Salone Christmas Quirks

Post by Lara

18th December 2013

Though we won't be in Salone for the second Christmas Day of our service, we've still managed to spend a good chunk of the season in the country, and have some observations to point out regarding how Christmas is observed here in Sierra Leone.  Bear in mind, Christians make up a large minority of the population, and Christian holidays are public holidays (as are Muslim holidays).  Thus, even if the majority of the country doesn't observe the religious aspects of the holiday, they often still take part in some of the festivities of the season.  

There are around 5 Christmas songs that both Americans and Sierra Leoneans know. They include:

• Mary's Boy Child (this version. Played on repeat on local radio stations throughout the month of December)
• Joy to the World
• Silent Night
• The 12 Days of Christmas

"Christmas Caroling" happens here, but not in exactly the same way-- we had some carolers show up at our house at 9:15pm the other night, after we had already gone to bed.  Carolers basically require monetary donations if they come to your house, which makes us a little bit uncomfortable, so we hid.

Christmas mass/church services are even longer than normal Sunday services here....which means they're really, really long.  Midnight mass last year was so long that Kevin and I both fell asleep before communion and our host mother [a Catholic] pulled us out a side door on the way back from the communion line, where we promptly met our host father [a Muslim] at a local bar.

It's common in Sierra Leone to ask for Christmas gifts from people. [Actually to be fair that cultural norm exists no matter what the season or reason for the gift is.]  Our friends and acquaintances have told us for the past few weeks, "My Christmas is on you"...which basically means they're expecting us to give them something for Christmas. 


The Sierra Leonean version of "Merry Christmas" is "Compliments of the Season".  The proper response to this greeting is "I wish you the same."


Christmas traditions here include the following:

• Lighting fireworks - Fair enough-- who doesn't love fireworks?
• Eating chicken - Or, more specifically, killing and eating a chicken.  It's common to "send" chickens for people as Christmas gifts. We sent 2 chickens to our friends at AYM for their Christmas.
• Visiting family and friends - Not so much like we do though-- visiting friends generally means showing up at their house, sitting down, being served a drink, talking for a little while, then continuing to sit quietly for up to an hour before taking leave and repeating the routine at the next house.
• Having new clothes made - Tailors get really backed up around Christmas, Easter, and the various Muslim holidays. Being able to have new clothes made is a big way of "bluffing" (strutting your stuff) for the holiday.
• Shopping - Even here, the market places get crowded around Christmas time, and overloaded with toys (cheap ones made in China), perfume sets, fashionable clothes, and gift sets that are tailored to men, women, boys, and girls.

Midnight Mass in Bo

Our host sisters in their new Christmas clothes

Believe it or Not

Post by Lara & Kevin

3^rd December 2013

We've noticed that sometimes when we're talking to friends and family from home, or even from other parts of Sierra Leone, occasionally we mention something about our experience here that is surprising to the person we're talking to, even though it didn't even occur to us that it might be.  Here are some things about Sierra Leone, Peace Corps, and our lives in general that you may not realize:

Everyone here has a cell phone. Or rather, just about every adult has a phone (of course, whether we have reception is another story).  Cell phones here are all pay-as-you-go, start around $20, and if you want a new phone number you can buy a new SIM card for $0.50 or less. Charging the battery costs about $0.25 at a local charging center which usually runs on generator power. There’s a whole world of etiquette and culture around phones here that is completely different from the one back home.  For instance, if your phone is ringing, you answer it, no matter what you’re doing—sitting in class, talking to your neighbor, or even speaking in front of a crowd (Kevin once heard the cell phone ring during a presidential speech on the radio)—not kidding.  Also, if someone calls you and hangs up before you answer, this is called “flashing” and it means the person calling is out of minutes and wants you to call him or her back.  It’s considered fairly rude not to call someone back when they flash you—still, we have a lot of trouble getting out of the American mindset that it’s the caller’s responsibility to get a hold of us.

When we say Sierra Leone doesn’t have electricity, we’re lying—Really, what we mean is that most of Sierra Leone is not connected to any grid. There are a couple of different power plants that run on hydro-electric or diesel that are slowly spreading their grids to surrounding areas, but most places in the country rely on individual generators and solar panels to charge our phones and electronics, run our lights, broadcast football matches, and keep beverages at a temperature that is somewhat reminiscent of “cold”.

