Return to Kamakwie
In case anyone was wondering why I have been incommunicado recently, I’ve just had another glorious 2 weeks ‘in the field’ in Kamakwie. No water, no electricity, no loud music, few cars, plenty of children, a bustling market and so many other sights. Instead of being woken by drunken soldiers and howling dogs we were awoken by a crowing cockerel (actually waiting to die in our garage!) and the call to prayer. Everything really does feel so laid back there – previous week in Freetown I’d nearly got mowed down by a mini bus, and my friend had got mugged, so I was really feeling very on edge and jumpy, yelping every time I heard a car horn – which is almost every minute! So it was so nice to be somewhere peaceful where you can walk down the middle of the road at night with no torch and only really have to dodge dogs – even they seem more polite in Kamakwie.
As soon as we arrived, all of the children from across the road came running out to greet us shouting “Jooey and Lola” (Zoe and Laura) and grabbing our legs. There are about 7 children, who live in the area of small houses across the road, and none of them are looked after by their actual parents – they have either died or moved to Freetown, leaving them to be looked after older relatives. Their clothes looked particularly tatty this time, more so than last time, which was quite sad. I don’t think they get any affection at home because at first they seemed nervous about hugging us, but once one has done it and its ok, they all pounce and won’t let go!
The office/living space is really bizarre. It was actually designed to be the only night club and guest house in Kamakwie, so the main function room has blue mirrored pillars at each end and shiny blue patterns on the wall. Each room is named after a football team – mine is Manchester United, they don’t have a Wolves one unfortunately! The beds just defy logic – there is no electricity and thus you can’t have a fan on at night which means you sweat a lot, so you would think the most appropriate type of bed would be something with a lot of scope for aeration. Unfortunately not, as the beds are huge concrete slabs with a mattress on the top, leaving years of sweat from sleeping bodies hidden inside the concrete. I have been warned NEVER to lift the mattress up!
A trip to the village really is a mission in Kamakwie. Not because of the distance – it is only about 75 meters from the office – but because of all the greeting one has to do! There are always people hanging around the office – friends of HPA, their friends, people hoping for work, people coming to see the SGBV officer or people just looking for some company. So once you’ve battled through all of the various greetings with them, then you get mobbed by all the children from across the road. Walking up the hill on the left is a women called Abubatu, who is normally selling fried fish on the road side (more about that later) and has two lovely children called Isata and Mohamed. After chatting to them, and being pointed at by Mohamed who is still very confused about the colour of our skin, just further up on the right is ‘Auntie Adama.’ She is the actual Auntie of the office cook/cleaner in Freetown, and is always sitting under the huge mango tree. Next on the right is the tailor shop – three men sitting outside their shop, each with a sewing machine and surrounded by bright embroidered material in varying stages of completion. There is a little girl who has some sort of sight problem apparently “in the dark, her eyes don’t shake” so maybe she needs some sort of sunglasses during the day. She always shouts “white man, white man” at us and touches our hands.
There is a yellow wooden room in which football matches are shown – often three TVs at the front of the room with people packed in watching their game of choice. After this is a shop/bar called ‘Pa Kanoos’ – every inch of the shop is filled with food and all sorts of soaps and materials, and roaming with cats (and apparently rats but haven’t seen any thankfully). Outside is the most bustling bar in town – just a couple of small square tables outside. We sat outside most nights having a beer and watching the town go by. It really is a hive of activity – so many people walking past, chatting to all the other shop owners, waving at us. It’s remarkable and very sad just how many children are out at night, even really young children of around 4 or 5 years old are just lurking around. Sometimes in groups, seemingly having fun and just behaving like children, but I can’t help thinking that they should be doing that during the day instead of late at night.
The market is really bustling but really quite small, probably the size of a tennis court if not smaller. Each stall is merely a wooden structure, all packed in closely selling virtually the same fare. To me it seemed very small, almost quaint, especially compared to Freetown. But all the young girls from out of town who came to the workshops we were holding were raving about how huge the market was, and all went about buying ‘Lappa’ (material for clothes) and shoes.
Mammy and Daddy business
So our main purpose in Kamakwie was to hold four Family Planning workshops with young women, nurses and Traditional Birth Attendants. We were trying to get them to identify the biggest barriers preventing the use of family planning in Sierra Leone. There is a huge issue of teenage pregnancy here, one of the highest rates in the world. This often leads to health problems for the woman as young women’s bodies are less developed and therefore less able to handle the trauma of pregnancy, leading to complications and a higher risk of child and maternal mortality and morbidity. Also, girls who get pregnant at a young age normally leave school and do not return, exacerbating the issue of illiteracy among girls. Many are forced to marry the father of the baby, even if the pregnancy was a result of a rape. People having children at an early age often leads to larger families and furthers the situation of poverty for the whole family, with parents often not being able to afford food for all of their children, let alone to send them all to school.
