Making friends
There is something very odd about arriving somewhere and not knowing anyone at all – quite unsettling, but also quite liberating as you have the potential to reinvent yourself as whoever you want to be. However, of course, I didn’t reinvent myself, just introduced myself as Laura and it was business as usual! So that first outing, the one in which you really have to sell yourself as someone that people might want to swap numbers with and meet again, is really quite crucial and scary. But at the same time, you know that almost everyone out will have been through it before when they first arrived. Which then gives you the confidence to approach people in a way that would appear brazen at home – “So did you say you were going out tomorrow...?” “So can I take your number please, just in case...?” – and it’s strange how you suddenly feel unstoppable after the first person accepts, and you just go around touting your number to everyone you meet.
By the end of the first week I ended up with a huge list of numbers of people that I couldn’t even remember their faces, so much so that most numbers were preceded by a hair colour or a nationality. Thankfully after a few weeks that all calms down, and we have found ourselves amid a really nice bunch of people in which we feel really quite settled already.
Jogging
So I’ve been jogging on the beach twice a week to try and maintain fitness. It sounds glorious, and to some extent it is in the right conditions. The first couple of times the tide was out, the sand was hard and there was a slight breeze which at least stopped me looking like I had just been for a swim, so the only thing you really had to look out for was the jelly fish.
However, when the tide is in it becomes an assault course of madness, more like orienteering than jogging. Not only do you have to dodge the waves coming in ferociously, but you also have to dodge the debris that the waves are bringing in to shore. Shoes, clothes, plastic, soiled bandages (and not disguised in a pirated Tweenie!), syringes and a whole host of undesirable materials and substances all come thundering towards your feet every time the tide comes in. I think most of the hospitals in Freetown expel their waste straight into the sea, and therefore Lumley beach is just a junk yard. So it’s not just not wanting your feet to get wet that makes you dive out of the way, but the horror of what might be drifting into your trainer. Rest assured that there are some glorious beaches just up the road from Freetown, which are unspoilt by sewage!
The hospital
There is something very unnerving about seeing a hospital in the dark. I don’t just mean a hospital whilst it’s dark outside, I mean a hospital building in absolute darkness at about 9.30pm. This is the Kamakwie Wesleyan Hospital (KWH) in which my organisation (Health Poverty Action) works, and they do not have a constant power supply. They have a generator, but this is only used between 7pm and 9pm, and if there is a caesarean section being administered. To see the building so dark, you could hardly even pick it out against the sky, it just makes you think how ridiculously lucky we are in the UK to have a free healthcare system that functions. Here in Sierra Leone, most people cannot afford medical care as it’s so expensive.
The government has recently instigated free health care for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under 5, but only in government hospitals which KWH is not. Therefore, the people of Kamakwie have to pay to come to this hospital which only has electricity for 2 hours a night, has rats, goats and dogs running around all the time (the rats have a particular preferred route apparently although thankfully I didn’t see any!), poor quality and insufficient equipment, lack of trained staff, the list goes on and on. There are only two ambulances serving the hospital, and they can only afford to collect women in labour, and even then it’s often a 3 hour round trip on horrific roads so it doesn’t make for a pleasant journey. In some really remote areas within the district, someone needing to go to hospital would first have to rely on someone to carry them on a stretcher, then take a ferry journey across a river (canoe if the ferry is not running, which happens frequently), and only then they would have enough phone signal to call for an ambulance. So when I think back to the UK NHS, and yes it is by no means perfect, but at least it’s free, and we can normally choose between a number of hospitals, then it really does feel very luxurious compared to SL.
Kamakwie
I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to ‘the field’ 2 weeks ago. The difference between Freetown and the provinces is stark and immediately apparent. After a sitting on the ridiculously busy Kissy Road in traffic for an hour trying to leave the city, it really is a welcome break to suddenly be surrounded by lush green trees, bright orange dust and children everywhere. I don’t think there are any more children outside of Freetown than inside but they must just take a bigger interest in me. Everywhere we stopped we were greeted with “white man” “white man” – given that both of us are women this seemed quite rude! But I quickly learned that it’s almost always shouted in excitement and with glee. In Kamakwie itself, which is actually a large town in SL terms but felt about the size of the small village in which I grew up (Brewood), I really did feel an immediate relaxation that I hadn’t realised I had been lacking in Freetown. There was noise, there is always a lot of noise in SL – singing, music, generators, motorbikes, etc. – but it also had such a peace to it that I felt immediately relaxed.
