Small-small update.

I am so incredibly busy with my project right now that I haven't been updating any of my blogs. I write something almost every single night while I lie in bed but I always get too tired or anxious about work or distracted by must-sleep-must-sleep-count-sheep and turn off my computer before I have finished writing the latest entry. My project has to be completed by April 15th (*cough* tomorrow) and it's just not ready yet. I'm glad that the final report will not say "A Report On Children's Rights in Sierra Leone by A-Lok" because I'm going to be mortified by the lousy quality of formatting when it's completed. Oh well. The information contained is priceless, I've learned so much that my line manager mentioned that I'm probably more knowledgable about children's rights than any of the other expats in Sierra Leone (*ahem*She said it, not me), and I've had an incredible rush writing it. I'm just disappointed that I've had to write about 30 pages worth of information that is going directly to the United Nations and I've only had a month to do it. (!?!) It's simply not going to be a perfect document and I'm disappointed by that.

Despite that, it's been very well worth the stress and the anxiety, since I spend my days learning absolutely immeasurable things. My evenings are spent drinking cool white wine on a beautiful porch overlooking bougainvillea bushes, reading books with Kumba and Fatmatah (the children who live on my compound) and eating chicken schwarmas by the pool at the local hotel. I take dirty, crumbling taxi cabs and chat with the locals who tell me stories about Salonean weddings, I hand out candies to the most beautiful, smiliest children you've ever seen, and feel extraordinarily fulfilled.

So, I have a million other things to add and plenty of half-written entries that I promise to complete and post next week when I actually have the time. In the meantime, I will mention this:

- I am currently at the Hotel Cabenda, which is why I have suddenly had internet over the weekends. They have wireless! Who woulda thunk it? We barely have electricity half the time, and here they have free wireless internet. I usually therefore spend my weekends working with my computer by the hotel pool, burning, uh, beautifully.

- The swimming pool is closed today because the hotel is having a wedding here this evening. I am supposed to go to a party tonight (theme: "glamour." I have a kickass red lipstick. It'll be interesting to see how a bunch of expats normally clothed in khakis and a pretty coating of red dust manage to clean up to look "glamorous.") but I am tempted to stick around to watch the wedding take place. I have never seen a Salonean ceremony before.

- My waitress told me that she thinks that I would make a beautiful bride. *Ahem*, mothers, lock up your sons!

- I went to a big musical festival on Easter Monday with my friend Justin. It was a music competition between artists: Western Sierra Leone vs. Eastern Sierra Leone. During this concert I experienced my first rain in 6 months. You can watch the video on Justin's website here. He also included some other videos from that night and has more to come, so feel free to peruse his site.

- I finish work on the 18th and leave on the 20th at night. During those two days off I need to: distribute all the gifts that I brought for the Salonean families I met here on my first trip; buy many, many souvenirs that will not fit into my suitcase and for which I will be royally ripped off at the covered market (so don't expect much, dear friends); I need to lead a workshop with collaborators of my project and my NGO's team; I need to go to several schools to ditribute pencils, pens and books to children; I need to pack and move out; and I need to socialise and take photos of all the things I've seen.

- I will be profoundly busy in my last week and probably arrive in Canada suffering from malaria, typhoid, an inflammed gall bladder and 2nd degree burns from the sun.

- Can't wait to see you all! Please take care of me when I arrived burnt, burnt-out, half dead, and brilliantly happy.

Our logistics team is out of town. They've left for a week to stay in Kailahun in the far eastern part the country, near the Liberian border. Freetown is in the far east next to the ocean. This departure on their part is problematic for my NGO because every time they leave everything goes wrong.

The Logisitics Team is in charge of doing all the necessary things that the rest of the staff either can't be bothered to do, or simply can't do no matter how much they are bothered. When a computer breaks it is Brian, our Head (and up until last week only) Logistics Guy who phones all the pseudo-computer-tech stores to get someone to come in to fix it. Brian is the one we call when we have a car accident, when we notice our guards falling asleep on the job, when our tanks run out of fuel, when the front gate to the compound becomes so covered in rust that it breaks at the hinges and falls off. We call Brian when we are in danger, when we are lost, when we have been robbed, when our car breaks down in Kenema 5 hours from home. Brian is the lifeblood of the NGO who ensures that everything that needs to be done is done. He makes sure we have water and electricity, air conditioning and petrol. But now Brian is gone and he's taken his new recruits with him. Since Brian left yesterday, the following has happened:

- The residential compound has run out of water. We are expected to have enough left to last us until tomorrow. Rumours in the newspaper talk of breaks in the water pipe that extends from the ocean through Freetown. It was built in 1965 by the British and is a corrugated mess. We have emailed Brian to tell him that none of us will be showering for the rest of the week. While we wait for Brian to come home next week and solve the problem for our apartments we will pray for rain to fill the well on the compound. We will use rain water for our showering, bathroom and cooking needs until Brian comes back.

- The generator at work has just been turned off. I've mentioned several times that we have two of them - the main generator and an auxiliary. I frequently complain about the lousiness of the main generator that constantly breaks and the weakness of the auxiliary that serves little purpose. Usually something breaks with the main generator so we turn on the auxiliary to at least have basic electricity. The auxiliary generator has enough strength to power our computers, but not the air conditioner, which usually leaves me in a sweaty, unproductive heap at my desk. Today, we have no generators - main or auxiliary. Apparently there was a considerable fuel leak in the shack that houses them and now neither can be used. As I write this I am wasting batteries on my laptop in a black office with no air conditioning and a lot of hot air.

I absolutely hate it when Brian leaves. The last time Brian left Charly and I got in a car accident and had to flee the scene for our safety. We swore to each other in a panic that Brian is not allowed to leave ever again. Brian is our guide, our contigency plan, our mechanic, and our hero. But since Brian is not here, we are going to bathe in residual rain water and work in darkness, and if the President is murdered and we need to be evacuated, the five white expatriate ladies working in my office (myself included) will call Brian in a hysterical panic. Oh Brian, how I wish you'd return, I'm so very sweaty right now.

In other news... Freetown has run out of milk.

In other other news, my project is coming along splendidly and I am so very proud of myself. :)

Des photos.

Today has been an exceptionally long day. I had a complicated presentation to make this morning (which sucked) and spent the morning feeling drained because of it. We ordered pizza for lunch since it seemed like everyone was walking around licking unknown wounds and it made me feel marginally better, but only marginally. So I decided that I needed a break from working my ass off only to have shitty results and spent the day chatting online and uploading photos all over the world. It takes about 45546782 minutes to upload each photo, so there aren't that many new ones for you to see. But I'm getting to it, promise.



When I am done this post I am going to go home, play some jazz music and read in the sunset on my huge porch. My apartment house is huge and gorgeous. I live in tthe white half and plan to throw a huge house party soon:



And this is where we went this weekend, Toke Beach:







And that's all for now, since I'm going home for some cool white wine and a lot of Glenn Miller... Then maybe off to Mamba Point for Tuesday's Movie Night.