The standardized tests we’re preparing our students for are harder than the ones we had to take – The junior high students here take a test called the BECE (Basic Education Certificate examination) and the high school students take the WASSCE (West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination) or NVQ (National Vocational Qualification Exam).  All of these tests have a separate test for each subject (i.e. math, English, literature, history, etc) and the students take the different subject tests (each several hours long) on different days.  The BECE is definitely harder than the proficiency tests that American students take throughout schooling, and it covers way more subject areas. The WASSCE is more like an AP test than the SAT or ACT, and in order to get into college, students have to have passing scores in 5 or more subjects. Imagine if students in the US had to have a 3 or higher on 5 AP tests before they could go to college—we’d have a WHOLE LOT FEWER college students, that’s for sure.

Virtually no one cooks with electricity here – In our town, most cooking happens over wood or charcoal fires. We also have a kerosene stove that we use for small things, and in other parts of the country it’s not uncommon to cook with gas (propane I think).  Outside of Freetown, though, we don’t know anyone with a microwave or electric range [scratch that—Kevin reminded me that one house in our town, Mattru, has an electric stovetop…but the owner lives in England and even when she was here visiting I don’t know if she ever lit a generator to cook]. Even the Peace Corps staff houses have gas stoves and ovens, so the only cooking that happens with electricity is microwaving, and only in the select few places in Freetown where that’s a possibility. One result of this is that cooking food takes a lot more time here than in the developed world, as well as a lot more manpower.

Most of the rice we eat here is imported – And most of the imported rice here comes from the US, that we’ve seen.  Though I’m not positive, I think a fair amount of that rice is sent here as food aid.  It’s very odd to live in a place that is so amenable to growing certain crops such as rice and cassava, but so much of the food we consume was brought in from outside.  It also is incredibly harmful to the economy—for a lot of farmers, small-time rice farming doesn’t pay off when imported rice is available in the market at a very low price.  

English is the “official language” of Sierra Leone…but you wouldn’t know that by living here.  We knew when we did our initial searches on Sierra Leone last year that Krio is the “lingua franca” and English is the official language of instruction in schools—what we did not know until we got here was that outside of the capital and educated circles, English is only the official language on paper.  Krio is spoken nearly everywhere...until you enter areas where predominantly one tribe lives—then it’s any of a dozen local languages that is primarily spoken, and Krio fills in the gaps.  Many of our students never had classes in English before they reached junior high level, when suddenly all their classes, notes, and tests are supposed to be held in English. Needless to say, that’s not the reality…but the fact remains that those students who aren’t lucky enough to have educated parents and/or older siblings to help them along spend their first year or two of secondary school trying to figure out what’s being said around them, which puts a huge gap between those students and the ones with a basic English education.

Our guilty pleasure food is cereal and cold milk.  Yep—it’s true. When we travel to Bo and Freetown, places where we can buy steak, ice cream, cheeseburgers, Snickers bars, cold beer, real cheese, apples, and any number of other familiar foods that aren’t even close to available at our site, we almost always spring for cereal and milk. We’ve even been known to buy milk and cereal, carry them back to site, chill the milk with ice we bought across town, and pig out on Crunch Berries 52 miles from the paved highway.  That’s not to say we skip the cheeseburgers, candy bars, ice cream, and the rest—but frequently milk and cereal is our go-to choice.

Many of the things called “roads” here would not qualify as such in the US…and normal 2-wheel-drive cars can drive on them.  This is a “myth” of sorts that the guys at Top Gear have tried to dispel in their multiple episodes that take place in sub-Saharan Africa or other out-of-the-way locations—you don’t actually need 4-wheel-drive to drive on a dirt road, or a mud road, or a road with a giant chasm running down the middle.  My principal owns a RWD Mercedes-Benz sedan that he drives to school daily on roads that most Americans probably would be nervous to drive down in a Hummer.  All of the public vehicles we take from our town to Bo are 2-wheel-drive, and they get loaded down with thousands of pounds of passengers, produce, furniture, rice, palm oil, goats, chickens, and fuel, and then oh-so-slowly make their way across the 52 miles of unpaved road (average speed is 10 to 15 mph), making people get out to walk when it gets especially steep or slippery, and often popping at least one tire on the way.  Still, wi kin manej o! [We usually manage!]

We count M&Ms and Oreos. Even other PCVs seem a bit confused about this one, but it’s true—when we have goodies like M&Ms, Skittles, Oreos, and the like, we make sure to count, and inform one another, every time we eat some (as in, “Hi Kevin! How was school? By the way, I ate 4 M&Ms.”).  It might seem odd, but think about it this way—the 50 or so M&Ms sitting in our candy box right now (yes…we have a candy box) are the only 50 M&Ms for probably about a 30-mile radius, and as a married couple, we each have an even claim on the stash—so of course it’s only fair to keep track of how many each of us eats, so as to preserve our marital harmony and maximize our individual mental health.  It’s amazing how important an M&M becomes when you’re so far away from all the rest of the M&Ms in the world.

