Road Trip, part one.

I just returned to Freetown yesterday from one week in the Northern Province. I started in Magburaka, where I helped a friend's local NGO hold a HIV/AIDS "peer animator" training workshop. I was mostly there for show - in Sierra Leone white faces are often seen to add gravitas to any development type effort - but led a few of the facilitations. It brought back many memories of leading various trainings throughout high school and college, and made me appreciate all over again the joys of sexual health education and the empowerment it gives people over their own bodies and personal lives. The condom distribution was a big hit; most of the 30 odd participants came into the district capital, Magburaka, from more rural towns and villages where condoms aren't readily available. One 'Pa' (the only older man in the workshop) took an entire box that he was happy to carry back to his community. All of the participants knew quite a bit about HIV/AIDS and other STIs, and had clearly been trained before, but still had gaps in their knowledge. It was heartening to see their active engagement and ready acceptance of the benefits and drawbacks of condom use. However, it was a somber reminder of the limits of education to realize that the tools (in this case condoms, but c.f. bednets, vaccines, early treatment of health problems, etc.) are not necessarily available in people's communities...

Road Trip

Fueling the car in Makali

River No. 2 Beach

A friend from MSF Liberia (sitting) takes in the sun and surrounds, while two of us take a more laid back approach to appreciating the restorative day.

River No. 2 Beach

Last weekend we made the one hour journey down the peninsula to River No. 2 Beach, one of the country's most beautiful - where mountains stumble down into mangrove swamps and the river (a modest creek of mountain run-off) plays with the sand and the tides as it flows into the Atlantic. The are villages in the surrounding area of Peninsular Road, and the car park fee of Le 5,000 (about $1.25) goes to the community association, but the small beach is mostly populated by a smattering of NGO workers and local Lebanese families on weekends.

The balcony on a sunny day

All grown up!

When I first moved to Sierra Leone last fall, I ended up with an adorable tigress of a kitten on my hands. The previous post is one of my first pictures of her teeny tiny scrawny kitten days. Much to my disappointment, when I became a reluctant vagabond, I had to leave her in the care of my friend, whose much loved cat Dave had died after a valiant fight against a virulent infection. Now, my friend/her guardian is also my flatmate, and we've been reunited! In addition to trying to eat everything I eat, she likes to sit and sleep alternately on my papers or snuggled in my mosquito net hanging over my bed.

Introducing my kitten, Oct. 2009

A positive headline in the news

A positive headline about West Africa is a little bit of an occassion in itself! Coming on the heels of horrible, terrible, no good, very bad days in the Mother Earth department for going-on-two months, this calls for a link:
www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/02liberian.html

For those of us near and/or dear to Sierra Leone, this story hits close to home, because the drug trade has periodically tried to establish a way-station here as well. A fascinating factoid that sheds a lot of light on how the drug trade can so flexibly try to penetrate Africa to access European markets is that a fully fueled Cessna (the little six-seater, indeed) can apparently make its way from South or Central America all the way to West Africa without refueling. Adding to the appeal of exploiting developing countries for drug trafficking by buying off officials (or trying and failing, c.f. NYT article), is that there are a number of fairly unsupervised landing strips throughout the region. The Sierra Leone government successfully foiled a racket enabling cocaine runners a few years ago.


By the way, I've given it more thought and the generators are less like struggling refrigerators, and more like lots of gassy lawnmowers having a party without music. Next time you hear a leafblower herding freshly clipped grass, you can think of me dozing off to sleep! goodnight :)

The view from my window

It's a hot, noisy night here in Freetown: no power, so the few better equipped houses have generators rumbling and humming across the neighbourhood. It sounds like sticking your head behind a dying refrigerator echoing off the surrounding kitchen walls; there are a few crickets and cat fights, too. I've played and lost many games of solitaire waiting for this humble picture to load. The fact that I won two games means I must have played for over an hour. I do think my computer takes pity on me after I lose a dozen or so times, and thus throws me a victory so I can watch the playing cards turn into confetti. (I love that part.) I've also managed to read a few NYT articles. There was a gem on Liberia a few days ago for those of us desperate for a sign we're not running the earth and humanity into the ground full-tilt after months of oil spill time lapse images: "Liberia Aids US in Drug Fight." Or something to that effect.

