Notes from

Sierra Leone

Breakdown Christmas

28 December 2003

We ground to a stop on the bumpy road. “Shit!” H. slapped his hand against the steering wheel. “Shit!” We looked at each other through the choking cloud of red dust kicked up by the truck speeding off ahead of us. “This could be the end of our vacation…” It was Christmas Eve and we had barely made it out of Freetown.

I looked around. We were at the edge of a very small village. A young boy outside my window stared at us. “Weting apen?” the child asked. “We didn’t see your speed bump back there through the dust,” and from the loud grinding sound that had been coming out of the engine, something was seriously out of alignment.

H. surmised, “It must be the fan that got knocked out of place.” He fumbled with his hand under the steering wheel, beside the seat. Walked out in front of the car, ran his hand under the rim of the hood. Squatted down and ran his eyes from left to right, right to left. Muttered “can’t open the bonnet.” I tried, but was equally unsuccessful.

I looked at the child, who looked back at me. The child’s father came and said there was a mechanic in the next village. “I have a bicycle” said the father and sent an older boy racing south in the hot afternoon haze. The harmattan winds from the Sahara gently cloaks this part of the world in desert sands from November through January. I read once that scientists have found Sahara sands in ocean floor samples as far out as the middle of the Atlantic.

A commercial van with fish painted all over it stopped a few minutes later. H. squeezed in to ride with them to the next village. I stayed with the car. A man driving one of the ubiquitous white UN four-by-fours passed me, probably heading down to the beach. It crossed my mind that it was rather unchivalrous for him to not stop for a woman alone in a village with a broken down vehicle.

H. returned in the fish van with two wirey men. The older man went straight to the driver’s door, reached under the steering box, and pulled confidently on what looked like a loose wire. The bonnet clicked open. In the absence of a prop, I held the hood up, my red hair bandana wadded in my palm to protect my skin from the burning metal.

The men pulled the fan box firmly into place. They added a few screws and pointed out that the left brace was missing, which is probably why it jolted out of place so easily. Temporarily fixed, we drove ever so slowly to the mechanics’ yard about a kilometer further south. The yard looked like a graveyard for crippled cars and cars burnt during the war.

H. and I stayed in the vehicle as a dozen young men gathered their heads under the hood. The old mechanic pointed out the problem, and they scattered to look for a suitable scrap of metal to fashion into a brace. I peeled a green orange and watched as a boy sitting on the crumpled hood of a totaled vehicle carefully ripped a corner off of a poster from the HIV/AIDS Secretariat that read, “You will not get AIDS by touching someone with AIDS.” Sketches of mothers holding their children and friends socializing attempted to prove the point.

I spit the tough skin of an orange slice out and walked around to the back of the broiling car. Across the street women were dancing and singing in a small tarpaulin stall. One left the festivities and hefted a large plastic basin onto her head to continue hawking her wares.

A few more boys had gathered around the crumpled vehicle and were attempting to send sultry looks in my direction. One blew me a kiss. “Wetin-du yu dae luk mi so?” I snapped, spitting out more of my orange cud. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?” The boys laughed. The kisser said, “I love you for my woman!”

Finally the mechanics managed to bend some metal into shape and secured the fan box. H. and I laughed thinking that in a Western country, we would probably have had to leave the car in the shop for days while they searched for just the right part to match this 1979 Range Rover. Here, mechanics virtually never have the right parts, but have been known to make engines as good as new with a little string and strong tape.

H. and I rolled down the windows and sped to River Number 2 beach to meet up with our friends A. and J. They seemed relieved to see us. I headed straight into the calm tepid ocean and let the dirt ease off my body.

The sun painted a vivid streak of sparkling red on the ocean as it set into the thick swath of harmattan haze. I went to the doorway of our bungalow and carefully positioned my camera lens to capture the sunset framed between a coconut tree and a thatched picnic shelter.

Water Play

Christmas day was spent in delicious relaxation on sand and in the water. We rose early and enjoyed a filling breakfast of bananas, oranges, and Lebanese flatbread with edam cheese and sun-dried tomatoes.