For most of our students, 50% is a “good score” on a test. This is still tough for us to wrap our minds around.  Having grown up in the American Catholic school system where below 70% is failing and 80% is a low C, we tend to think that a “good score” starts around 85 for a really hard class or closer to 90 for easier classes. Obviously that relaxed a bit in college, but we still struggle to grasp how knowing only half the material can be a good thing.  Here, above 50% is passing, and letter grades are not ascribed.  Students’ grades are ranked, though, so our better students want to be 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd in the class.  That means that a very few students look to get 90% or 95% on tests, but most of them would be happy to scrape by with a 60%, 55% or even a 50%.  Of course, this means the standard distribution for my tests here is more like a bell-shaped curve than a lot of American classes, which may be a more reasonable way to dole out grades.

It’s common knowledge here that the U.S. has 52 states.  This one is definitely odd.  Every PCV I know, plus most Americans here that I’ve talked to, have been told by someone (generally middle-aged or older) that they learned about the United States in school, and about all the 52 states.  When we respond that there are only 50 states, we’re often told that, well, we must have lost 2 states because “when I was in school, there were 52 states in America.”  When we respond again that no, there never were 52 states in the US, most people look awfully confused.  I’m really not sure what to make of this except that at some point in Africa’s history, there were 52 countries on the continent, and maybe that’s why the number 52 sticks in people’s minds?  Anyway, it seems that for a fairly sustained period of time, Sierra Leonean students were taught that the USA has 52 states—and that managed to fit into the 50% of their lessons they chose to hang on to.

All of our animals eat rice.  If you’ve been reading our blog, following our Facebook posts, or talking to us at all in the last year and a half, you probably know that we have a veritable zoo at our house.  Currently, there are 3 dogs, 2 cats (one of which is pregnant again), and 8 chickens to name a few. If you think about raising animals in rural Africa, you may realize that we can’t run down to the store and buy a bag of Purina dog chow…so what do we feed all these creatures that depend on us?  Well, rice, of course!  The chickens get a cupful of uncooked rice every morning, plus a scoop or two of cooked rice in the evening. The dogs eat basically the same meal we ate, usually the morning after. The cats need a little more meat, so we frequently boil some fish and add it to our rice for them—but the bulk of their food is the same—rice.  Our friends at a local NGO have several pets including a cat, dog, monkey, and a hawk (zoologist read: black kite), all of which eat, and get excited to eat, rice.  Among Sierra Leoneans, we’re actually considered pretty odd for actively feeding our cats—most cats here are expected to kill their own dinner every night—but we’re pretty sure their diet keeps them strong and contributed to Nimbus being able to raise 3 healthy kittens the last time around.  Other domesticated animals here include sheep and goats, who graze, monkeys, who eat a mostly vegetarian diet (read: rice and sauce) supplemented with bugs they catch, and pigs, who tend to eat just about anything they can get their teeth on. 

Broken Record

Broken Record

Post by Lara

3^rd December 2013

The other day as I made the roughly 10 minute walk from our house to our friend Millicent’s, I had the same conversation 4 times:

Them: Gbessay, good morning!

Me: Good morning!

Them: Where is Abubakar?

Me: He’s at the house.

The above conversation, and variations of it (i.e. “he’s at school, teaching, seeing as it’s a Tuesday morning and he teaches every weekday morning”) is one that we both have several times a day. We’ve even been asked where our spouse is while we’re standing next to each other.  

It turns out, we’ve had a lot of conversations a lot of times over the course of the last year and a half. Pretty much the exact same conversation.  Here are some more examples of discussions that we have a whole lot here:

Mende Niceties

Below is basically the same conversation we have with everyone we know every time we see them:

Them: Abubakar, bi waa? [Abubakar, are you up?]

Kevin: Aaaa. Bi sie. [Yes. Thank You]

Them: Bi gahun yena? [How is your body?]

Kevin: Kaye Ngewo Ma [Thanks be to God]

Them: Bi li ma mindo lo? [Where are you going?]

Kevin: Sukui lo. [School]

Them: Ke, maa lo hue! [Well, we will see again!]

Kevin: Ohhh, maa lo hue [Yes, we will see again.]

Obama!

Sierra Leoneans (and from what we can tell pretty much all Africans), as a general rule, love Obama. We had a ton of conversations of this sort during the 2012 election, when Sierra Leone was also holding a presidential election: 

Them: Where are you from?

Lara: I’m from America.