There was something very liberating (and grounding) about having no water and electricity, about settling down at 9pm as there was just nothing else to do and the battery from the laptop had died. It was very grounding as well, though, as I was immediately struck by all the inconveniences caused by being there, but also the mechanisms put in place to cope with them. We didn’t have enough fuel for the generator to be on each day, so on the non-generator days we would take them to the power plant to get them charged, take our phones to the phone charging shop (literally a shop devoted to charging the hundreds of phones left there), work on our laptops with no lights on and have our torches surrounded by flies until it became unbearable and cooked on a charcoal fire outside – and all in all I did find it quite glorious. However, for me this was a trip, I knew I would be returning to Freetown at the end of it, and even if I wasn’t, I knew there would be some respite somewhere along the track. Everyone was so friendly, it actually became quite exhausting moving along the street because of all the greetings I had to do. To each person you had to greet once, ask how their sleep, day, night, work, morning, etc. had gone, then discuss when I would see them again. By the end of the week I felt like a local celebrity!
Krio
I am really trying to throw myself into everything and most importantly, the local language of Krio. After a while it becomes quite simple to understand, or at least some things do, as others remain a mystery. You can definitely get away without learning krio in Freetown as everyone speaks English, however you do miss out on a lot of office jokes and people talking about you whilst walking behind you down the street. In the provinces, as soon as you leave Freetown, it becomes a lot more imperative that you understand at least the basics.
I think the most difficult aspect of speaking Krio is just letting yourself do it. It just feels wrong as it sounds so much like lazy English with an African accent. Of course, when you get to know it in more detail you realise that it’s much more complex than that, but the basics just feel bizarre and a bit rude! For an English person particularly, it is difficult to swap our classic “excuse me, would you mind terribly, please, thank you,” for “I wan dis” and “I go take dis.” Equally, all responses to greetings tend to be just “fine” – “how de body,” “how you sleep,” “how de morning,” the only response that people give is “fine” – it all seems a bit low key. Some phrases sound really sweet like “how much o’clock,” whereas others are just strange like “which side you de go” – meaning where are you going? Having said all that, I am thoroughly throwing myself into it and hoping to become fluent soon!
Christmas
On the whole it doesn’t really feel like Christmas at all, at least not as we know it. You just can’t feel all that Christmassy when sweating like a pig! There are quite a few Christmas decorations about but it really feels like some fool has put them up in the middle of summer more than it actually being the festive season. In fact, in our local shop there is a really terrifying dwarf Father Christmas pushing an equally dwarf like trolley filled with presents, that makes me jump every time!
We have been embracing it though, and have been to two carol concerts – one at the Cathedral in town, which was more of a performance than an interactive concert, in which we yearned to sing throughout and were only given two opportunities, and the other at a rest house for people with disabilities which was much more about audience participation and letting yourself go – most enjoyable! We also attended the IRC Christmas party last night which really was a world away from the work Christmas parties I went to last year! It took place in the car park of an apartment block (the IRC house), with the loudest music imaginable and people dancing right from the beginning of the evening. In fact, even though it was also someone’s leaving do, they wouldn’t even let him open his present in order to get on with the dancing! Right from the word go EVERYONE was on the dance floor, old and young, senior and not so. Raucous dancing as well, a type of dancing you would normally reserve for dancing alone in front of the mirror, or a very drunk and debauched night. But that just added to the enjoyment of the evening, and soon we were up there too, dancing like we never thought we would in front of colleagues!
The general atmosphere does seem to have developed an extremely jolly tinge, well more jolly then usual. There is a tangible excitement in the air, parties everywhere, music louder than usual, everyone very jolly. There are also a lot of ‘JC’s’ which to people here means ‘Just Comes’ (or Jast cams in Krio!) This term describes all those Sierra Leone diaspora who return to the country for the festivities. Amazingly, it is really easy to spot them, often wearing their finest clothes, travelling in huge cars, stocking up on bottled water and making a very obvious show of their fine English. Yesterday someone approached me to ask in the ‘Queen’s’ English whether I was in the Peace Corps. Having said all that, we are very excited to be spending our first Christmas out of the UK, and will be basking in the glorious sun and mopping our sweaty brows!