We took a canoe in the morning up the river to the bottom of a ‘waterfall.’ The locals said we might see crocodiles and monkeys, but we were not entirely convinced that crocodiles exist in this region at all. Forest elephants used to live in the peninsula, but they were hunted out years ago out of greed from the West for ivory. Monkeys are rare, and have good reason to hide as people eat them: bush meat.

Our canoe moved steadily upriver propelled by a young Sierra Leonean man paddling with strong rhythmic strokes from the back. As water slowly seeped into the rough-hewn canoe, J. and I took turns scooping it out with the cut-off bottom of a water bottle. Scoop, splash, scoop, splash. We watched a bottle of Heineken bob past us, just out of reach. The canoe eased alongside mangroves at the channel’s shallow edge. A stringray scooted beneath us and out of sight. Fat fish darted here and there. These were the first signs of aquatic life I saw in Sierra Leone; the ocean waters are strangely devoid of all but the rare drifting clump of seaweed.

We shared a good natured chuckle when the distant crash of water turned out to be a low cascade rather than a waterfall. Having gone that far, we decided to hope the rocks as far upriver as we could go. There was a path on the other side of the river. The canoe man said it went to ‘the village.’ J. led the way, the fearless explorer forging ahead through the overgrown brush. I followed close behind her and the men brought up the rear.

“What will we give the natives when we get to the village?”

“Can always give them J. and Julie!” The men laughed and J. and I snorted.

J. slowed down a little as the path narrowed to mere inches, sayinig she was afraid of snakes. A grassy plant reached out and caught my arm. Blade grass. It had cut me before when I was hiking with Borbor in Kenema. It attached to my skin with nearly invisible curved spikes, like Velcro: amazing that such a plant could appear so soft. I carefully pulled off each blade, but not without a few burning cuts across my hand. Properly broken in with blood and dirt and soaked from a bad slip in the river, I felt ready to face the ‘natives.’

Suddenly J. stopped and burst out laughing ahead of me. I caught up to her and started laughing as well. The path dead-ended at a road. “This must be the peninsular highway,” we surmised. The men emerged behind us and we stood in the empty dirt road for a few minutes, not really ready to head back given the money spent on the canoe ride, but not terribly excited by the present scenery. Small red and black dragonflies paused with us. Finally we turned back and crossed the cascades back to the canoe where the canoe man sat waiting, clearly bored. Though I strained my eyes through the water, I didn’t see any stingrays on the return trip. We passed the Heineken bottle still on its seaward journey, but it was far out of reach.

In the afternoon, H., A. and I swam far out into the ocean. We stopped periodically so for H. and A. to test the water’s depth. I hung onto the boogie board, which served as their launching pad, and watched them disappear into the dark waters. Once or twice I ducked a couple of feet under water as part of my continual efforts to get over my fear of what I call the ‘dark force.’

I was about five or six years old and was sitting on a raft with Roger in his swimming pool. Our raft drifted over to the deep end, where my brother was treading water. Roger abruptly stood up to my left and dove into the water. The raft flipped over and I sunk to the bottom, the wind knocked out of me. I don’t remember feeling afraid. I do remember sitting cross-legged on the cement floor looking up at Roger and Jason treading obliviously above me and wondering how I could get to the top. I already could swim along the surface, but I didn’t know how to move my limbs to get out of the situation I was in. Jason tells me that the two-year old girl watching from the shallow end screamed when she saw me go down and Roger’s mom dove in and pulled me out.

Ten years later Roger hung himself in his bedroom and the dark force, which I think had lurked in the back of my consciousness since that moment at the bottom of the pool, began taking an increasingly oppressive hold on me every time I entered water.

In the clean warm Atlantic, I determined two months ago to finally conquer my irrational fear. I had forced myself out onto bodies of water before in kayaks and canoes on the Connecticut or Potomac rivers, but my heart would beat rapidly, I would hyperventilate a little, and the fear didn’t diminish. When I told H. about the dark force one day, he began helping me by patiently swimming further and further out with me and talking of warm blankets gently covering me where I talked of darkness strangling me. H. is a dolphin when he meets the water. With the ocean so accessible on the Freetown peninsula, I’m getting there, though it may be a while before scuba diving makes it onto the agenda.