Them: I love America! The president of America is my brother, Barack Obama!

Lara: Yes.

Them: How do you see Barack Obama?

Lara: Well, I like him.

Them: Good! I like him too.

This is Africa

Before we came to Sierra Leone, we watched the movie Blood Diamond starring Leonardo Di Caprio.  While I can’t really speak to the accuracy of the storyline and I don’t remember the movie in explicit detail, one part of the film is memorable because it gets repeated to us all the time—Leo and his colleagues who are South African mercenaries have a catch phrase of sorts: TIA (This is Africa).   I can’t even begin to tell you how many people have used those three words to justify basically every idiosyncrasy of life here.  A few “TIA” topics that come up several times a week if not daily are time, weather, bribery, and eating rice.  The funny part about it is that these are not necessarily pan-African phenomena. For instance, in other African countries, beans are the staple food. In yet others, bread is.  Still, if you ask a Sierra Leonean, Africans eat rice.  Being a bigger landmass than North America, Africa obviously has a whole lot of different climates going on, but when I tell my neighbor the heat is getting to me, his immediate response is “This is Africa!”  Here are some specifics:

Time

Not only are Sierra Leoneans notoriously bad time keepers—they totally love to talk about it. This morning Lara had the following conversation with a fellow teacher:

Mr. Kallon – People here have no respect for time. When we say you should turn in your exams by this date, they wait a week before turning them in.

Lara – Yes, I’ve noticed that.

Mr. Kallon – But it’s not the same where you come from, is it?

Lara – No, not at all. 

Mr. Kallon – Well, this is Africa—here, we do not respect time.

The Weather

It’s funny to note that here in Salone there are only 2 seasons: rainy and dry, and so if you know what time of year it is you can generally predict what the weather will be like with a fair degree of accuracy. That doesn’t stop us from talking about it with everyone we know though.  Oh and by the way, if it’s under 80 degrees and/or cloudy, it’s “cold”. 

Kevin: Mr. Fofanah, how are you today?

Mr. Fofanah: Well, I’m trying to be fine, but the rain is making it difficult.

Kevin: Oh, I like the rain

Mr. Fofanah: You like the rain? Well we Africans do not like it. It is cold.

Kevin: It gets much colder where I come from.

Mr. Fofanah: Oh, that’s why you like the cold!

Bribery and Other Forms of Corruption

It’s certainly not everyone in Sierra Leone who practices corruption…but it’s common enough that you start to get used to hearing about it.  Some teachers will “sell” grades to their students, or make them do work at their homes as part of their grade.  Some police officers (as in, a lot of them) accept a few thousand Leones to look the other way when a motorbike driver isn’t wearing a helmet, or a car driver doesn’t have a license.  What we’ve found from talking to our friends and colleagues is that a lot of people, though they may not approve of these practices, feel a total lack of efficacy when it comes to fighting corruption.  Because of that and also because they know we come from somewhere different, we find ourselves discussing corruption a lot, and the conversation usually goes something like this:

Lara – So…the driver can just pay the person at this road block and then he won’t get a ticket for overloading the motorcar?

Passenger next to Lara – Yes. You see how people are in this country? Only interested in money.

Lara – Hmm. But isn’t it dangerous to have the vehicle loaded this way?

Passenger – Oh yes. This is Africa—we’re only managing.

Lara - …Ok…

Corporal Punishment

Without going into too much detail, let me just say that corporal punishment is practiced here in Sierra Leone, both at home and at school (though of course the way people discipline children varies from school to school and home to home).  When we first arrived here, we were asked all the time how we felt about corporal punishment and we tended to give answers akin to the one below:

Mr. Wai - In America, you don't beat children, do you?

Lara - Well, they're not allowed to beat children in schools, and most people don't beat their children at home. You can go to jail for beating a child.

Mr. Wai - Wow! Well, here we have stubborn African children. We have to discipline them or they won't respect us.

Lara - We discipline our children in America too-- but corporal punishment is illegal, so we discipline them in different ways, such as making them work or sending them out of school.

Mr. Wai - Oh, ok. 

Eating Rice

As I mentioned above, Sierra Leoneans eat rice as a staple food, and some of them don’t know that other countries have different staples. They also tend to be confused when we try to explain to them that there isn’t necessarily a staple food in the US—we have so much variety there.  We’ve had more conversations about rice than I’d care to count.  Here’s an example of a recent conversation with our good friend Old Meh:

Old Meh – So, I want to go back to the office and cook. 

Kevin – That’s fine—I know you must be hungry after working today.

Old Meh – Yes, man. I’m really hungry. I ate gari this morning, but you know, This is Africa, so we have to eat rice.

