talked to some of the students - or rather tri to understand their Krio. They taught me a game in which the leader shouts out a letter and you have to come up with a word starting with that letter ASAP. In theory it's quite easy, but when you have try to wade through Krio accents - and they though my American (as they're used to an archaic British) english accent - it complicates matters a bit.
I returned to the YMCA and went out on Fort Street to take some pictures. I met the guys who run the shoe & clothing store just down the street from the Y. They are two brothers - one 24, the other 20.
They have relatives in Maryland who ship them containers - via Maersk SeaLand - to Freetown where they sell their relatively upscale merchandise. The owner just returned from working for a US military subcontractor in Baghdad - he was very glad to be back in Freetown, although he still wants to come to America. He's on the left in the picture below:
On a good day - when it's not raining - they can make anywhere from $5 - $25. They also introduced me to Sebastian, a Liberian refugee who lives above their store - he can't be more than 16 years old. He's the one leaning out of the door on the right of the above picture.
Before long I was mobbed by the usual Fort Street children
There is no concept of of boys or girls clothing. The boy with the batteries in his mouth (I have no idea what he was doing with them) was wearing a "purrrr-fect!" shirt with a kitty cat on it. One twenty something young man I saw yesterday had a "#1 Mom" shirt on; Harry (Amanda's Sierra Leonean project coordinator) is very proud of his woman's purse:
Last week he purchased a black woman's coat for Le 6000. When I told him the buttons were on the wrong side and that it was incredibly feminine, he didn't seem to mind. I realized that clothing is clothing, and when the only actual reference to gender is a few small words on the tag, it doesn't really matter who some designer in New York intended it to be for. A coat is a coat and a purse is a purse - here in Salone function is as important, if not more so, than mere aesthetics.
Eddie, the executive director of Miracle Corners of the World, is in town for a few days, so Amanda and Nick took him up to the US Embassy to meet with the ambassador, leaving me to celebrate the Fourth of July with Jyoti, Tamara (two of the other iEARN interns), Rachel and Michelle (British grad students doing research). I didn't even realize it was the Fourth of July until I was writing down my expenses for the day and wotre 7/4. As the sole American at dinner, I had a bit of a subdued celebration with Jyoti (Nepal), Tamara (Australia), Rachel (UK) and Michelle (UK).
I sat under the Cotton Tree eating Le100 worth of popcorn, the only food I had been able to find a lazy Sunday afternoon in central Freetown. Women carried goods by on their heads, taxis fought around the round about, and poda podas huffed by as the aprentices shouted out destinations: "Lum-Lum-Lum-Lum-Lumley!" One group, wearing t-shits emblazoned with a picture of Libyan President Gaddafi and the text "Brother Muammar Gaddafi - World Islamic Call Society," was hanging on the cotton tree a massive poster identical to their shirts. Others hoisted a banner, in Arabic and English, that said "The Youth of the City of Freetown welcome the found of African Union." Gaddafi had been road-tripping through West Africa on his way to the AU meeting and was supposed to finally visit Freetown sometime this week, although no one knew exactly when.
An enormous megaphone with a taxi beneath it drove through the streets, blaring in Krio and English that "marginalization affects you" and that Brother Gaddafi will alleviate the suffering. I guess they got bored with shouting their message because they soon started playing Abba's "Take a chance on me" through the megaphone.
The excitement continued on Monday. Signs celebrating Gaddafi popped up all over the city: "Kwame Nkrumah to Muammar Gaddafi - Completing the dream of African Unity." Nkrumah was the Ghanian leader who spearheaded the independence movement from England in the late 1950's and was elected president of Ghana. I've included an excerpt about Nkrumah from a paper I wrote earlier this year on the politics of post-Independence Africa; it's more history than anything else, so feel free to skip ahead to the more exciting parts.
In less than two decades, Kwame Nkrumah went from a convicted criminal to prime minister leading the African unity movement to a man evicted from his own nation. A man with idealistic ideas far beyond the times, his refusal to acknowledge the realpolitik that dominated the African political scene lead to his demise on the global level, while domestically his increasingly inefficient and corrupt administration lost popular support.