I dragged a large rice sack out to shore and picked up a few rusty cans from the sand, still feeling guilty about leaving the Heineken bottle from the morning. I strained and gasped dragging the sack in. If it is this difficult to save a drowning bag, how much more difficult must it be to save a drowning human? I thought to myself, and shuddered to think I might ever have to attempt that one day. I would surely drown as well.

Club Med

On Boxing Day we decided to drive to the southern tip of the peninsula, stopping at different beaches along the western coast. First stop was Tokeh, just south of River Number 2. Small boys sprinted alongside the car as we bumped down the road, holding the doors through the open windows. We pleaded with them to let go, terrified that we would crush one of them.

“H., look!” I said, indicating the brush on the right. “Those must have been tennis courts.” One could just make out faded paint on cracked concrete through the build up of dirt and weeds.

The boys fell behind and chased us screaming and laughing all the way to the beach, where we parked flanked by the crumbled remains of burned buildings.

“Julie!” called out a thin man as he approached me. “You remember me?” I didn’t, but gave him a big smile and clapped his hand in greeting. “From the ferry, over there,” he pointed back toward River Number 2. “Oh yes, I remember!” I’d chatted with him once or twice as he waited for customers to ferry across the narrow mouth of the river in his small pink motorized boat. “Is that your husband?” he asked. “No,” I laughed, “my husband is still in America.” Sometimes it is just easier to say I am married; having just a boyfriend, particularly one on a different continent, leaves a woman fair game out here.

I stood with the man under an umbrella-shaped tree as he told me Tokeh’s storey. “The French built this hotel.” Club Med, people had told me before. “This used to be the most beautiful hotel, the most expensive hotel. They built it in 1987, 1988. Over there is Tokeh Island,” he pointed off shore. Pointing to a small rocky patch between Tokeh Island and the shore, he said, “The helicopters used to come there.” I could make out a layer of tar that had once served as a landing pad, but had now crumbled around the edges. “The French would take a small boat to come to the shore,” the man explained.

A barefoot boy wandered nearby, staring at me, holding a plate of rice and plasas. He passed through the gaping doorway of a large burnt-out cylindrical structure and placed his plate down on a concrete counter. He continued watching me through a gaping hole in the wall as he ate. I could imagine that downstairs might have been a lounge and a kitchen, and perhaps a couple of rooms for rent. After a swim and a snack, people might have wandered upstairs for a sundowner on the balcony where they would lie back listening to peaceful music and the crashing waves.

“The rebels came and stayed here for a while. Then they burned all of it when they left. That was 1994.”

“Did they burn the village, too?” I asked.

“No, only the hotel. The village they left okay.”

I caught up with my friends further south on the beach. There were clusters of buildings, so we asked if there might be rooms somewhere for rent. The first cluster of bungalows had the factory-made look of sterile architecture from the 70’s and turned out to be privately owned by Lebanese or Germans (the locals seemed confused as to which). The next was a low sprawling compound with dirty blue and white paint and rusty but relatively new zinc roofs. “This used to be a casino,” said a man. We entered the room, choking in the dust. Tables were placed haphazardly upon each other. The walls were a deep blood red. Light sneaked in through the broken plate glass windows.

“We have two rooms, and we have a tent.” The man led us through what appeared to have been a kitchen, but was currently housing stacks of broken furniture. He opened a door off the kitchen to reveal a dark room with a pile of dirty mattresses and a broken faucet. I suspected that villagers had decided to make use of the parts of the abandoned compound that they could access. I learned that an American couple had recently taken over the compound are were starting to fix it up—hence the new roofs—but were away for the holidays.

We declined the rooms, saying we might come back later if we didn’t find something further south, and continued on our way.

Southern tip

The village of York appeared in a cool forested stretch of rode. I was startled and felt like I had zipped through a time and space warp. Crooked shutters hung off of two storey houses made of asymetrical unpainted clapboard. Some houses had zinc walls, but still left one feeling that they were attempting to create the clapboard effect. People sat quietly on small verandas adorned with bougainvilleas. Dirty children ducked behind clothing strung across their yards to dry. A painted cement post proclaimed, “York/ Centennial/ 1819-1919.” I felt like it was 1819 and I was wandering among slave houses in the States. This Krio settlement was one of the last remaining showcases of the transatlantic exposure brought by freed slaves who had been resettled by the British in Sierra Leone.