Kevin – Oh yes—I know if you haven’t eaten rice then it feels like you haven’t eaten at all today.

Old Meh – Exactly! So, I’m going to go now and cook my rice.

Yeah, I'd Eat That (Take 2)

Yeah, I’d Eat That (Updated post)

Post by Lara

28 November 2013

It’s been a while since the first time we wrote a “Yeah, I’d eat that” post, and we decided to revisit it, since our tastes have changed some in the interim.  When we first arrived here, we had trouble liking a lot of the foods that were offered to us, and we were more interested in finding ways to make American food in Sierra Leone than in cooking and eating more local dishes. As we’ve spent more time here, though, we’ve learned that rice really is a good base for most meals (cheap, filling, and appealing to humans, cats, dogs, chickens, and monkeys), and we really like the various sauces that are traditionally eaten with rice—cassava leaf, potato leaf, and “granat” [peanut] soup, to name the most common 3.  Beyond that, we’ve taken to liking a lot of the foods that we either didn’t enjoy at first or were too turned-off to try.  Partly, this transition was fueled by the fact that fish is the cheapest source of protein here (we’re like 20 miles from the ocean, and have a river running 200 yards from our house), and so we’ve really gotten used to it.  Before, we would get tired of everything smelling or tasting like fish (they like to sell “meat pies” in our town that are filled with about 5 hot peppers and a spoonful of fish, bones included), but now, we’re regular connoisseurs when it comes to local fish—we know the ones that we like—smoky, tender and flaky or somewhat beef-jerky-esque, and the ones that we don’t like—I still don’t eat fish heads or tails, and I tend to pick around the small ones that they throw into dishes whole.  Another piece of the puzzle is that what we were used to in the states as far as the amount of salt, MSG, pepper, or sugar is concerned has become little more than a memory, and we’ve started to get used salty, spicy, not-so-sugary food here.  Of course, we still love American food and have gotten pretty good at making it over charcoal fire—last night, we made oatmeal raisin cookies that were worthy of my grandma’s kitchen.  Mostly, what we’ve found is that what we’re willing to eat as well as what we crave has just broadened as we’ve spent more time in Salone.

               

Here’s our revised list of foods we love, those we tolerate, and those we’re still not into: 

Fish bones—unavoidable in most meals. Yeah, I’d eat that.

Chicken bones—as in, gnawing on the ends and getting as much marrow out as possible. They are so delicious. Yeah, I’d eat that.

Pizza topped with canned corn and/or canned mixed veggies—this is how our favorite restaurant in Bo (Sab’s) makes veggie pizza. Yeah, I’d eat that.

Not-even-close-to-ripe or so-overripe-they’re-about-to-burst fresh tomatoes: when it comes to tomatoes, Salone certainly isn’t up to the standards that we’re used to, having grown up in Ohio with vegetable gardens and farmer’s markets. We get so little in the way of fresh vegetables here, though, that we get excited even about the sub-sub-par tomatoes that occasionally come our way. Yeah, I’d eat that.

Oyster cakes: fried donuts with dried oysters mixed in, served with a generous dusting of cayenne pepper and raw onions: this is actually Lara’s most frequent school lunch. Also, here’s a fun fact for you—oysters provide more protein and iron per ounce than almost anything, AND they taste like fishy pencil erasers. In a good way.

Termites! Roasted in oil with a bit of salt.  We’ve tried these. They were burnt and therefore not that good, but we ate them.

Giant grasshoppers—our neighbor girls, Fatu (16) and Hawa (11) have brought a few of these to show us. Apparently they are delicious fried. No one’s been willing to share their grasshoppers with us—they’re that sought-after. But if anyone decides to fry one up and pass it to us…yeah, I’d try eating that.

Gbengbe (water frogs) – This is another edible oddity that we’ve been spared so far solely because Sierra Leoneans love them so much they don’t bother “wasting” any on us publa [white people] who won’t appreciate them.  We can’t say that feeling isn’t mutual—we frequently keep goodies to ourselves on the pretense that they won’t be appreciated if we share them. Well, if anyone finally decides we deserve a shot at gbengbe, yeah, I’d eat that.

Binch Salad: lettuce, hard-boiled egg, spaghetti, and cooked beans topped with ketchup, mayonnaise, and pepper. Binch salad is a staple food of ours in Freetown, where we buy it from P-Money at his little stand right outside the Peace Corps compound. 

Acheke: gari [pounded dried cassava root], spaghetti, lettuce, hard boiled egg, fish or chicken, and raw onion topped with ketchup, mayonnaise, and pepper.  Lara loves this, Kevin doesn’t…but he’ll eat it in a pinch. Yeah, I’d eat that.