Initially the charming spokesman of Africa, Nkrumah gradually become more socially isolated; he replaced this with “a citadel of power” in which he alone dominated the Ghanaian political scene. He dismantled any real sense of democracy and replaced it with an autocratic regime democratic only in theory. Since he claimed to be the visionary messiah of Africa, he had no problems in destroying the fragile system at whim – by 1964 Ghana was a one party state; the following year Nkrumah merely announced the winners of the elections without a vote. He refused to acknowledge any imperfection and claimed all failures had resulted from “imperialists and neo-colonialists plotting against him.” Additionally, his lack of coherent economic policy proved disastrous: “From being one of the most prosperous countries in the tropical world at the time of independence in 1957, Ghana by 1965 had become virtually bankrupt: it was saddled with huge debts and beset by rising prices, higher taxes and food shortages.”
As his domestic world collapsed, he became obsessed with the international scene and his real life-long infatuation of establishing the United States of Africa. While many leaders agreed with his ideas to some degree, most were already alienated by his foreign policy of active subversion of other governments. As a result, the 1965 OAU [Organization of African Unity] summit meeting in Accra at which Nkrumah called for union government was a dismal failure, completing his isolation not just at home, but on the international level.
The army, threatened by Nkrumah’s subjection of the military to his own policies, finally removed him from office in 1966. This was to become a common theme throughout Africa, as the first-generation of post-Independence leaders, corrupted by power, ignored the demands of the people.
(The book quoted is Meredith's "The Fate of Africa")
In short, Nkrumah was unable to successfully establish an effective continental government entity. Although the OAU did foster a dialogue between African leaders and supported the nationalist movements against white minority rule in Southern Africa, it was increasingly marginalized by Cold War politics and, more importantly, national sovereignty. As it was essentially an organization of African leaders who had no desire to give up any authority to a continental body, so the OAU gradually withered away as many leaders became increasingly autocratic and focused on state - and regime - security. The OAU watched As the OAU was a child of the state-centric politics of the post-World War II era, it only had protocols for handling inter-state conflict and subjected human rights, democratic governance and human security to state sovereignty and regime survival. As there was no mandate for intervention in intra-state affairs, the OAU could only watch from the sidelines as corrupt leaders created disaster and conflict - leading to the deaths of millions - throughout second half of the twentieth century.
As the OAU was effectively “held ransom by its own charter,” several leaders, such as Mbeki of South Africa and Obasanjo of Nigeria, began working to create a new pan-African body that would be more appropriate for a post-Cold War era that places value on human security. While based on the OAU, the this new organisation - the African Union - had many differences, the most important being Article 4(h), which gives it the right to intervene in internal state affairs in order to "prevent war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity" and respond to "serious threats to legitimate order." This recognition of the humanitarian problems - and the mandate to resolve them - created by primitive adherence to national sovereignty - has enourmous potential, although currently it is only that, as enforcement of Article 4(h) remains problematic. Leaders often give dramatic speeches promoting good governance, democratisation, and accountability at AU meetings, but such ideals are rarely being implemented once the leaders return to the plush benefits of leadership in their home nations. Many of these same leaders came to power through coups or fraudulent elections and rarely even budge towards democracy. Nevertheless, the AU remains a significant step towards ensuring human security for all.
However, like any bureaucracy, the AU is expensive and most African nations were not prepared to front the expenses of a continental body. With his usual theatrical antics, Gaddafi jumped on pan-African bandwagon and provided much of the initial funding for AU, even though his dictatorial Libya can not exactly be said to be a prime example of the ideals touted in the AU's charter. Additionally, his international image has been less than stellar due to decades of antagonism directed at the United States and the United Kingdom and his support and training of the leaders of rebel movements throughout sub-Saharan Africa, such as Charles Taylor of Liberia and the RUF here in Sierra Leone.
