Notes from

Sierra Leone

Twenty-Five Sureties

16 April 2004

After ten months of listening to my musings across a crackling telephone wire, my boyfriend Dan crossed the Atlantic in early April to see Sierra Leone for himself. I was called up-country just before he arrived, and upon my return found that he had already explored the oft-bewildering maze of downtown Freetown and was maneuvering by taxi and on foot with ease! Always observant and already growing to understand the competing forces that have shaped Sierra Leone, he wrote the following letter home to share his first impressions. Read on! -Julie

'Welcome to Sierra Leone. If you cannot help us, please do not corrupt us.'

Thus reads the first sign you see upon leaving the small, sweaty airport servicing Freetown, coastal capital of this nation of 6 million nestled between Guinea and Liberia on the Atlantic.  The sign seems quaint, but it's no small request.  In fact, it's difficult to imagine a nation more subject to, and created by, external forces: from its first inhabitants migrating from North and East Africa, to its colonialization under British rule, to the largely externally-motivated (and funded) civil war of the 1990s and early 2000s, to the current wave of international funding and organizations flowing in to help rehabilitate and rebuild, Sierra Leone has been an incredibly hands-on enterprise.  But what helps and what corrupts is often hard to tell.

Take just one foreign actor as an example: the Brits.  Starting around 1750, they used Sierra Leone's islands as a key hub in the slave trade.  Not helpful.  But in 1787, after outlawing slavery on British soil, they established Freetown as a settlement for former slaves.  This might be termed 'helpful.'  Yet it also kickstarted their colonial presence throughout Sierra Leone, which, as evidenced by the 1898 anticolonial uprising, was ultimately deemed by the local populace as unhelpful - even though it had helped create a working infrastructure, a comfortable standard of living for those in the colonial service, the premier West African university, and Freetown's reputation as "the Athens of West Africa."  The rebellion suppressed, British interest in their colony increased with the 1930 discovery of diamonds (this would prove unhelpful, through financial exploitation and later international war mongering), but waned by 1961, when they grant! ed the nation independence.  Helpful?  In principle and in the long term (the hope remains), of course.  Yet left to its own to mimmick Western democracy, Sierra Leone instead found itself ravaged by 30 years of corrupt single-party and military rule, followed by 10 years of brutal civil war.  It was this stage that gave the Brits their first opportunity to unequivocally and unambiguously help: by providing financial and political support to hold democratic elections in 1996 (despite chaotic rebel interventions), and, as rebel violence reached its most audacious peak in May 2000 (with UN helicopters being shot down and hundreds of UN soldiers being taken prisoner), mobilizing their largest military undertaking in nearly 20 years, sending warships and troops to Freetown and effectively quashing the rebellion.  Since the formal end of the war, the UK has remained one of the primary sources of relief and restoration funding.  By some counts, then ! -- fair or not -- it took over 200 years and the creation of a huge me ss in the first place for the British to learn how to help Sierra Leone.  To be fair, the world is a complex place and it's hard to do.

Whether the correct figure for Britain is 40 years or 200, my hope has been to be a lot faster - since I've only got 2.5 months.  The context of my arrival in Freetown was this: after 2.5 years in Washington DC, I was moving on to grad school in the fall and had just enough time and resources to undertake 10 weeks in an inexpensive locale.  Sierra Leone, ranking at the bottom of the UN's human development index (1999), was a great candidate - particularly because it was home to my girlfriend, Julie, who is working for a refugee aid organization in Freetown.  Hence, I found myself flying a 3rd world airline into a maybe-3rd world airport, with all my cash on me and no job.  That would be a hopeless situation if not for the utter competance of Julie.  She'd already secured us a fabulous place to live, with two other international aid housemates (one British, one Swiss) in a spacious, and very moderately appointed flat on the top floor of a four-stor! y cement block factory/apartment building on one of Freetown's busiest roads (one of the 5 or 6 or so roads with pavement actually useful for auto traffic, the rest are twisting, steep, dusty dirt roads used primarily by pedestrians).