Street meat: that’s our name for any red meat that’s grilled and sold on a skewer in public places. We’ve taken to getting street meat sandwiches when we visit Bo, and we frequently buy it from car windows at stops along the Bo-Freetown highway when we’re traveling.  Yeah, I’d eat that—with onions and cayenne pepper on bread, pretty please.

Powdered “cheese sauce” mix: Kevin’s mom Jane has so far given us 3 bags of this stuff from GFS, and we are obsessed.  Enough said.

Cassava root—raw, boiled, mashed, grilled, dried, fermented (see below)—you name it. This is the most common tuber here. Visit a farm, and the farmer may just dig one up, wash it off, and hand it to you to cham [chew].  Once a friend gave us a variety they call “candy” and it tasted like a sweet carrot—delicious! Other varieties can taste more like raw potatoes or even chalk.  Cassava root has a not-insignificant amount of arsenic in it and apparently can be poisonous if you go to town eating it (I think it’s somewhat similar to the amount of arsenic in apple seeds—a few won’t hurt you but a stomach full could be fatal).  Well, arsenic or no, we’re into cassava root. Yeah, I’d eat that.

Foo Foo: fermented cassava root shaped into balls and then boiled, served with fish or chicken “soup” poured on top.  The foo foo is kind of sour, very sticky, and fairly bland. This used to be something we ate to be polite. Now, we actively pursue it and even find ourselves craving it. Kevin’s current favorite school lunch is foo foo and fish ball soup.  Times have changed.

Fish balls:  No, not the reproductive bits of fish. These are made of fish meat spiced up with pepper and other herbs, mixed with something to hold them together, and formed into quarter-size balls. They’re cooked with “soup” and served on top of foo foo or with bread. Fish ball and bean sandwiches are sold at my school during lunch.  If you close your eyes and ignore the bones, they taste somewhat like meatballs.  Yeah, I’d eat that.

Chicken balls: Yes, the reproductive bits of chickens. Turns out, they're scrumptious...if a little awkward to talk about.

Monkey/cat/squirrel/bush rat/mystery meat: as far as we know, we still haven’t eaten monkey or cat. I say “as far as we know,” because sometimes it’s better to just not ask.  (Yeah, I’d probably eat that—as long as it’s not a monkey or cat that I was acquainted with.)

Chicken feet: These show up all over the place and we frequently see people chowing down on them—most commonly sold along with soup or sandwiches on the street. As for us? Lara tried one once—she hardly got her teeth into it before she decided it was not for her, and offered it to the nearest child who gladly accepted it. Kevin has yet to try chicken feet and is fairly sure that he will not be attempting anytime soon—everyone’s got their own standards, after all.

Guest Post-- Five Senses Unleashed in Africa by Jane Flaute

25th November 2013

Hi all!  Kevin's mom did us the honor of writing a post after their trip here in July-- enjoy!  -Lara

FIVE SENSES UNLEASHED IN AFRICA

FEEL

            Africa woke up my senses. The minute we stepped off the plane, I could feel the humidity in the air. I knew it would be very warm there, and being the rainy season, humid. My hair was damp most of the time, either from sweating, humidity, or raindrops. I was happy to discover that the rainy season was not a constant rain. During our visit, we only had rain twice; the first 6 days and the last 8 days. That being said, the rains can do some real damage. It makes the dirt roads almost impassable if not down right treacherous. Our long drive from Freetown to Mattru was better than our trip from Mattru to Bo. Of course, the day we left Mattru, it was raining, no pouring. An hour into the drive our driver was very hesitant to drive through a huge puddle or small lake. Not sure which one it was that was in the middle of the road. Only after a truck made it through did he decide to try it also. Did I mention the cozy nature of these trips? On a few trips Lara or Kevin had to sit where there were no seats, and the rest of us were simply crammed in, shoulder to shoulder, cheek to cheek. Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful. The trips on public transportation would have been a great deal worse! Unless, of course, people hanging out the back doors of a van or sitting on top of the roof would be what one would like to do. When we left Bo, we saw many people wearing winter coats. To them 75° - 80° is cold. I thought it felt great. I guess that is another reason they don’t mind getting so close when they travel.

SMELL

            I was immediately made aware of the different smells when we stopped at our first stop for lunch. I think it may be the palm oil they use, but there was a definite unyielding smell.  Along with that, there was always the charcoal or kerosene stoves cooking dinner somewhere. Most meals seemed to be fish or chicken, rice or potatoes, and hot peppers! I do not eat hot peppers because they kill my sense of taste. It was funny, but as much bread that everyone has and everywhere is sold, I never smelled the bread baking. Walking along the crowded streets in market areas, I can say I never noticed body odors. The obstacles of washing clothes and bathing never kept people from keeping themselves clean.