However, with this new promotion of the AU and humanitarian assistance to African nations, his image is improving here in Sierra Leone, although certainly not uniformly. Wikipedia states:
Gaddafi has also emerged as a popular African leader. As one of the continent's longest-serving, post-colonial heads of state, the Libyan dictator enjoys a reputation among many Africans as an experienced and wise statesman who has been at the forefront of many struggles over the years. Gaddafi has earned the praise of Nelson Mandela and others, and is always a prominent figure in various pan-African organizations, such as the Organization of African Unity (now replaced by the African Union). He is also seen by many Africans as a humanitarian, pouring large amounts of money into sub-Saharan states. Large numbers of Africans have come to Libya to take advantage of the availability of jobs there. In addition, many economic migrants, primarily from Somalia and Ghana, use Libya as a staging-post to reach Italy and other European countries.
There are many explanations for the change of Gaddafi's politics. The most obvious is that the once very rich Libya became much less wealthy as oil prices dropped significantly during the 1990's. Since then, Gaddafi has tended to need other countries more than before and hasn't been able to dole out foreign aid as he once did. In this environment, the increasingly stringent sanctions placed by the UN and US on Libya made it more and more isolated politically and economically. Another possibility is that strong Western reactions have forced Gaddafi into changing his politics. It is also possible that realpolitik changed Gaddafi. His ideals and aims did not materialize: there never was any Arab unity, the various armed revolutionary organizations he supported did not achieve their goals, and the demise of the Soviet Union left Gaddafi's main symbolic target, the United States, stronger than ever.
While everyone here has a different opinion of Gaddafi, most people were excited for his visit Sierra Leone, if only from the novelty of seeing a foreign head of state. The hot topic of conversation last Monday night in the taxi was the streetlights being on. Although most of the city has streetlights, they only function when a high government official from Sierra Leone needs to impress visiting dignitaries - so they were on for Gaddafi. Their unusual light revealed hundreds of people lined up along the roads, waiting for the Libyan convoy.
The taxi driver managed to negotiate the police roadblocks and dropped me off at the Y, but then I saw people running towards Siaka Stevens Street. Thinking to myself that joining an giant mob of people was a very bad idea, I ran with them anyways and made it to Siaka just as the first Sierra Leonean police escorts were flying by on their motorcyles. Next came the SL police pickup trucks complete with officers sitting on a wooden bench in the back with their weapons held nonchalantly at their sides. This was nothing unusual as such escort is customary for high government officials.
Then the Toyota Land Cruisers rolled by, caked in dark red West African dust but still clearly only a few months old - the beautiful white and maroon trim peaked out from under the dust. Some Libyans waved from the windows, but most continued sleeping, sprawled out in the back seats clearly bored by just another West African city. Others pumped their hands into the air in triumphant celebration of their own arrival, to which the Sierra Leoneans roared with applause fit for a returning war hero. In a sense, Gaddafi is just that - except he supported the side that lost, but in a war where there's no good guys, even the losers get recognition. Especially when they donate millions of dollars to your country.
After an nearly interminable amount of identical white and maroon Land Cruisers, the media truck rolled by with camera men poking out of the windows. The next Land Cruiser was jet black with a driver wearing immaculate white gloves, jesturing excitedly to an identical SUV behind him. The crowd screamed with excitement as tinted windows concealed what could only be their hero Gaddafi, but the only glimpse of him Monday night would be his likeness cheaply imprinted on the "World Islamic Call Society" shirts.
The procession continued on after Gaddafi with ambulances and buses and just about everything else imaginalbly - if there was a slight chance of the convoy needing something during their roadtrip, they had brought it along with them. Then, with a few more police sirens, the Libyans disappeared down the brightly lit streets as the Sierra Leoneans blabbered excitedly about their wonderful Arab friend from North Africa.
