I Feel the Earth Move

 Post by Lara

26 June 2013

I was a camp counselor during the summer of 2007 and during that time I had the extreme pleasure of helping out with nocturnal camp, which included a trip to a local observatory late one night to view star clusters, nebulae, and other fun cosmic visions.  That experience got me excited about astronomy, and resulted in Kevin buying me a Night Sky Atlas and a green laser pointer (the kind you can point into the sky!) one year for my birthday.  Sadly, the hustle and bustle of life in the states meant that I only pulled out the atlas a handful of times in the years after, but it made it onto our packing list for Peace Corps.

Back before we moved to Salone, I expected that the night sky would be a bit different here than it was in Ohio where we came from.  I recall noticing some differences when I lived in Ireland for a semester in undergrad—first, that the difference between the longest and shortest day of the year is noticeably more extreme than in Ohio (when I got to Galway in January, the sun was rising around 8:40am and setting by 4:20pm, and when I left the sun was coming up around 5 am and setting around 9:20 pm).  I don’t really recall the moon and stars looking very different, but if anything I guess I would have seen fewer of the southern constellations.  So, I expected some differences in the night sky, but I didn’t really know what kind of differences I might note. 

The first thing we noticed about the night sky was that the moon has rotated—the man in the moon is kind of looking down, and the crescent moon looks like a cup.  The first few weeks we spent here, we were really off-put by the fact that the moon seemed to have jumped and turned from where it ought to be, but like most other things here, we got used to it.  Also, because city lights are just not nearly the same thing here, the lack of light pollution means that the stars are so much more visible than they were in our suburban hometown, and we can actually see pretty clearly by the light of the full moon.  We also immediately noticed that we could see constellations we’d never seen before—our favorite is Scorpius, which spends a lot of time taking up a big portion of the sky from May or June until October or so (as I recall). 

The next thing we noticed took a little longer, but became apparent as we spent time studying the Night Sky Atlas and learning the names of different constellations, stars, and planets we could see—the stars were shifting in the sky really quickly.  As in, I could look at the sky and see the Big Dipper standing on its bowl between the trees behind my house, then go inside for a few minutes or make a cup of tea and come back to the same spot, and the big dipper was now leaning over and only half-visible in our heavily-treed back yard.  I could swear that if I just sat watching the sky, I could see the stars slowly shifting.  Where we come from, those kinds of shifts happen over the course of some hours, not minutes.  It was so jarring to me that I wasn’t sure it was real.

Until—I read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is an awesome book that you should all go buy and read (I recommend the Special Illustrated Edition if you can get your hands on it).  The book’s basic goal is to give some background and context to all those “facts” we learn in school or from the media, such as the temperature of the core of the Earth or the movement of electrons in atomic orbitals, that might make us wonder how on Earth did anyone figure that out?  The book is a wonderful read—informative, witty in that British tongue-in-cheek way, and not so high-brow that it becomes boring.  Bryson managed to answer a whole lot of questions I’ve had through the years and give me what I would consider to be a respectable basic knowledge of everything from geology and paleontology to particle physics and microbiology.  It was on page 67 of the illustrated edition, in the asterisked comment at the bottom of the page, that Bill Bryson confirmed my suspicions.  “How fast you are spinning depends on where you are.  The speed of the Earth’s spin varies from something over 1,600 kilometres an hour at the equator to zero at the poles.  In London the speed is 998 kilometres an hour.” 

So, there it is—making the trek from Ohio to Sierra Leone meant increasing the speed of the Earth’s spin below me from about 777 miles per hour to a whopping 989 mph, and it’s a difference you can almost feel here.  I love sitting outside at night and taking note of the orientation of the stars, then waiting just a little while and looking back to see that Scorpius’s tail is now disappearing over the horizon.  It’s just one more very different thing I get to enjoy during my two years here.

I did a lot of web-searching in writing this post. Special thanks to timeanddate.com, Bryan Gastonguay for introducing us to Stellarium (www.stellarium.org), NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s web page (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970401c.html), Google, and of course, Bill Bryson for all the information!

This post is dedicated to my favorite bald astronomer, Jason Heaton.