SIGHT

It was still dark when we took our first car ride to the ferry to get to Freetown. Kevin and Lara marveled at the few street lights we drove under. Once on the ferry, we marveled at the sunrise coming up while traveling on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Our first African meal did not look all that appetizing. The rice was not fried rice nor was it white rice. It was tastier than it looked. The cassava leaf sauce with lots of hot peppers went over the rice and did not look appetizing. The fish was most unappetizing to set eyes on. Fish heads with eyes kill an appetite. Lara mentioned how “sterile” we are here in America. She is right. The motel we stayed at in Bo would never have passed OCEA and our health department. Out of the 3 rooms we rented in Bo, my room was the best. We had a toilet seat. It looked like it was cleaned about 5 years ago, but we had a toilet seat. The walls in the bathroom were tiled, those that were still on the wall. We also got one towel for Bill and I. I wasn’t sure if it was used to mop a floor or not, but when I ventured to smell it, it did not smell dirty, so Bill used it. The 4” foam mattress we slept on looked dirtier than those I have seen in alleys to be taken to the landfill. Needless to say, I made sure the sheet  covered the mattress. I snapped a picture of the steps going up to our rooms, but it did not show how uneven these steps were. I felt drunk walking up the steps because they were so uneven. Kevin and Lara painted their wash room and the toilet room making them bright and cheery. This was good because you need all the light you could get in the toilet room to be on the look out for spiders, BIG spiders, tarantulas! I am very grateful we never had to encounter the tarantulas that they have. Usually the spiders would hide by or under the towel by the little pot we used to wash our hands with soap. It was said that they always knew when Cheryl or I went to the toilet as we always, and that is no exaggeration, always lifted the toilet seat a little and let it drop to scare away the spiders that liked to linger in the toilet. Another thing that took us by surprise were the women who were not concerned about keeping themselves covered on top. As it was explained to us, once the women have kids, it is no longer a big deal. We only saw one or two women who did not cover themselves. The bar we went to one Saturday night was located next to a stream going into the ocean. People wash their clothes and literally beat the dirt and stains out of them in these streams. Since it was their bath night, they also bathed in the stream (Note: For Africans, everyday, sometimes twice or three times, is a bath day. ~K&L). That was eye opening to say the least. Another experience we had was walking in the market in downtown Mattru. There was a boy about 10 years old who had his shirt on but no pants. I mean, no pants. One of the people near him asked him where his pants were. They were at home. Duh! Our drive from Bo to Freetown, was a beautiful scenic view of green land and green mountains. Bureh Beach was one of the most scenic beaches I have ever seen! There was very little population on the beach, probably because it a cold season for them. On one side was a mountain and a river that flowed into the ocean. On the other side were lots of coconut trees lining the beach and a small island not far from it. There were some “resorts” along the beach, but not high rise and luxurious resorts (Yet. Bureh is going to explode with tourism in the next few years. ~K&L). Bill and I slept in a mud hut which was actually very nice. Our 4” foam mattress lay atop a bed of sand. It was very comfortable until someone got up in the middle of the night and sand sprinkled all over the sheet. Kevin, Lara and Cheryl all slept in a tent inside a big tent (since it was the rainy season) on a foam mattress on the sand. They stayed dry too. Looking behind the mud hut, were three small buildings. The first one was a toilet over a big hole in the ground; but with a toilet seat! The second building was no bigger but actually had a shower head in it and you could wash under a trickle of water, as long as they pumped water into the tank on top. The third building was a latrine which I did not venture to try it out. Driving into Freetown I had to restrain myself from screaming “watch out” several times. I was sure we would get hit or hit someone with the crazy traffic flow. Freetown was lined with shops after shops and bustling with people and traffic.