The next day was just like any other, except everyone was wearing the Gaddafi shirts. I heard on the street that their would be a rally at the National Stadium in the afternoon, and as I work right across the street, I ventured on over, curious to see the Sierra Leone-Libya interaction. While there were no signs of Gaddafi at first, the numerous police officers milling about confirmed he would be arriving soon.
While the stadium was about half full, it was almost empty compared to the Togo-Sierra Leone football match earlier in the month. Most people sported Gaddafi shirts or banners, while those in the VIP section were clearly those in favor with the World Islamic Council - all were dressed in white gown-like garmets (I'm sorry I don't know the real name for them). Chants of "Allahu Akbar!" roared through the stadium when the Libyan entourage arrived and drove their Land Cruisers onto the track. Hundreds of street sellers walked through the stands hawking everything from eggs to posters and oblivious to the Libyans disembarking on below the stands.
Photo by Moses Marrah
The Libyans knew they were the wealthier nation - and weren't afraid to show it by directing the event, as the Sierra Leonean officials watched from the shadows. Sparkling white minibuses inscribed with "Gift of the Leader and Libyan People to the People of Sierra Leone" filled almost half the track, each with a driver standing smartly at attention.
A dance troupe performed for the two heads of states as the crowd applauded. A crowd of Libyan doctors - or who I can only assume were doctors - paraded into the VIP section behind the two heads of state. The doctors wore jeans, tee-shirts emblazoned with Gaddafi's image and white lab coats. Some draped stethoscopes around their neck and wore surgical masks. One tried to smoke with surgical mask on, which didn't work out so well for him. They were a very interesting group of rather confused medical "professionals." After seeing them, I can understand how the Bulgarian HIV case !!!!!!!!!LINK!!!!!!!!! could have happened.
President Kabbah (SL) and Gaddafi both addressed the crowd, although unfortunately I can't report with any accuracy on the remainder of the rally, as I was busy convincing Libyan security officials that I wasn't a threat to their leader. Thankfully, they were quite reasonable once they realized I was just a student photographer.
After more speeches and chanting, the Libyan motorcade tore out of the stadium in their Land Cruisers and left Freetown to continue their road trip to the the AU summit in the capital of Ghana, Accra. Mobs of young boys chased after them, eager to catch one last glimpse of Gaddafi. The summit is going on this week, and the BBC reports that his dreams of a single African state are likely to remain just that, as most of his fellow leaders - and likely himself as well - are simply not going to give up their sovereignty to an unproven continental organization. The current pan-African trends seem to favor economic integration by means such as the Economic Community of West African States or ECOWAS. Leaders interested in actual governance rather than thousand mile road trips through West Africa have largely left Gaddafi alone, although a few states such as Senegal have supported the Libyan leader.
- - - - - - -
The day after Gaddafi's rally I was walking with Moses down the street near Grafton, a small village just outside of Eastern Freetown, glad that the excitement of Gaddafi's visit had finally quieted down when I glanced up to see a nightmare hurtling towards me.
A tractor trailer truck was bouncing down the road with dozens of people clinging onto the roof while a mob of their compatriots ran along side it. Some screamed with joy and raised pink plastic bundles over their head, away from the grappling hands of those who hadn't been so fortunate while others jostled for prime positioning to grab the pink packages that seemed to be inside - but when it went by, the truck was completely empty. I handed Moses my backpack - it suddenly becomes a lot less valuable when a white person isn't carrying it - and we weaved through the crowd and hopped in the first poda that was going back to town. A man jumped into the poda with his pink bundle of loot and sat next to me, guarding it with clasped hands and wary eyes. Once safely away from the mobs, he opened the plastic and peered inside. He blabbered excitedly and pulled out a woman's dress for closer inspection.
Our poda had finally left the crowds behind when a group of boys dashed by, heading towards the mobs of people screaming "res! res!" (rice! rice!). Before the poda could even stop moving, everyone inside - except Moses and me - had handed the apprentice Le800 and leapt out, joining those dashing back towards the the mobs. I was utterly confused, to say the least.