A wide unfinished highway appeared as we continued south. A marvel of German engineering! I had not seen a road so wide, so very perfectly flat, so expertly curved to let the water run off. We took old paths to the side of the highway whenever possible to avoid marring the unfinished perfection. Even further south, the highway was paved and there were even occasional guard rails at the curves! With poor roads being the complaint I hear most often from Sierra Leoneans identifying obstacles to economic progress, I swear even the people we passed looked happier. I worried that the government planned to fix up all of Western Area and would completely forget the abominable road conditions in the provinces. It is widely agreed that the government only functions in Western Area, and a combination of lack of resources, lack of will, and competing paramount chiefdom systems render government completely irrelevant to the rest of the country.

Mama Beach, our southernmost goal, turned out to be a disappointment. There were decent rooms for rent, but to get to the beach one had to pick through a swampy stream that smelled of rotting fish. The set-up seemed to me to have bad feng shui. Holiday partiers played load pop music on a powerful boom box and danced on the sand. We decided that we couldn’t take any more Enrique Iglesias, Shaggy, or Celine Dion, and headed back to the peace of Tokeh for the night, where we found a pleasant lone bungalow that had been overlooked before (“How much?” “Forty dollars.” “The people over there said they’ll give us a room for 30,000.” “Ok, I can do it for 40,000”—about fifteen dollars).

Breakdown II

I fumbled with the torn 1980-something Shell map and cursed that it represented Western Area with so little detail. I guess there were never enough Shell stations there.

“So, should we do the mountain road back or go through Freetown?”

The mountain road was more direct and allowed us to avoid the frustrating city traffic jams, but I wasn’t sure I could find it again. I had taken it twice when I first arrived over six months earlier, both times coming the other direction.

“Wait, I think that’s it!” The dirt road to my left struck a cord of recognition in me. We veered left. “Yes, this is it, I’m sure of it.” H. muttered quietly, “Tempting fate…” but didn’t explain himself. We continued on for some kilometers.

“Hey, H., since we’re on the mountain road maybe we can stop and see the chimpanzees.” The chimpanzee reserve was the only zoo I knew of in the country.

“Sure, let’s do that.”

We drove in silence, H. swerving around potholes and the occasional fowl. The engine revved up as the car chugged up the mountains. “Why is it in such a high gear?” H. frowned and shifted the automatic transmission, but the revving got louder and louder.

Just then the sign for the zoo appeared and after a moment’s hesitation, H. said, “Well we didn’t come all this way for nothing” and turned left up the steep road. The car struggled up a few hundred metres, growling louder and louder until finally H. said, “Shit, the clutch must be blown!” and we rolled the whole way down to the main road. We barely moved half a kilometer before the car finally gave up trying to make it over a bump going uphill. “It’s gone.” We were right in the middle of the road. H. started backing up. “No, no, let’s try to push it forward, we’re just a few feet from cresting this rise,” I said, lest we back all the way back down the mountain before finding a spot wide enough to pull over. I got out of the car and looked around. Just a woman, two children, and two men. All but one of the men had stopped to look at us. I called out to the men, “Can you help us please? Can you help us push?” H. put the car in neutral and we heaved, but the Range Rover didn’t budge. So we waited.

Two men on a lightweight Honda motorcycle coming the other direction stopped to see what was the matter. They sped on and evidently called some charm because nearly two dozen men materialized from the bush down the hill where there had been no one before. The men piled up behind the car, and I along with a couple others pushed along the side. We heaved. My sandals lost their grip in the loose dirt road and I wiped out. The men stopped pushing. “No, keep going!” I called, “you’re not going to run me over!” I regained my footing and joined again. The car slid slowly up. H. steered it over to the left once we had reached the plateau.