TASTE

With the limited resources to cook on, I am very impressed with Lara and Kevin’s skills to make different tasty meals for us. We had gumbo, spaghetti, pizza and one of the sauces with rice. We got to experience country chicken and English chicken. English chicken was bought in the Mattru market frozen. Country chicken is fresh. One of Kevin and Lara’s neighbor gave them a gift for us while we were there, 2 live chickens. I am touched by their thoughtfulness. I chose to not participate in the butchering of these chickens. The neighbor kids around age 10 and 16 did help Kevin and Lara. I would have just been in the way (right?). Our first meal in Africa was on the ferry trip from Lungi to Freetown. Kevin and Lara brought some bread and laughing cow cheese. Laughing Cow cheese is pretty much the only cheese they get in Sierra Leone. After  driving about 3-4 hours on our trip from Freetown to Mattru, we stopped at Moyamba
Junction for lunch. Cassava leaf sauce and granut sauce served with rice along with a Fanta for me and Star Beer for others. I do not like hot and spicy and could not eat either sauce as steamed poured from my ears after one bite. I did have some rice though and a cool Fanta orange pop. Cool is the coldest I got in Africa. As I said earlier, the fish was not appetizing to look at but I did taste a bite of Bill’s fish once. It really was good, but I do not like eating around fish bones. Almost every meal we had out we were offered rice or potato fries. Sometimes the potatoes were white and sometimes they were sweet potatoes. They were always very tasty. While at Mattru market we had a Binch Akara sandwich. It was a ground bean, deep fried and put on bread, rather, a roll with hot pepes and onions. As I said, I do not eat hot peppers. My sandwich was very bland for those who live there but I still enjoyed it. One thing I realized was they do not have much sugar and sweets in Sierra Leone. That is really a very good thing. Obesity is not a problem there. We had one of their donuts or fry kek, as they are called. It was a fried cake. One without much if any sugar. What did awaken my taste buds were their fruits. Pineapples, coconuts and bananas were plentiful and delicious. We did have mango but they did not seem to be as readily available, but full of sweet flavor. Mmmm. While at the motel in Bo, breakfast was included with our room fee every day. And every day it was the same breakfast. Scrambled egg, 2 slices of fried plantain and a loaf of bread, tea or instant coffee. While at Bureh Beach, we had the same breakfast every day there, scrambled eggs, 2 large bread rolls, and laughing cow cheese, tea and instant coffee. It was tasty. When we ate out, Kevin and Lara did request that they hold off on the peppers. I can’t thank them enough for doing that.

HEARING

For not having electricity, you would think it would be very quiet in Sierra Leone. It was actually very noisy. Kevin and Lara met us at the airport in the early hours of the morning before even the roosters began to crow. Our ride to the ferry was quiet and dark. After getting off the ferry, the sun was up, the people were out selling their goods and wares, dogs were barking and horns were beeping. It was a long ride from Freetown to Mattru, about 7- 8 hours. We did not see many cars on the road and walking seemed to be the most popular transportation. By the time we got to their house, we had been traveling for over 72 hours and were exhausted. With no electric lights on after dark, we were in bed before 9. Tucking our mosquito net into the bed every night, I was lulled to sleep by the sounds of the crickets, frogs, and barking dogs. My alarm clock was the mosque a mile or so away at 5 AM starting the day with their prayer and the cock-a-doodle-doo of Kevin’s rooster named Dinner or was it General Tso (It was actually General Tso II. ~K&L)? I missed these sounds once I got back. Sitting on Kevin and Lara’s verandah and playing with Seamus the monkey provided hours of entertainment. The monkey would squeak when he was happy and to have him jump into my arms and squeak was quite amusing. With no transportation other than walking, we sat around watching the rains, catching buckets of rain to fill the large container in the wash room. For some reason, Toto’s song “Africa” kept ringing in our heads. I did notice that when it got really dark out and we knew the rain was coming, 20 seconds before it would actually rain you could hear it raining as though it was right in front of you. While sitting on the verandah, we met many of Lara and Kevin’s neighbors, friends and students. I loved listening to them speak Krio. If you listened close enough, you could understand most of what they were saying. Mende not so much. Surprisingly, in the big town of Bo, we heard bleating goats throughout the night. The most prominent sound in Bo was the motorbikes and their beeping horns. With a mosque a half mile away, morning prayer and the roosters continued to wake us each day. Spending a few days on Bureh Beach, frogs and the ocean became our new din. As we made our way back into Freetown to begin our journey home, beeping horns became a constant sound.

I have always taken trips or vacations with comfort in mind. A cruise ship spoils you with fancy restaurants, luxurious décor, rich foods of all kinds at all hours of the day or night; light, day or night. Cleanliness is always expected.

This trip was not a trip of luxury. We had many issues to get over, like learning to pour water over our head to wash up, toilets with no toilet seats, (yes, there were many toilets with no seats), getting used to the distinct smell in Africa, humidity, dampness and using flashlights after dark. Looking back, I will always cherish the time spent in Sierra Leone getting to know some of the people there, learning their culture.

Thank you Kevin and Lara for hosting us and showing us around. More importantly, showing us why you are there. You are needed and making a difference!