Nenya.net

Looking Back, Tying Up

I’ve been in SL for 2 years and my time here is coming to an end. I need to sit back and reflect think on all the things that I’ve learnt, realised and begun to understand during me time here, once I’ve done that I’ll try to do a final update to my blog, but until that’s done, I’ve been thinking of things that I will (and won’t) miss when I leave here and I’ve thrown them in together- the only order is the one in which I wrote them down:

- The fantastic traffic safety sign- I’m lacking pictures, since I’m normally driving when I go past, but the captions are great (admittedly some of them are on one of the roads with more precarious edges than you’d generally find in Europe):
o Hug Children at home, Belt them in the car
o No Safety, Know Injury, Know Safety, No Injury
o Drive Safely…Today Heaven can wait
- Driving home over the hills in the evening and having a beautiful view down to the sea and being able to watch the sun set into the sea in a myriad of beautiful colours- one time recently, when I’d just finished playing squash, I walked out towards the beach and the sea looked as if it were made of molten gold/bronze
- The potholes in the major roads and the totally potholed other roads
- The totally crazy taxi drivers-including the ones that drive around at night with no headlights on in order to save fuel, or only have one headlight that works, so use that on full beam, or have decided to have the ‘coolest’ car on the road, full blinged out with loads of lights and stickers and toys and ski racks (yes- even tho’ I don’t think SL has ever experienced snow)
- Being able to buy fresh bread from the car window (as well as fruit, sweets, toiletries, DVD’s, school books, fried plantain, new windscreen wipers and other car accessories/essentials, boards games and probably anything else you can think of). I was recently offered two cows horns while I was driving by- with bits of the brains still attached in the middle, I wasn’t keen, which prompted one of the wits who I was driving to question why didn’t I want to buy the ‘bloody’ cows horns?  I wonder…perhaps it was the anticipated smell, the likelihood of not being able to get it through customs and the fact that it really wasn’t something I had a hankering to put on a mantle piece…?
- The amazing beaches- beautiful, generally very clean, the water warm and clear and being able to eat freshly caught and BBQ’d fish with locally cooked rice and sauce after having enjoyed a swim in the sea.
- Being overcharged for anything because my nose is the wrong shape (or perhaps it’s something to do with the colour of my skin?) and then trying to barter prices down to something a bit more reasonable… well, sometimes!
- Having to buy cooking gas from the side of the road and hoping that it has been filled up enough such that it’s worth what you paid for it
- The highly erratic electricity and the ‘fun’ of depending on small generators for everything most of the time
- The friendliness of everyone here, especially when you need help or assistance
- The crazy rain, which totally soaks you if you get caught out in it for even a couple of seconds- my umbrella decided that it had had enough by the end of yesterday and now barely works- I’m hoping that the rain stays away long enough that I won’t have to get a new one before I leave! It turns roads into rivers/car parks and has caused some people to die due to the ferocity of the water as it heads down to the sea, sometimes catching people and washing them out to sea
- Coming home to a clean house several times a week, where even the ironing has been done- wow that’s brilliant and not something I can expect to happen for many years, if ever again
- Beach bars where you can sit and watch the sun go down over the sea in the early evening
- The interesting work ethic- some people work really hard and are very good at what they do, some just drift by waiting on handouts from others (ok- this could be any society in the world), but when you see young guys just sitting around during the day on the side of the road, just passing the time with each other, scepticism creeps in about whether they really want to work. It’s also interesting to see in offices how many people aren’t being that productive and also the extent to which friends and family ‘drop-in’ for a chat and sometimes with a request for assistance in the middle of the working day. Also if there’s no power in the offices, work can be difficult- e.g. computers won’t work and neither will a/c or fans and in the middle of the dry season it can get very hot and tiring just being
- The general harmony between people of different religions
- The general rancour between people of different political affiliations
- The huge amount of respect shown to parents- especially to fathers e.g. a friend of mine was told by his father that he had married a woman from a certain tribe who’d turned out not be exactly what he wanted / a ‘bad’ wife and so he wouldn’t allow his son to marry a woman from the same tribe. But this father would apparently have no problem with the son marrying a white woman who he didn’t know
- The huge amounts of chilli that is included in food here
- The 3 genders in development- man, woman and white-woman, with ‘white-woman’ being more or less on an equal footing with man, but with ‘woman’ being a lot lower down the scale. Women definitely have a much harder time of life here than men- they are expected to do a lot of the work in the fields, as well as caring for the family, any cooking and cleaning that needs to be done. I know some of the men work very hard as well, but it seems that it is always the women here upon whom the ultimate burden falls. Women are expected to be utterly faithful to their husbands, whereas not only does Islam allow men up to 4 wives, culturally it seems acceptable for a man to have other girlfriends as well as his wives/wife. Oh and women are expected to bear lots of children- especially boys. Girls tend to get less education, tho’ this is slowly changing, but even if they are educated, some are taken out of school in their mid-teens in order to be married off.
- There’s a huge disparity between rich and poor in SL- a recent article in the economist put the gini coefficient for SL (a measure of inequality) at above 0.60- according to the data they had collected this meant that SL was one of the most unequal countries in the world. This picture came from the Economist website