We held workshops to try and assess the issues and listen to what these young women thought were some possible solutions. Overwhelmingly there were four main issues raised. Firstly, a lack of availability of family planning – most people said there was no family planning available in their community, meaning they would have to travel long distances to find it. Secondly, a lack of awareness about family planning – many of the girls were unaware of what was available to them, had heard ridiculous myths about the consequences of using contraception, such as that it would prevent them from ever having children or cause health problems. Thirdly, cost was highlighted – contraception is supposed to be free but it is being consistently charged for, thus making it too expensive for young people. And finally, men’s attitudes and conduct were the biggest issue – many of the young women said that not only did their husband refuse to wear a condom, but also refused to let them use any sort of family planning because they wanted a large family to show that they are strong, despite the health and economic impacts to the woman, children and family. Various people were identified as key stakeholders who might be able to influence the situation – predominantly men, such as traditional and religious leaders, chiefs and counsellors. Such is the patriarchal society here, everything that women do depends on men, be it in the family or in district or national level politics.
The participants then came up with ideas for plays and songs that promote family planning and everything we had discussed in the workshops. My group did a play showing a planned and an unplanned family and we asked all of the children opposite to come and help out and make up the numbers for the unplanned family. They had a whale of a time, even those who were supposed to be depicting a huge, poor and miserable family couldn’t keep the smiles off their faces that they were being given attention and a role with so many adults.
So I mentioned Abubatu above, here is her story. She normally sells fish by the side of the road every day. Her children are normally well dressed and wearing shoes; the oldest goes to school every day, and doesn’t hang around the street at night. This time she wasn’t cooking fish, as she had been taken ill a few weeks before and had had to go to hospital. Because of the high hospital fees, she had spent all of her money and was suddenly unable to afford the cost of the fish, oil and other ingredients to sustain herself and was left with no form of income. So many people live by the day to day, and so an unexpected cost like hospital fees immediately takes away their ability to continue with income generation activities. Hopefully she can start up one of her new business ideas and get back on her feet again.
Freetown delights
Just a few snippets about Freetown that have amused/interested me recently:
• We were in a taxi recently in which the driver tried to sell us some lettuce!
• The road building has now progressed and there are now huge gulleys on each side of the road for the drains to go in. The only way to cross to the roadside is by ridiculously treacherous bridges (one large or many small planks of wood that bow in the middle), which Sierra Leoneans seem to take in their stride but we can’t seem to master and end up wobbling around and yelping in front of an audience!
• We were at the beach the other day and there was a SWAG (i.e. coach load of Sierra Leoneans from Freetown) there, taking up most of the beach. They had brought a huge sound system and were blasting out the tunes which enabled us to realise that dancing in the sea is amazing! People here dance like no one is watching, much like we were dancing in the sea where no one could be watching. It reminded me of being at a festival where there might be one person dancing on their own, looking quite hammered but like they are having the time of their life, and everyone behind them is nudging each other saying “look at that person” – that is how people dance here! Granted, they move with a lot of rhythm (more than the average festival goer) but with that air of not caring at all and just enjoying themselves. The dancing that we only achieve at the end of a large night of drinking, they can achieve at 1pm in the afternoon – I love it!
• Newspapers here are hilarious – most of the time, the point of the story does not become apparent until nearing the end of the article and often includes so much superfluous information that you nearly give up. The pictures are so graphic – if there has been a death there is always a picture of the actual body – and apparently this is because people are so distrusting of the media that they would not believe them if they just said it had happened, so they need the proof.
Mercy Ships
You might have heard about the Mercy Ship. It’s a huge hospital on a ship, that travels around the world, docking in certain countries and providing essential surgery to the nation it’s holed up in. Interestingly, it has recently arrived in Freetown, after a few months of scoping the country, screening potential patients and advertising its arrival. They adopted the same approach that they have done in every West African country so far, which is to use a stadium for two days to screen people and book them in for their surgery over the next 10 months. Normally they section off areas of the stadium for different types of need, have an elaborate queuing system and manage to get through everyone. Freetown, it seems, was not ready for this.
On the first day of screening, there were such horrific crushes – with people jumping over fences, violence, pushing and selling places in the queue – that they had to cancel the entire thing for safety reasons. Unfortunately, at least one person died in the crush. It is so strange that the exact same approach has worked in so many countries previously and just didn’t work in Sierra Leone. I can’t help thinking that Sierra Leonean people have been lied to so many times before, they have had their hopes raised and dashed so frequently, that they just don’t believe it when they hear that they will get seen to eventually, that they will eventually receive surgery. The same thing happened with the launch of free healthcare – people were in such disbelief that they all arrived at health centres, even if they weren’t ill, just to try and get drugs in case they did get ill in the future, because they thought it wouldn’t last. We likened it to crushes that inevitably happen in Western countries, mainly just for entertainment events – football matches and music events spring to mind. Can you imagine ever having to go through this to get some sort of medical care?
