Death and burial in Salone
Every week and sometimes several times a week, there’s a funeral parade that goes past my office, there’s lots of people marching, a band playing and the likelihood of a feast (provided by the relatives) for the mourners to look forward to at the end.
In West Africa, how you are mourned and buried is important-it shows off the wealth you had in your lifetime, as well as the wealth of your relatives now you’re gone, it’s also looked on as a celebration of your life and all you’ve done and achieved.
The stark reality hit close to home recently- a friend who is soon to depart Salone inherited a caretaker who lived and worked at his compound when he arrived here sometime ago. This caretaker is a very elderly gentleman, with almost nothing to his name, in fact, so little that his only home/shelter was a metal roofed shack (at least one side open to the elements), that the landlord of this property had been persuaded to construct for him to stay in. Recently, the caretaker came down with an illness so severe that he needed to go into hospital. However, the hospital needed various forms filled in and payments for registration before it can accept patients into the hospital, after several attempts to get into hospital, it was finally managed, as the result of the ‘white man’ paying these fees for the caretaker. After this, various other fees are needed to keep someone in hospital- for daily food, water, medicines and cleaning, although these are much lower. Compared to US costs for health care, it’s pretty cheap here (possibly a totally cost of 40-50 GBP or 80-100 USD at current exchange rates to get someone into hospital and then looked after and hopefully healed after a couple of weeks in hospital), but for local (unskilled) wages of 4,000-5,000 Leones per day (that’s about 80pence to 1 GBP) it’s a fortune. Even for a mid ranking civil servant, that’s at least two-thirds of a month’s wages just to get into hospital and be looked after there.
Back to the issue of burial and death, my friend went to try and find the family of the caretaker, who apparently live up country, but because they wouldn’t gain anything through is death, except lots of bills and expenses, so really didn’t want to know/be identified, which is so sad.
An interesting debate/set of comments was sent in to a BBC article on this subject in 2003- whether it’s worth paying for a large funeral for someone:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3246228.stm
What is also sad, is that people are prepared to spend so much more on the death of a relative than on keeping them well while they’re alive. The social pressures for a ‘big’ funeral are huge, in other places in West Africa, keeping the body on ice for a while is done as a status symbol- the longer you can afford to pay the morgue fees to keep the body there, the richer you are. The problem comes when the dead are celebrated at the expense of the living, or people refuse to acknowledge relatives for fear of having to pay the expenses of a funeral, let alone those for health care. It’s true that each culture and each community within a culture has its own traditions to keep up, but I don’t think these traditions for the dead should be undertaken at the expense of the living.
The poverty of Crewe Bay
Someone I know was working down in the Crewe Bay area recently, they were involved in a survey of illnesses and difficulties faced by the families there. Crewe Bay is one of the slums in Freetown, with well over 500 households in the community. It is an illegal build, along one of the watercourses that runs from the hills down to the sea. The household sizes vary immensely; some had 29 people (man, 3 wives and 25 children), living in a single room, whereas some were just couples who had come to Freetown in search of a better life. Since at least 70% of people in Sierra Leone live below the US$1 a day poverty line (79% in rural areas, with a lower proportion in Freetown, tho’ it’s much more expensive to live in Freetown than in the rest of the country), it’s understandable, why people look to move somewhere else, but often the difficulties and diseases that they face in the city are at least as bad as in the rest of the country.
The unemployment rate remains very high, despite the government’s drive to increase youth employment (youths are anyone between the ages of 18 and 35). The elections are just round the corner, so there are a lot of attempts at providing short-term jobs (both for political gain and also to try and increase stability by providing an activity other than ‘rallying’ for the youth to be involved with).
Anyway, back to Crewe bay- the ‘streets’ between the houses are so narrow that you cannot stretch out your arms to either side because you will be pushing into/through the walls of people’s homes. There isn’t running water, and electricity-well, take a guess. Very few of the children had clothes on and despite the warmth of this country for most of the year, when the rains are persistent (and don’t drain away), it can does get quite a bit cooler (low 20’s). All of the children have been suffering from respiratory problems- probably due to a mix of coldness and lack of good nutrition. The inhabitants of the Crewe bay slum cannot afford packaging, yet the watercourses are jammed with rubbish- most of it from New England and other communities based further up the hills; they just throw the rubbish into the rivers and wait for the rains to wash it out to sea, but instead it gets jammed up round the Crewe Bay area and causes flooding into the houses people have built there- the waters can come about 4ft high and are a mix of rubbish and sewage, since the drainage systems are overwhelmed by the rains. There are even stories of some people/businesses throwing the rusting shells of old cars (once all useful parts have been removed) into the watercourses and waiting for the rains to wash them out to sea. Instead, it just makes life even more unbearable for people.
The annual rains/floods make life very tough- children’s school books being washed away (in the middle of their exams); make even attempts at self-advancement that bit more difficult. Illnesses ranging from chicken pox (needs to be kept away from adults who could get shingles), to respiratory problems, to leprosy, to the ever present threat of malaria make earning a living harder-there isn’t really such a thing as unemployment benefit here and for many casual jobs, it’s the amount you produce that you get paid for and the work often requires physical exertion, which if you’re ill is difficult- you either end up producing less (and therefore get paid less), or can’t find work, or need to borrow money to pay to medicines (although I haven’t heard much about loan sharks here, I know they exist in other countries’ slums, so assume there’s a similar system in operation here).
So what can be done- well, in some ways very little- the buildings are not precisely legal and anyone who tries to put in place permanent structures will not end up in the government’s good books. However, there are things that can be done- the local youths can be employed to clear the rubbish out of the waterways (the main city dump is less than a mile away), locally made tools and wheelbarrows can help in the rubbish clearing and removal and will also produce a small multiplier effect on the local economy (local being a particularly small geographical area in this case). If the necessary equipment is made available, it has been suggested that the waterways are deepened, since there’s probably been a lot of build up of gunk in the watercourses over the years- if the rains had somewhere to go, they wouldn’t need to flood the alleyways and homes of the Crewe Bay inhabitants, which may make it slightly easier for them to survive.
Labels: floods, malaria, poverty, rain, rubbish, slums
