I Love Sierra Leone.

I leave for Paris on February 1st. Thankfully I won't be staying there long, only about a week. I already dread it knowing that I will spend emotionally healthy evenings catching up with Eva and Jeanne followed by emotionally, mentally, and physically unhealthy nights of wild parties where I drink too much and crawl home on scraped knees.

I so much prefer the dirt and dust of Africa, the perpetually dirty hair, the 20-pound weight gain from food drenched in palm oil and the mentally stimulating work that no one gives a shit about. In Paris I suffered immensely from the desire to Do Something Good, the reality of doing nothing and having nobody care. Here, at least, I am Doing Something Good even if nobody notices. It's enough for me.

I love my life:

I wake up in the mornings and it's warm and sunny. I don't care that my hair is soaked with sweat, that hiking up my (now-too-small) jeans takes effort against the resistant sweat on my legs. I drink a coffee that is too strong, type on my laptop for hours in the sun and cause permanent sun damage to my aging face. I look utterly like shit, have probably never been less attractive in my life, and feel oddly pleased about it.

I leave the house. My street is a long, unpaved dirt road coloured the brightest shade of orange you've ever seen. Immediately outside the house I have about 4 seconds until the local children run down the hill tripping over themselves yelling, "Helloalloallo!" and come careening headfirst into my knees. They wrap their itty-bitty arms around my legs, smothering them with dirty rice and dust and grime. This week I have been lucky enough to leave the home every day around noon - I have time and am not rushing to meet Charly at the end of the street to grab a ride. When I see the kids coming, yelling their Halloalloallo's I can bend at the knees and outstretch my arms so they have warm hugs to land on instead of knotted knees. This week they have smeared their rice on my arms and back instead of my thighs. I'm not sure what they get out of it, but I love starting my morning with the hugs of these children.

I walk down the orange street wishing goodmorning's to the passers-by who always respond cheerily with bright white smiles against such black skin. The contrast from the frigidity of Paris is astounding. The number of enemies I have here is so minimal! My neighbours say hello! They smile at me! One group in particular, the family who offered me the baby I wrote about earlier, greets me particularly enthusiastically. The mother in question starts the conversation saying, "HELLO GOOD FRIEND!" laughs and points at her daughter - "Look, it's your baby!" she says. I laugh, wish them a good day, politely tell them that I don't want any mangos ("We have good mango! Tell Mike!" they say) and I go off on my way. I have never bought a single mango or orange or banana from this group of people, nor have I agreed to take the baby, but they consistently treat me wonderfully. I walk the rest of the way smiling widely, happy that my upper arms are lined with dirty fingerprints and that somebody greets me as "Good Friend" every day.

These are my friends (including baby!):

At the end of the rocky, dusty, road that I inevitably trip on, there are several rusty shacks full of women and children. The men, I suppose, are at work. The women bathe the children, chase chickens and scrub laundry in rusty buckets. Everyone smiles, saying "Goodmorning, WhiteGirl" and waves. The kids at these homes don't offer hugs - they are shy and discreet in their waving and well-wishing but their smiles are so joyously unrestrained that it's still shocking to me, 60 days later.

When a slumbering, dying taxi rumbles along I get in as if it were a bus, joining the other passengers behind the cracked windshield. I sit in the withered seats, metal poking out from the material at every corner. Hello! Hello! Goodmorning! we all say. The taxi inescapably roars as it moves along even though the vehicle always (always) moves at such a slow pace you swear that it's constantly decelerating. It's not a question of traffic - the cars here are simply the ones you threw out twenty years ago to the junkyard which (you didn't know this - at least, I certainly didn't) were eventually sent to Africa. On the rare occasions that Mike and I get in a car with upholstery, a solid windshield, and no exposed metal parts, we inevitably give one another surprised, wide-eyed glances followed by a "Wow! Nice car!!" Every morning I have conversations with the locals in the taxi about how much I love Sierra Leone, no I am not American, I work for Save the Children, yes, you are my friend too. I get out at King Harmon Road with a wave and respond to the "Ya, good day!" with a "See you back, ya?" and think about how fabulous my life is, sweaty hair, 20-pound weight gain and all.

PS. I had 6 views of this post and a comment AND a "kudos" but then I deleted it to upload the photos and never got to see the comments! Write 'em again!

PPS. Save the Children has such a slow internet connection that uploading the photos that belong to this post is impossible. It will have to wait. Come check back next week!

BE MY PERSONAL FRIEND.

No, not really - that's not the title I wanted for this blog entry but when I went to type something the auto-fill drop-down menu showed me the history of things that everyone else had typed in a similar field. I just thought that was the funniest.

