Notes from

Sierra Leone

Hiking with Borbor

19 July 2003

Borbor, the laundry man for our Kenema houses, offered to lead me for a hike into the picturesque hills rising behind the town. He said I might not find the path, and as we wound between small village houses scattered about the foot of the hills, I decided that he was right.

Everyone stopped their working and socializing to look at us, a few asking Borbor in Mende where we were going. Women stared from where they squatted tending open fires topped by large black cauldrons. A few young children called me "Peu-moy," meaning "white person" in Mende, as we passed.

We stopped at Borbor's house so he could change to better shoes. His brother greeted me in English as he lit a cooking fire in front of the house. Several little boys and girls ran up to me, giggling as they grabbed my hand or pet the white skin of my arm. Borbor's mother sat on the mud porch, preparing smooth, flat brown beans about the size of a matchbook. Her breasts, which had never seen a bra, drooped fully exposed. I tried to focus instead on her toothless grin. She asked me something. "Do you like these beans?" translated Borbor as he tied the laces of his gray Nikes.

The shoe situation taken care of, we continued our meandering path to the hills through everyone's front yards. "Boa!" we were greeted as we passed. "Bisia!"

At the last house, girls filled large basins with water from a public tap. A man mistaking me for a dam technician offered to lead me up the hill to see the dam. Borbor explained that we were just going for a walk.

We started up a hill planted with young crops. At the top of the low rise was a small A-shaped thatch shelter with a couple of pans and the remains of many cooking fires to one side.

We crossed a small clear stream in which a middle-aged man sat nude, bathing. Borbor asked him how his day was as we carefully balanced on the rocks directly behind him.

A little further, we passed a squatting man practically enveloped by huge piles of gravel of varying sizes. He frowned in concentration and barely looked up from his tedious work: he was picking up rocks, one by one, balancing them at just the right angle, then striking them with a small hammer. Making gravel, one stone at a time.

I struggled to keep up with Borbor as the slope and the density of the foliage increased. I tried to control my panting and hoped my face wasn't too red. My head pounded from the intense heat of early afternoon and the beginnings of dehydration. Borbor seemed to bound ahead effortlessly on his long legs. I stumbled in my office shoes and promised myself that I would bring sneakers next time. To give us excuses to pause, I feigned interest in random plants (not so implausible since I had inquired about trails to look at the plants in the first place) whether or not I actually found them interesting.

There had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Borbor's village when he was young, he told me, and he used to lead her for hikes every weekend. She had also studied environmental sciences, so he was used to foreigners with a strange obsession with the plants of his country. He had initially thought I was in Sierra Leone as a researcher.

My eye was caught by a felled trunk about five inches thick covered all around with enormous white thorns threatening injury like tightly-packed shark teeth. Borbor waited patiently as I took a few photographs. He seemed far less interested in this menacing stake than in the tree just beside it with thin twisted limbs diverging and rising from a focal point near the ground.

Pointing to this rather average-looking tree, he said, "This one is used to treat malaria. You take the root and soak it in water." (He might have also said something about leaving it to ferment). "Then you drain it and drink the water. It is very bitter." Indicating a round green fruit about the size of a lime, he said, "the fruit is very sweet, but the root is bitter. The fruit is not yet ripe, though," he added. Holding up his fist, he said, "When it is ripe, it is this size." He glanced at the spiny stick that had first caught my attention and pointed out that someone had cut it down to give access to the root of the medicine tree.

The path disappeared and the dense bush became impassable, so we continued our slow slippery ascent in the clean stream, which cascaded down the steep rocky bed in many little waterfalls. We passed around the dam, a simple cement wall holding a pool of water back for diversion through an aboveground pipe that led through brush and down the hill to the tap we had passed at the last house.

The gray rocks were blood red where they had been frequently licked by the water, marking the stream's path as it fell toward town.

On the return, Borbor told me what each of the crops were as we went back over the first low rise. Rice about a month old covered most of the hillside (planted in the dirt and not in swampy paddies as I've seen elsewhere). Individual specimens of corn, maize, cassava, beans, yam, cocoyam, soursour, and cucumber were scattered here and there with no apparent design.

"Borbor, is cacao and coffee also grown in this area? I saw stores in town with painted doors saying they buy cacao and coffee."

"Yes… I will take you next time. Cacao trees are far in the hills yonder."

"Are there places to buy cacao?" I had a flashback of chopping a football-shaped pod off a cacao tree in Ecuador with a machete, then cutting the hard shell open to reveal dark round seed cases embedded in white flesh. The seed cases were opened and the seeds removed to dry in the sun. I wanted to try my hand at cooking Mexican-style molé, a spicy sauce made with ground cacao, chili, and peanut oil.

Borbor's lips twitched, holding back an amused smile. "Not really. It is just grown for export. Sometimes the coffee growers might reserve a little for personal consumption, but not cacao. If they were grinding cacao, people would scold them and say they were wasting it." He thought the Western addiction to chocolate was bizarre and humorous.

As we neared town, I remembered seeing street hawkers there selling small portions of Horlick's instant cocoa mix in plastic bags for relatively high prices. There seemed a bit of absurdity in the fact that the locals wouldn't even think of consuming the cocoa they grow themselves, but after exporting it raw to Europe, they import the processed product for consumption.

Next article: Gerihun refugee camp

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in the personal notes are my own. Facts presented are accurate to the best of my knowledge, but this site should not be taken as an authoritative resource.

Copyright © 2003 Julie Greene