I think the truck had dropped off a load of clothing donated by Gaddafi at one of the buildings alongside the road, but the distribution had turned into a bit of a brawl, with the losers chasing after the truck in hopes of there being more pink bundles inside it There may have been some rice as well, as it looked like some had been spilled on the road.
People said Gaddafi had donated the clothing and rice as a gesture of solidarity with the Sierra Leonean people - and I assumed this mob would be the end of the matter. However, Gaddafi's donations were to remain a matter of converstation. The front page of that morning's Standard Times - one of the local newspapers - was filled with the title "BOMBSHELL - COL GHADDAFI EXPOSES GOVERNMENT" and the following article, initially only published in their print edition:
"At the National Stadium yesterday the visiting Libyan President revealed to the mammoth crowd which was predominantly Muslims, the numerous contributions he has made to this country through the Government of President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. Among the items donated were Two shiploads of rice, money to the tune of Two million Dollars, fleet of vehicles, forty tractors, skip trucks, bowzers of fuel, nineteen buses and other items . . . The two ship loads of rice, the President could not explain how it was utilized. What remains of serious concern to the majority of Sierra Leoneans present at the National Stadium is that the Government of President Kabbah has never informed the people about these gestures from Colonel Ghaddafi and his Government"
In short, the Standard Times reported that Gaddafi had mentioned donations to people of Sierra Leone that Kabbah's government had embezzeled, instead of giving them to the people. The Standard Times stated that president Kabbah then attempted to explain these donations, saying he sold the rice to finance NASSIT, the social security institution. Kabbah's SLPP (Sierra Leone People's Party) government published the following rebuttal of the Standard Times article the next day:
Government wishes the public to know that there is absolutely no iota of truth in the publication. Colonel Ghaddafi never made such a statement nor did he make any reference to donations made to Sierra Leone. On the contrary, it was President Kabbah who, in welcoming the Libyan Leader once again reminded the public about the various items Libya has donated to Sierra Leone.
It will be recalled that on every occasion when donations have been made, the President has always informed the public either through press releases as in the case of the Libyan rice, when that rice was publicly sold and proceeds used as seed money to launch National Social Security and Insurance Trust (NASSIT) or as in the case of the tractors, a public ceremony was held at the Youyi Building at which the President presented the forty tractors to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security.
So also in the case of the twenty buses, skip trucks and water bowsers a special ceremony was held at the National Stadium at which representatives of the Libyan Government were specially flown from Libya to Freetown to take part in the presentation. All these presentations were given the widest publicity on the radio, television and in the newspapers.
Apart from the public presentations President Kabbah has on numerous occasions all over the country referred to these gifts in his public speeches. With respect to the one million dollars gift, the cheque was prepared and issued in the personal name of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, who nonetheless endorsed it to the Accountant-General for payment into the Consolidated Revenue Fund. Again, a press release was made on that occasion. Government considers the Standard Times publication as not only mischievous, malicious, inciting but also calculated to bring the President into hatred and excite public disaffection against the President and his Government
The relationship between the Government and the people of the Arab Republic of Libya and the Government and people of Sierra Leone has been collaborative and transparent.
It is, therefore, the hope of Government that media practitioners would practise their trade with objectivity, integrity and caution. The referenced article in the Standard Times woefully failed to observe these basic rules of journalism.
Meanwhile, the matter has been referred to the Office of the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice for necessary action.
As I was being interrogated by the Libyans during the speeches at the rally, I can't verify if the Standard Times or the SLPP version of the speeches is correct, and - in either case - the speeches were in rather halting English, which is easy to misinterpret. The government did not merely issue press releases combatting the claims of the Standard TImes; the "necessary action" taken by the Attorney-General was to arrest the editor of the Standard Times, as reported by Reuters:
FREETOWN (Reuters) - Police in Sierra Leone have detained a newspaper editor over an article about gifts from leader Muammar Gaddafi after his visit to the West African country this week, state radio reported on Friday.
Police detained Philip Neville, managing editor of the Standard Times daily newspaper, after a search of the newspaper's offices which produced evidence that may lead to charges of sedition and criminal libel, the radio said.