Gbessay Sabi Tot! [Gbessay Knows How to “Tote”]

Post by Lara

25 June 2013

FYI- I wrote this post several months back and never got around to posting it, so the photos are a bit outdated and may have already shown up on Facebook or elsewhere. 

One thing you can’t help but notice when you first arrive in Sierra Leone (and I’d imagine most countries in Africa) is that people here really like to carry things on their heads. Not only that—they’re really good at it. Our first few days in Freetown we watched countless women and children walk by selling beni kek (sesame seed cakes), granat kek (peanut brittle), and boiled peanuts balanced on big trays on their heads. Others would walk past with big bowls on their heads selling flip-flops, clothes, and other goods. Still others would be carrying jugs of water.  This is referred to here as “toting,” and just about every Sierra Leonean we know can do it. Instead of carrying bags on their shoulders, travelers often tote their bags on their heads. They will carry firewood or freshly cut bamboo bundles on their heads coming back from the bush. One time, a friend of ours toted a bookshelf that probably weighs 80 lbs about half a mile to our house from the carpenter.  What’s even more astounding is that many of these individuals don’t have to hold what they are toting. They can even turn their heads with something balanced on top without needing to steady it. 

As early as that first week we’ve tried toting things, and we were abysmal at it at first.  My host sisters spent a good hour with me once trying to show me how to tote my water bottle. I wasn’t successful, but they assured me it was at least in part due to my slipu ia (slippery hair).  After that, I shied away from trying to tote things for the most part, until our water pump broke. 

For two weeks, we had to go to the second closest pump, which is a good 200 yards downhill from our house.  That means carrying water 200 yards uphill—not an easy feat any way you slice it. Kevin had a good time showing off his arm muscles after making 2 trips carrying two 5-gallon buckets up from the pump.  My first instinct was to just ask the neighbor girls to go fetch water for us, but after Kevin convinced me it was not cool to let an 8-year-old and a 12-year-old show me up, I decided to go fetch water with them.  We all grabbed a bucket and went down to the pump.  The girls made sure that I had a katta, a piece of cloth that you roll up and place between your head and the bucket to cushion it a bit. 

The first thing I noted about toting was that it’s actually easier to tote a heavy object than a light one. The bucket full of water, once perched right in the middle of my head, was not going anywhere.  Now all that was left was to walk uphill 200 yards and dump the water into our storage container. The first trip was easy enough until about the last 50 feet, at which point my neck started trying to remind me that the muscles supporting my head are not used to carrying an additional 40 lbs, and could I please put the bucket down soon.  I made two trips that day, and gave my neck a break for a few days. 

Since that first time, I’ve toted water occasionally, usually choosing the 5-gallon jug shown below because the small opening means I can afford to be a little shaky without spilling a whole lot.  I’ve definitely adapted to the Sierra Leonean habit of toting things instead of carrying them with my hands, though I need to us one hand to steady anything I carry.  One of my goals for my next year of Peace Corps service is to be able to tote without steadying the object with my hands-- about 13 months to go!

Olele, Musa, and Hawa toting water together-- This was Musa's first time toting. There's about 3 inches of water in his bucket.

Pay no attention to the splotches of water on my shirt-- I'm toting!

All About Water

Post by Lara

17 June 2013

Having just surpassed a year spent in Sierra Leone, I’m finally getting around to writing a post I meant to write sometime last June—this one is about water, in all the ways we encounter it here.  Please forgive any silly errors-- I may not have edited this post as well as others.

One of the first talks we got when we got off the plane in Freetown was about all the ways water could make us sick—specifically drinking untreated water.  We were provided with 1.5 L bottles of pure water immediately and reminded to only drink from these and refill them from provided filters.  One of the most difficult habits to get into was using bottled water to brush our teeth, and making sure not to swallow water that we showered with, since that is untreated.  Now after over a year in Salone, those little adjustments have become second-nature to us.

Here lies Nimbus resting behind our water filter.

The official talk on water safety taught us several interesting lessons: for instance, did you know that just about every pathogen in untreated water can be killed by boiling the water hard for just one minute? I think back to all the “boil water advisories” that went out when I lived in the states, where the CDC suggested you boil water for 10 minutes before using it, and I get a sense of the factors of safety surrounding our everyday lives in the good old US of A—here, boiling for 10 minutes is not only difficult, but it takes a lot of fuel—we’ve not had an issue with 1 minute of boiling thus far. 