We all let go, panting. I looked down and saw that my right knee was covered in mud and blood. Funny how such things don’t hurt until you look at them. The men clucked. “De wuman done fall down,” they said. I rummaged around for a tissue and gently tried to lift the mud and rocks away. We had been keeping a desperate and unsuccessful look-out for water for hours already, and we certainly weren’t going to find any there.

Men crawled under the car, peered under the hood, and seemed to come to a consensus that it must be the clutch and we couldn’t do anything about it. The motorcyclist had rejoined us and said, “It’s downhill now for a bit, so maybe if you keep going you can get enough speed to make it up the last half-kilometer rise. I’m moving around—just have to drop this guy off—so I’ll be watching you.”

We thanked everyone, got back in the vehicle, and barreled down the hill. Just as we got to the very bottom of the dip before the last rise, we were obliged to stop by a crowd of villagers dancing and clapping sticks behind a dancing costumed man completely hidden under thick layers of grasses fastened over his head, arms, and legs. At any other time that would have been an interesting cultural spectacle, but we just weren’t in the mood.

The dancers passed and we crawled forward. A few meters ahead was a bridge exactly the length and width of one vehicle, and smack dap in the middle of the bridge the car died again. It was almost funny. We were in the village of Regent, only about three miles from home. H. tried to call for help, but the cell phone network didn’t reach that area.

Suddenly the motorcyclist reappeared, evidently on his return trip to Freetown. “I’ve caught you again!” he called out. After some debate and a few attempts to flag down the occasional car driving toward town, we agreed that I would ride the motorcycle to town and H. would stay with the car. I was nervous and wished I were wearing long pants; I was bleeding as it was and had no desire to go flying off the rode on a motorcycle. The cyclist laughed at my fears and said there would be no problem.

The ride was scenic and the breeze was cool. I felt cool, too, as everyone watched us pass. I mentally affected a biker-chick attitude. The western sky was turning pink. My heart sped up a few times as we swerved around deep potholes and large poda-poda taxis pressured us from the rear, but overall I felt more secure than I had expected.

The motorcyclist, a builder by the name of James Kamara, dropped me off at King Street where I had left the red Nissan a friend lent me while he was in England on holiday. As expected when things are going wrong in Sierra Leone, things continued to go wrong: first H.’s phone battery ran out just as I went to make the crucial call to a friend, then I couldn’t find my own phone, then the Nissan wouldn’t start, then it died trying to crawl up King Street (my colleague Linda calls it ‘the skinny scary street’) so I had to roll all the way down and take the long slow route along Wilkinson Road back to my house where I still failed to find my phone.

I talked to myself along the way. “Julie, where is the phone? Where could you have put the phone?” I reasoned that the phone would be out of batteries anyway so I should move on to other possibilities. “You’ve got to find Mohammed; he’ll figure out how to help us. Where is Mohammed’s house? Where the fuck is Mohammed’s house?” I bit my knuckles. “The sun is going down. Can’t call him. Where is Mohammed’s house?

Most of my colleagues were away for the holidays, but luckily I found one at the guest house where field workers stay when they come to Freetown. I managed to revive H.’s phone long enough to retrieve Mohammed’s number and used my colleague’s phone to call, casting nervous glances out the window at the vibrant red sun.

Hours after I left Regent, I finally made it back along with Mohammed, his friend, and his friend’s sturdy Nissan Terrano. I watched dubiously as they connected the cars with a narrow yellow cord and thought to myself that it didn’t even look as strong as the cords I rock-climb on. I was wrong. The tough little Terrano, purchased in Mauritius and broken in in the Namibian desert sands, slowly tugged the heavy Range Rover all the way back to town.

Home at last, I considered just dropping to my bed and passing out, but thought better of it and with great effort managed to force myself into the shower. Mud, sweat, and blood flooded off me. My knee stung a little. I felt a little silly as I hoped to myself that it would bleed a little more; my logic as a child was always that it is no use hurting if there is no war scar to match the pain! Clean at last, I sighed in tired relief and collapsed onto the mattress, pulling the mosquito net down around me. That night I slept happily through the cacophony of dance music from a dozen competing holiday parties.

Next article: Why Africa?

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