Gaddafi held a big rally in the country's main stadium on Tuesday during a road tour of West Africa to drum up support for a continental government, which will be discussed at an African Union summit opening in Ghana on Sunday. The Standard Times led Wednesday's edition with a report that Gaddafi had detailed gifts Libya had previously given to Sierra Leone, including two shipments of rice, that the government had not made public. President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah said on Tuesday the rice had been sold to raise funds for a national social security unit to provide benefits to the unemployed, but revelations of the gifts have received broad coverage in local newspapers.
"Many news media have been talking about Col. Muammar Gaddafi's gifts, not just the Standard Times," New York-based press freedom watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres said in a statement on Friday. "One has the impression that Neville was arrested in order to settle scores and to issue a warning in the run-up to the 11 August general elections," it said.
Charles Magai, the PMDC - (People's Movement for Democratic Change) candidate for the August 11 elections, hopped on the anti-Kabbah bandwagon with the following allegations published in the Concord Times:
Kabbah Sold the Rice in Ghana - Charles Margai Peoples Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC) leader, Charles Francis Margai Saturday alleged that President Alhaji Ahmad Tejan Kabbah sold the much talk of the town controversial rice that was donated to the people of Sierra Leone by the Libyan leader, Muammar Qhadafi in Ghana.
Although opposition PMDC leader Charles Magai is using the issue as a campaign matter against the SLPP, it seems that Standard Times article may have merely misquoted and/or misattributed the statements at the National Stadium, as the other newspapers failed to report revelations of the rice, and many even support the governments claims. It seems that the government may actually be correct, as the Awareness Times published this statement by President Kabbah, apparently made in 2005 concerning foreign assistance from Libya that was questioned by the Standard Times:
STATEMENT BY HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT, ALHAJI DR AHMAD TEJAN KABBAH AT THE CEREMONY OF THE HANDING OVER OF TRACTORS AND AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS DONATED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF LIBYA ON WEDNESDAY, 17th AUGUST 2005. Culled from State House Website of www.statehouse.sl What we are witnessing today by the presence of these tractors before us, bears testimony to the goodwill extended to us by friendly governments, more specifically the Arab Jamahariya of Libya whose Minister of Cooperation is here with us today. This great sister nation has generously donated to this government the tractors and implements - thirty in all - to support our Food Security drive. I may add that these tractors are only part of a package of donations which also include forty 50-seater buses, 20 skip trucks, 6 trucks for refuse collection, 20 water tanks, 14,500 and 11,000 litres capacity each, water tanks, and the construction of four executive villas. I should like, on behalf of my government and the people of Sierra Leone to express our profound gratitude to the Leader of the Libyan Arab Jamahariya and the people of Libya for these generous gifts.
The Libyan Government also made an earlier gift to the people of Sierra Leone in the form of rice as a contribution towards the rehabilitation of war victims. We came to the conclusion that to distribute the rice at that time would not have had the type of impact that was desired. We therefore sold the rice and realized the sum of two billion, twenty-seven million, six hundred and eighty-four thousand, three hundred and seventy Leones (Le2,027,684,370.00). This amount was invested in Treasury Bearer Bonds and later injected into our Social Security Scheme as social safety net. The intention is to use the returns of this investment to meet the cost of food and shelter for old people who have no children and are unable to work. Urgent needs of war-affected victims will also be financed from this source.