From the dining room and kitchen, there's a fabulous view of the beach, lying 1/2 mile to the West.  Downtown is 1 mile east.  From the living room and balcony overlooking the road you see: streams of people walking - mostly in the road as what few sidewalks there are have cavernous holes and/or merge with the open gutters.  Chickens and the occassional goat rooting around in the trash and red dirt lining the roads.  Palm trees and steep hills rising up behind us.  Some other 2- and 3-story residential buildings (at 4 stories, we're a local landmark) - dingy painted cement exteriors with balconies, corrugated roofs and white metal bars over all windows.  You hear: Afro-pop late into the night, calls to prayer from the local mosque and roosters early in the morning, and a never ending floor of vehicular traffic (honking is a local pastime).  Right across the street is a Lebanese restaurant (the only place in town to get croissants or espr! esso), shacks selling Coke or vegetables, and a Lebanese supermaket selling, amongst other things, frozen pizzas and singing, dancing, James Brown dolls.  I have a lot of explaining to do.

In addition to the fact that Lebanese run all the supermarkets, most of the internet cafes (hello!), and much of the money-changing industry around here, I know these things about Sierra Leone are true:

1.  It is and always has been diverse.  Two-thousand years of waves of migration have helped establish tolerance and an entreprenuerial spirit as regional hallmarks.  First from North and East African traders, then from the 13th-17th centuries from Mali's Islamic empire, including the first Portuguese explorers in the 15th century, and later from the Lebanese influx, the culture has evolved.  By the 19th century, 14 ethnic groups had settled throughout the country.  Today there are 14 tribal languages spoken in addition to English, the official language, as well as Krio, an offshoot of it, which serves as the most common and universal language; 3 major religions practiced (Muslim, animist and Christian); and a relatively even split amongst major ethnic groups.  Tensions across any of these divisions are low to non-existant.

2. "Sierra Leone" was coined by the Portuguese explorers who first mapped the coast in the 1460s - in reference to the intimidating hills rising jaggedly above what is now Freetown.  The Portuguese made some inroads -- enough to produce some offspring with the locals -- but apparently found the land too hot and buggy, and left it for the British to colonize centuries later.

3.  It's absolutely gorgeous.  Now is the end of the 6-month dry season and vegetation is still quite lush, and, especially up in the hills, thick.  Of the four main beaches on the Freetown peninsula, at least a couple of them must be amongst the best in the world.  Of the forests -- once populated with elephant, chimpanzees, pygmy hippos and the like -- only 4% remain.  There is a sizable national park on the northern border (with Guinea) and a few other smaller protected areas that serve as a last refuge.  Besides visiting a chimpanzee reseve outside of Freetown I can't speak to the rest of the country yet - word is it is hot and dry, the center flat and the borders hilly to montaneous.

4.  It is hot.  88 degrees, every day, virtually all year (it dips a couple degrees during the peak months of the rainy season, July - September).

5.  There are two seasons: dry and rainy.  I have gotten a preview of one rain (a month early, I'm told).  It was impressive, like buckets.  The sky smelled like fresh mud.

6.  It's buggy.  As I quickly learned, mosquito netting is a must.  Do NOT sleep out on a balcony attempting to escape mosquitoes - even on the 4th floor, the ocean breeze will not keep them away.

7.  The ocean breeze is constant and cool - the newly-arrived traveller's salvation (the windows are always open at our place).

8.  Once you get mosquito netting, do NOT sleep with your knees pressed against it.  For reference, 50 mosquito bites per kneecap heal in approximately one week.

9.  Freetown, home of an estimated 2 million, is located on a peninsula sticking out into the Atlantic.  Outside of the immediate downtown area, it is extremely hilly.  A short walk up hill provides spectacular views.  Looking out the window of a car at night riding along the ridges, it almost looks like you're flying.

10.  Three tall buildings tower above the rest of downtown.  They were apparently built by Chinese investors and are pretty dingy inside, but from the outside they look like they were dropped in from space.  Or Cleveland.  The rest of downtown is 3-4 stories in height, with huge open-air markets and street vendors clogging the roads.  People will fix your shoes for 25 cents, make you a copy of a key for $10, sell you a sandwich for $1, or a basketball for $35 - no $20, ok $10.  All in "Leones", of course (2,800 of them to the dollar).  It takes awhile to get used to the prices, especially as everyone's first quote will be about 3 times the real price.

11.  Handmade, colorfully-patterned fabric is the distinctive local industry and art form.  After purchase it's fashioned into elaborate dresses for women and simpler coverings for men.