It's not something that I should make fun of, but being on a public computer you tend to come across some seriously interesting and hilarious things when you read the history of the computer's internet searches. I always have a giggle when I'm at the Special Court and I can see what other people are searching for. You can see my searches in there because they're the ones that always have quotes around them: "Chapter IV" "Sierra Leone" "Child and Young Persons Act"; "Sierra Leone" "Local Courts"; "Safe sleep aids"... Most of the searches done by other people include questions on scholarships to Canada, Australia and Europe. Others are law research, questions about human rights and youth initiative projects, etc etc etc. All kinds of legit things.

And then there are some that make me glad that I ALWAYS remember to erase my tracks on public computers. These are some of the searches done on mine:

-find lover

-FREE LOVE WORDS

-looking for love

-please allow me to access my e-mail

-the natural method

-the silent way

-what side of the body is the womb located

-where is the womb in the female

-how to know if pregnant

It sounds to me like somebody got his lady knocked-up and I've just learned way too much about it.

Things about Sierra Leone, Chapter 3

+ I have been extremely lucky safety-wise here. I'm living in a war-torn country where everyone here has either been a victim or a perptrator. Everyone. Children were kidnapped, drugged with cocaine and sent into combat, some at the tender ages of 6 or 7 to act as spies, their tiny bodies slithering unnoticed in the bush. The massive use of child soldiers ripped this country apart and the indescribible inhumanity distinguished this war from others. Children were forced to murder their own parents and cut off the limbs of adults under the premise that a person with no hands could not vote. This did not stop pure decapitations or the regular removal of people's feet. I regularly read the stories of young girls taken captive to act as sex slaves (many, also, in their pre-pubecent years.) The stories you hear and read about in the literature are absolutely horrendous, and disgustingly, the more you read, the more they blend together. It becomes common to hear the story about the 13-year old girl who was raped, tied to a stake, and had her foot cut off before she was burned alive. She does not die - the fire goes out and she lives to watch the maggots eating away at the stump at the bottom of her leg.

You read, in your research, the stories - endless, endless, stories - of 15 year old girls with a knife under her throat giving blowjobs to soldiers, bearing the children of her captor(s), and being stuck with them at the end of the war. Because who is she ("she" being hundreds of individual terrorised young women) going to live with now that she is unmarried, pregnant, and living with only one arm? You watch interviews with children, 14, 15, 16 years old, who talk candidly about how yes, they killed and tortured civilians, but what were they to do? They would have been murdered themselves otherwise. Their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles - everyones lives depended on these children committing with eyes closed torturous acts on their peers. Others, with cocaine-smiles, flailed their machetes wildly.

Almost all the taxis drivers are former combatants. Your waiters. The guy who sees you lost on the street and offers to hail you a cab that you don't even tip him for - he'll still smile huge white teeth and wish you a wonderful day. Or, if it's Christmas, he'll say "Compliments of the season." Jim, the guy who sells bread on the street with his two (unschooled) daughters, Tina and Fatima who run run run to hug you when you come home from work. Jim probably fought too, and probably did so as a child soldier. Jim invites you to Christmas dinner.

Despite these stories, despite living in a country where people have experienced such immeasurable pain and hardship, I am consistently floored by the generosity and warmth of the people. I feel more safe here hailing a taxi at night than I do walking to Summerhay's at night, 15 minutes from my West-Ottawa home in Whitehaven.

Things about Sierra Leone, Chapter 2

+ We have a cleaning lady who is apparently within the top 5% of the richest people in Sierra Leone. To start, a cleaning lady is seen as a necessity for we fragile gringos. All our clothes are handwashed in buckets and dried in the sun on clotheslines. There would be no such thing as having a washing machine or a laundromat here, which also means there are no drying machines. This sounds like no big deal - I certainly didn't have either in Paris - but here the fact that clothes are dried in the sun is a problem. As they dry little bugs crawl into the clothes and can burrow into your skin later when you wear them. They then lay eggs in your skin leaving you with some potentially very dangerous parasitic infections. So every single item of clothing is fully ironed after its day in the sun - which means everything, underwear, socks, bras, the whole lot. No clothes touch your skin after drying in the sun without being ironed. So this is the primary reason for why it is necessary for the expats to have a cleaning lady because we need extra care in preventing illness. Our cleaning lady was first hired by some Americans who lived here before us. They had no idea what to pay her, so they figured that it would be fair if for each bedroom in the apartment they paid $100 USD. We have three rooms, so she makes $300 a month. Considering that the average yearly wage here is around $269 USD and our lady Adema is making more than that each month, she's a very wealthy lady. Adema also gets bonuses for Christmas and whatnot, which adds even more to her salary. She is a very stylish, very beautiful woman and I bet that she uses the best shampoo. I vomited all over my sheets when I had malaria and typhoid, so she definitely earned her Christmas bonus.

+ Since I mentioned that, I should also mention two things about the diseases here. When my father received word about me having had typhoid and malaria he called me in a furor, swearing at me that WHY didn't you get BLOODY VACCINTED? and WHY aren't you taking ANTI-MALARIALS?!