So it seems the Standard Times printed a baseless article, but the fact of the allegations against the government being false did not stop the people from taking action to obtain their share of the alleged stolen rice, as reported by the Awareness Times:
SEDITION in Sierra Leone as angry youths defy state Authority and Loot Rice because of LIES
Sierra Leoneans who were underestimating the amount of damage that Philip Neville’s last week publications have caused in the country had a second rethink after last Fridays’ incident along Guard Street which saw youths physically attacking a trailer load of freshly imported rice and carting away the bags of rice in broad daylight; all while shouting that they were collecting their own share of rice they said was given to Sierra Leoneans by Libya’s Colonel Ghadaffi but which was "stolen" by Kabbah. Some of the youths were reported to have held copies of Standard Times Newspaper which had the ‘BOMBSHELL - COL GHADDAFI EXPOSES GOVERNMENT’ as its headline and which newspaper, they were showing as justification for their actions, to amazed pedestrians who watched in utter shock as the youths manhandled the trailer operator and a woman during their exercise to forcibly collect what they claimed was their "own share of the Libyan rice". In complete defiance of State Authority including the Sierra Leone Police Force, the irate, misinformed but well fortified young men attacked the trailer and defied any member of what they termed as "Government Theives" to stop them from carting away their "own share of Ghadaffi’s donated rice." It would be recalled that Neville had published several dangerous lies which had led to serious disaffection amongst the populace, causing the incitement of youths who believed the wicked lie that rice meant for Sierra Leoneans had been brought into the country and not accounted for by the Kabbah Government. The broad daylight defiance of State authority with the attack and theft of the trailer’s rice was a culmination of the anger of the misinformed young men of that area who having been brainwashed with lies and who upon seeing freshly imported rice being driven from the Water Quay decided to intercept and loot the rice they wrongly believed was their donation from Libya’s Ghadaffi. "Na we yone res we dey take so! [It is our own share of the rice that we are taking]" the irate misinformed youths reportedly shouted as they carted the rice away down to the wharf. According to eye-witnesses, within minutes, the trailer load of rice was emptied of all its content which found their way down to the shanty houses down the bay wharf.
Neville's article claiming the rice was stolen by the SLPP leadership seems to be false and, in any other situation, could have been corrected by well-publicized press release by the government. Instead, everyone seems to have overreacted, with the people upset and demanding their share of the rice and the government imprisoning Neville. To complicate matters further, Neville has a history of less sensationalist, distortion-filled journalism that has often targeted Kabbah. Neville is currently awaiting trial later this week; The SLPP government may merely be using the incident as an excuse to eliminate a troublesome opponent - Neville - by citing the Public Order Act of 1965:
33. (1) Any person who— a) does or attempts to do, or makes any preparation to do, or conspires with any person to do, any act with a seditious intention; or b) utters any seditious words; or c) prints, publishes, sells, offers for sale, distributes or reproduces any seditious publication; or d) imports any seditious publication, unless he has no reason to believe that it is seditious, shall be guilty of an offence and liable for a first offence to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years, or to a fine not exceeding one thousand leones or to both such imprisonment and fine, and for a subsequent offence shall be imprisoned for a term not exceeding seven years, and every such seditious publication shall be forfeited to the Government.
The media in Sierra Leone is not very effective by western standards: there are a few radio stations, two TV stations - one of which is government owned, and a slew of newspapers which are often lacking any journalistic integrity. An effective and responsible media can hold the government in check - and vice versa - but in Sierra Leone, neither the government or the media serve as an effective guardian of the people's interests. When those same people are living on a dollar a day, it only takes a single outlandish claim - like Neville's - to spark a needless rice controversy.
While Nkurmah's dreams for a pan-African government were destroyed by corruption and autocracy, it remains the be seen if similar problems will derail the modern version of his dream, the African Union. Hopefully, a new era of leaders will be able to embody the principles of good governance and democracy to build an AU that has a positive influence on the individuals that should ultimately benefit - the people of Africa. However, the AU has yet to make a substantial difference in the everyday life of Africans, as issues of corruption still dominate politics, at least among those I've talked to here in Sierra Leone. Last weekend I interviewed several people about such matters - specifically the supposedly "missing" rice and their opinions of Gaddafi and Kabbah. I've posted the video below:
The Second part
Please note that at the time of the interviews, we were unaware that Neville's claims of "stolen rice" false.
This entry is exceptionally long already, so I'll leave you to decide what their comments reveal for Sierra Leone. Tell me what you decide.