12.  There is virtually no other industry, besides a few hand-carved crafts for tourists, locally made baskets, and bright plastic tubs with tie-dyed patterns.  As far as anyone can tell, there are no factories anywhere.  What labor there is is done by hand: witness the whole production lines of people breaking large stones into smaller stones, into smaller stones, into smaller stones, into pebbles into gravel - with hammers.  That is work.  Construction is done with ropes, boards, and large sticks for scaffolding.  There are few right angles; diversity of angles reigns.

13.  Local food is simple: rice and ______.  ______ can be fish, red meat (often goat), chicken, or groundnuts (peanuts) -- often mixed together in a stew.  This is sold in countless stick-and-corrugated shacks lining the roads for a dollar or so.  Vegetarians who like to cook for themselves can find tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, some peppers, carrots, onions and chives from roadside vendors for extremely cheap.  Right now watermelon, pineapple, and mango are in season too.

14.  There is rarely 'national' power so almost all electricity is powered by individual generators.  Ours is on from about 5pm - midnight.  We actually have (very old) air conditioners -- perhaps the largest status symbol in the country, if it hasn't been replaced by cell phones -- but they're not worth using.  The fan we bought is much better.

15.  Hot water is very rare and not at all missed.  Cold showers are perfect.  The city water source is up in the hills and currently quite good, but also threatened by deforestation and development.  Some estimate that it will face crisis within a decade.

16.  Bottled water is all over the place for those of us who's digestive systems are not tuned to the local aqueous flora and fauna.  I've been boiling and pumping the tap to save a few dollars and provide a nice daily routine.

17.  Budgeting $12 a day lets you live well in Freetown, with some nights out to the fancier restaurants (i.e., colonial relics).

18. If you get bumped up to First Class on one of Sierra National Airline's 3 weekly flights to Freetown, you will enjoy 1970s upholstery, lots of champaign and rolls and fish, and the second issue of their in-flight magazine.  It touts the nation's first feature film (about the 1898 anticolonial uprising) and the return of the now-more-legitimized-thanks-to-internaiontal-sanctions diamond industry.  Typos will be numerous.

19.  Colonialism never leaves a culture.  Maybe now it's better to term it cultural imperialism, or an accute awareness of power differential, but it is still here every day.  And in every building: you live in a left-over colonial villa, or a shack.  You ride squished in 20-per-van local "taxis" or drive a Mercedes.  There simply is no middle class - or not much of one, yet.  And there is not nearly enough strength in the public institutions for them to withstand the corruption they are subjected to.  In the US, corruption means skimming off the top -- institutions function and those who run them get fat.  Here, corruption means skimming off everything.  Nothing works, and nothing changes until the next uprising.  And that is where all of us foreigners and our funds (the US government has invested over $1 billion here since the start of the Clinton administration) and our fleets of white Land Rovers (the transit of choice! of the international aid community) come in.  "Stop fighting!" we say.  "Develop responsible public institutions!"  Will Sierra Leoneans listen?  And if so, will we help or corrupt?  And (pop quiz): what is the current record for the number of baskets of coal Dan has seen stacked on one walking woman's head at one time?  For answers, see #25.

20.  "White man!" I am often called as I walk around.  It's an attempt to get my attention, in most cases so that I can be asked for money.  There are few white people generally out and about (most travel from home to office to restaurant to bar to home via Land Rover), so I don't mind - I try to share a smile and sentence or two, but rarely money.  Sometimes it's the more-derogatory "White boy!", usually from teenagers, which is fine.  It's the occassional "White boy" (or financially-motivated "White man") from little kids that I regret.  It's easy to see where the negative or 'cash cow' view is coming from, as there is some resentment over, say, the sight of so many Land Rovers lined up like pigs at trough at the bars at night.  According to some in the community, a disheartening proportion of international aid workers are reticent to learn the local language or customs, and spend a lot of time bemoaning the many shortcomings or innefi! ciencies they perceive here.  They don't give the community a good name.  Yet they are outnumbered, and some go very far out of  what might be considered 'their way' to act as ambassadors of goodwill.  There can't be too much of this in my view.  I stopped at a small shack to buy a Coke, and found an older teenager was grinning somewhat maliciously at me.  "Are you from Britain or the US?" he asked.  "Which is worse?" I asked.  "My religion instructs me to hate people from both," he said.  Just a couple minutes of talking about my differences with some of the US' current policies and attitudes seemed to change his worldview quite substantially (ie, not everyone from the US is alike).  I might not have been the first person from the US he's ever talked to in depth, but it certainly seemed the first he ever talked politics with.