So, this is my wonderful view. In the distance you can see Lungi, the island where the airport is inexplicably located. The water in the middle ground is ocean and is more or less a shipping channel into the bay-type water formation that is on the inland side of the Western Area peninsula (at the tip of which Freetown sits). Maybe 'tamarra' or 'next tamarra', as they say in Krio, I'll be able to post a picture of my balcony, which is actually envious. Needless to say, my number one extra curricular activity is watching boats pass, and taking their pictures as I mentally make a boat taxonomy and keep track of which ones would be most likely to have pirates if this was the slightly more rambunctious Gulf of Aden. (At the top of the list: old trawlers with flags and rags, and local wooden fishing boats outfitted with heavily polluting but impressive sounding motors.)

Magic

See interweb portal sticking out of my computer at left like a thumb hitching a ride on the information superhighway.

"There are oceans and waves and wires between us..."

This was going to be a post about caveats and is even more so now that the 'error on page' has fittingly expunged my first entry. Oops. Before I send this modest attempt at communication out to family and friends, I wish to make a few caveats about the interwebs here in Sierra Leone, and about my own propensities as long-distance communicator:

1. This is not my first blog. I started one in South Africa, where the internet connection is far stronger, and managed to post just two or three times before deciding that life was better spent being lived than being reiterated. The biggest challenge to this blog's success as a portal to my loved ones is that I am its author.

2. The second biggest challenge, of course, is the paltry internet connection in Sierra Leone. Any internet connection, mind you, is a huge victory for a country that stagnated for a few years at the bottom of the Human Development Index (http://hdr.undp.org/en/) and went decades without power in the capital city. That said, every word, every dot or dash of punctuation, and every valiant photo that makes its way onto the interwebs has to squeeze through a flash drive modem that spirits data away to a satellite in the nethersphere that somehow, ostensibly, bounces my musings back down to you. This means that many posts will be waylaid, or ingested by the 'errors' that be.

3. On a related note, text loads more reliably, but I am wont to write much; I would rather let the country and my experience speak for itself through images. I suspect that anything I write will be imprecise and inadequate, and I will regret it at best. At worst, it might get me into trouble. Of course (see above), it takes 20 to 120 minutes for each photo to load. Still, a photo blog is my sisyphusian aspiration. Forgive me if it is painfully spare. Maybe emails will prompt more textual elaboration.

4. I am still settling in (again) here in Freetown, with the luxury of time and my friend's internet connection while she's at work all day. When I get up and running, I'll be where sporadic electricity is a distant dream and hopefully doing better things with my time than watching pictures upload. Which means posts will become few and far between. Still, if this ends up being a front-heavy, 48-hour crush, the few photos it gets to my family makes it worth the effort.

With love, and hopes for more posts,
Zoe

Q & A

Question: What's better than a cold drink of potable water in Africa?

Answer: Hmm, not much. Maybe world peace?

Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary

Chimpanzees are indigenous to Sierra Leone, but have been endangered due to extensive hunting for bushmeat. Most of the chimps at Tacugama were captured as babies and sold as pets by hunters who killed their mothers for food. I made this second visit to the reserve in the forested mountains around Freetown in a heavy rain storm. Beautiful. ...and refreshingly cool!

This year, the sanctuary celebrates its 15th anniversary with the completion of an impressive national chimpanzee census. See http://www.tacugama.com/ for more information, to adopt a chimp, or to visit the sanctuary or offer your skills as a volunteer. The census estimates indicate roughly 4,000 chimpanzees living in the wild throughout Sierra Leone, alongside even more rare forest elephants and pygmy hippopotamus.

Upon arrival

Walking around Freetown upon return, I am struck with a craving for the tart frozen yogurt I didn't have time to get in Washington, DC. I have come up with a modus operandi to handle situations such as this:

Want what you can get. Don't try to get what you want.

Welcome back na Salone!