First of all, I have been vaccinated against typhoid. I have all kinds of neat little stamps in my carnet de vaccination that note that I have been vaccinated against typhoid, diptheria, polio, hepatits A and yellow fever. Secondly, I take 100mg of doxycycline every day to combat malaria. The problem is that these drugs and vaccines are not 100% effective. You can still get typhoid even if you've been vaccinated against it, and you can still get malaria even if you are taking anti-malarials. My father told me that the reason I got malaria anyway was because I was taking the wrong type of medication, but this is also not true. There are three strains of malaria, one of them being cerebral (which can be fatal within days,) and three anti-malarial medications, none of them protecting against any of the strains. They are a preventative medication with a lot of hope but they cannot ensure that you will not still contract malaria. They're just the beginning of a defense. The only cure for malaria is treatment, and the only true prevention of malaria is good luck and good genes. You can take all the anti-malarials you want but you still can't guarantee that you won't get it. I sleep under a mosquito net, take 100mg of doxycycline a day (just popped some five minutes ago) and use a nice botanical plant-based mosquito repellant that smells awfully nice and screams REPELES MOSQUITOS THAT MAY CARRY WEST NILE VIRUS. That may be true, but even with all of these protections you can still get bitten, and you can still get malaria.

+ Speaking of mosquitos, the bugs here have been unremarkable. I expected that living in an African jungle I would regularly find massive spiders (and some of them are indeed quite big) and indescribable insects, but they've really all seemed quite normal. Our bathtub is regularly the home (and morning deathbed) of a family of daddy-long-legs. Mosquitos are a rarity. There were probably twenty of them at the hospital in my room and that was more than I'd seen in my entire trip. The beaches are clean and there are no wierd multiple-legged things trapaising around and the most annoying bug here is the ant. There are less bugs buzzing and crawling around than at a cottage on a Canadian lake in the summer.

Things about Sierra Leone, Chapter 1

+ I've written in the past about the lack of electricity here. This is a very complicated problem in Sierra Leone that is infuriating because the possibility for the public to actually receive electricity exists - the government simply won't give it to them. Over the Christmas holidays we have been lucky - the National Power Authority has been providing electricty almost every day for almost 20 hours a day for the past two weeks. When I say that we don't have electricity it's not because the power lines don't exist and it's not because the house is not equipped for it - the power just doesn't come. We have a generator that turns on every day at 7pm and lasts until the morning providing us with air-conditioning, lighting and hours of BBC World. But we pay for the fuel for the generator and we are responsible for turning it on. The public, the poor, the non-expats and the non-whites do not have these luxuries. They light their homes at night with bunsen burners and only the bars and restaurants and stores that have generators have any electricity. The roads have no traffic lights (none - not one single traffic light exists in the country) and the streets are lined at night by flickers of fire coming from the lanterns of tin-roofed, tiny, wooden shacks the size of my bathroom. But the fact remains that during the past two weeks we've been receiving electricity during the day. This is for three reasons:

+ It is Christmas. The President every year offers electricity as a sort of "Christmas present" to the public. It's Christmas, so we'll let the hospitals not-run on fuel-powered generators, we'll let the mothers turn on fans to cool their fevered, dying children, and we'll let the expats use the microwave to make some popcorn.

+ It is an election year. The elections will be taking place in February and it's very likely that this burst of electric activity will continue for a while as the Sierra Leone People's Party waits for the public to come to the polls cheering their thank-yous.

+ Sierra Leone is the second least-developped country on the planet. (Don't ask me who's in last place. That's where we'd been for the past ten years - we just got bumped up in the 2006 UN Report.) What is interesting to note is that during the war - which was a particularly brutal one - there was actually more electricity than there is now. Thirty years ago, there were traffic lights in every city from Freetown to Bo to Kenema. In the middle of Freetown at Congo Cross (a junction downtown) there was a large fountain bursting water and lights every single night, a little wannabe Paris. Ten years ago, the country was dealing with a bloodbath but people could at least go to a hospital run on electricty and not an auxiliary generator when they got their limbs cut off. Today the government is so incredibly corrupt that electricty is used as a very literal power source in every sense of the term. The lack of electricity, the water shortages and the incessant poverty keep Sierra Leone on the lowest rung of the developpment ladder which means that it receives significant funding from NGOs, foreign governments, the EU and private individuals. The UN High Commission for Refugees has plastered half the countryside with tents for the poor and dug wells for them to get water. The plethora of NGOs in Freetown, Bo and Kenema help the rich get richer since we buy so much beer and contract people for things like logistics support in our computer labs. Witholding electricty from the public keeps Sierra Leonians poor, and helps the members of Government, investors, and Lebanese restaurant-owners rich. The rich stay rich and the poor suffer and die off like flies.

As I write this, it is the Christmas season in an election year in the second-poorest country in the world, and my Dell laptop is plugged into the wall.