21.  People ate dog food during the war.  I walked along the local beach and all around town with 12-year-old Michael one afternoon, and he told me this.  The only thing more difficult than comprehending the massive suffering of the war (many thousand of the ghastly amputations and murders occured in the early-to-mid-90s, years before the attrocities moved  into international media attention), is comprehending why it happened.  Former US Ambassador John Hirsch has written an excellent book about it, with the upshot being that initial populist rhetoric, fueled by international instability and intra-statal aggression (such as Charles Taylor's desire to cause problems for the standing Sierra Leonean government and finance various military operations with diamonds) = chaos = long war.  However, everyone either seems to have a different slant on it, or not want to talk about it.  While life has moved on (and is moving on at an increasing rate! as foreign investment acculumates), the effects are not hard to find, in the amputees begging for change, the increased number of orphans, or the entire amputee camp on the outskirts of town.  However, on any given day in almost any part of Freetown, if dropped in from space, you would not know there had been a war here, if not for

22.  the more-than 10,000 UN peacekeeping troops who remain in the country.  Happily, they have been bored from lack of activity for a few years now.  They are slated to withdraw this fall, which will be an interesting test.

23.  Cell phones are everywhere.  Western clothing (usually second-handed) is everywhere.  Countless sports jerseys - some faceitious (you would think the world's most popular basketball team was "Hard Knocks") and some just old (e.g., a Charles Smith Knicks jersey, for those in the know).  There is a lot of local dance music and rap.  The most popular song when I got here?  "Corruption" - a condemnation of governmental corruption saying "e do so" or "enough is enough".

24.  Per capita GNP is about $200.  There are large slums and shanty towns with open sewers.  All trash in Freetown is incinerated - a huge human health risk that is decades from being addressed.  Life expectancy at birth is 45 and the infant mortality rate (14%) ws recently highest in the world.

25.  Foregin help is real and needed.  Even the most cynical I've met here have not told me otherwise.  Sierra Leone was created of external influences, then nearly destroyed by them, and now will only recover and hopefully thrive in cooperation with them.  The cooperative approach is key, and spreading, as agencies and funders realize that they way we provide help matters just as much as the help we are trying to provide.  Most international organizations here are working to nationalize their staff (ie, shift from internationals to Sierra Leoneans), build the capacity of local institutions through collaboration and training, and provide aid with a particular eye toward the empowerment of women.  By all accounts these efforts are making a difference.  The challenges here are as enormous as could face a population, and there are still corruptions of the international aid system (such as refugees sneaking repeatedly back over the border to! receive aid again and again), but as the post-war stabilization and recuperation stage transitions into development, there is some hope that attempts to help are on the right path - because unlike colonialism and unlike early independence, two sides are now attempting to work together as equals for the first time.

As for me, I am encouraged enough by the number and quality of people working on humanitarian relief that I've been drawn back to the good old environment.  Compared to humanitarian initiatives, environmental ones here are best described as 'fledgling'.  But as evidenced by the lack of planning for Freetown's water, waste disposal, or natural areas, the long-term implications are huge.  One of the larger environmental organizations, the Environmental Foundation for Africa, has found they could use my services in 2 fronts: helping get together a first national conference on the environment, and, before that, helping count chimpanzees on an island down south for two weeks as part of an initative to train local students and forest staff to study and support natural populations.  In fact, this will be the first ever environmental field research carried out by female Sierra Leoneon students, on an island with one of the highest primate concentrations in all! of Africa.  And it starts tomorrow!  Hence, I'll be out of communication range (including phone) until May 1.  I promise to be safe and to let you know how it goes.

Happiest of Aprils to you and yours,
Dan

(PS - the answer to the pop quiz question is 7).

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
- 18 April 1946, Hermann Goering (1893-1946) Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the second man in the Third Reich.

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Copyright © 2004 Julie Greene