- Handling dirty money the whole time…perhaps I should rephrase that- handling cash where the notes have varying levels of dirt and germs on and having the constant desire to clean your hands after handling money here. Mind you, since a lot of the money is often kept hidden somewhere within various pieces of clothing, it’s hardly surprising that it isn’t especially clean
- The newspapers and their sometimes unique versions of English grammar and syntax
- The fact that almost everything in SL is sponsored by one of the mobile phone companies
- When the weather gets too cold (below 25 degrees centigrade), Sierra Leoneans will don thick jackets and woolly bobble hats, despite the fact that in the UK as soon as the temperature hits the 20’s, everyone starts wearing shorts and summer dresses
- That almost all buildings and compounds employ guards
- That you can measure how wealthy someone is by the type of wall they have round their compound and the thief deterrents placed in the top of the wall- ranging from bits of broken glass to electrified fences
- When something happens e.g. a car touches another car, people are having an argument, everyone comes and stands around shouting at the tops of their voices and joining in
- Shouting is used as a normal method of communication
- The difficulties of just living when you don’t have money
- The large amount of long complicated words that are used in documents so that the author can sound educated- so far as I’m aware, the ‘Campaign for Plain English’ obviously hasn’t put up offices in SL just yet
- The generosity of mind and spirit of so many people here, which is so lovely

Okay, that’s enough for now- I'm sure there's more I should include, but that's enough for a start. Overall, I’ve loved my time in SL, tho’ it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster-especially emotionally- and I know there’s still loads for me to learn about the country and people etc. I think living in any country that you don't know well/haven't been brought up in can bring difficulties, confusions and emotional highs and lows, I'm sure it's not just in SL that you can go from being pretty depressed to very happy within the space of half and hour, even when the reasons for each emotion are entirely different. Maybe it's just that I've been taking more time to examine how I react to situations, but I think it's also the effect of Africa and for me in particular, from living in Sweet Salone.

I’ve also really enjoyed travelling around the country, both for business and pleasure. In my time here I managed to visit all the districts, including Bonthe island and the Turtle Islands just off the coast and I definitely agree with people who say that Freetown is definitely not fully representative of Sierra Leone as a whole and that although you can get an idea of SL from being in Freetown, to really know what it's like you need to go upline and meet people there and know and understnad more about their lives. It has been an incredible experience and I can’t quite believe that it’s coming to an end. However, I’ve still got two weeks to enjoy being here, so it’s not quite over yet……

Labels: beach, car, poverty, power, rain, roads, weather

posted by Nenya @ 3:14 pm 0 comments

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

posted by Nenya @ 10:57 am 0 comments