Kevin buying "Binch Akara"

During our pre-service training and the first month or so that we were at site, Sierra Leone experienced a cholera outbreak that made it extra important to watch not only the water we drank but any foods we wanted to eat that may have been prepared with untreated water or exposed to flies and other disease-carriers.  Many yummy foods and drinks can have untreated water in or on them, such as sliced pineapple, ginger beer, frozen yogurt, popsicles, and pre-peeled cucumbers—we usually only eat those if we’ve prepared them ourselves.  Of course, any cooked food such as rice, “stews,” and the like are cooked long enough to kill anything that may have been lurking in the water.  Still, we  have to be careful because local cooks frequently use untreated water to rinse utensils and dishes before using them and to fluff rice and make balls out of cassava root, etc—so any food we didn’t make at home carries some risk with it. 

Beyond the risk of food-borne illnesses, water can play a role in some other illnesses as well.  First, fresh water in Africa—yes, any fresh water, even a puddle—can carry schistosomiasis, AKA blood flukes.  [For anyone who’s interested, check out the Radiolab episode on parasites. We loved it!] When we first learned this we were bound and determined to never swim or wade in fresh water in Africa, which we tried to do for a while, but it’s nigh impossible to survive rainy season in Sierra Leone without getting your feet wet, and it doesn’t really feel right asking our African companions to carry us over every giant puddle we come across.  Long story short, we’ve likely been exposed to schisto, and we are very happy that it’s PC policy to just go ahead and treat for it when we leave the country.

Much more common than blood flukes and thankfully also on the list of things Peace Corps protects us against is malaria, which is carried by mosquitoes, which need standing water to breed.  Guess how much standing water can be found during rainy season in Salone?  Answer: waaaaaay too much.  Kevin and I, though we take a malaria prophylaxis and are unlikely to get malaria ourselves, are on a constant crusade to rid our immediate surroundings of standing water (side note: mosquitoes LOVE me. They really do. So even if I’m never going to get malaria, I do my best to minimize the mosquito population in my environment so as to cut down on itchy annoyances).  This anti-standing-water campaign led Kevin to spend an afternoon not long ago digging a trench to drain the water from the pump we go to, and has also inspired us to work very hard at perfecting the gutter that runs behind our house—the faster 8 inches of water can disappear, the better! 

In addition to the standing water that pops up all over the place as the rains come more frequently, all water sources start to brim in August and sometimes don’t go down again until November or so.  The river that runs through our town becomes especially dangerous in the heaviest part of rainy season, and people drown here every year—even though many of them are experienced swimmers.  When the river is at its peak, the ferry that crosses it cannot run, and the only way to cross at our crossing is to hop into a dugout canoe, cross your fingers, and slowly make your way across by first traveling upstream a few hundred yards and then cutting over as the current carries you back downstream to the crossing.  It’s mildly terrifying, in case anyone is wondering.  On the flip side of that coin, in the driest of the dry season while the ferry is making its runs, many wells dry up at least for a time, and people have to travel further and/or resort to using not-as-clean water for their household needs. A colleague of ours had no water in her village for the better part of a month, and learned all sorts of techniques such as saving the water that she rinsed with in a big bucket and using that water to wash her dishes later.  This may seem a bit unsanitary, but when it comes to conserving water so you can drink and cook and wash yourself daily, you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.

Of course rainy season has its upsides too—for one, we can set our buckets out under the roof and watch them fill up in no time at all rather than having to walk 100 yards down the hill and back up again with full buckets; and two, rain tends to lower the temperature a bit, which is lovely because it is freaking hot in this country.  Outside of the heaviest few weeks of rainy season, we tend to make at least one trip a day to the water tap down the hill, and carry two 5-gallon buckets back up to the house for cooking, drinking, bathing, laundering, and all our household chores.  It probably goes without saying that Kevin and I are both buff as all get-out now that we’ve been doing that for nearly a year. 

Water is a really interesting aspect of life in Salone, because whether it’s scarce or plentiful it can be a problem (I want you to know that it’s incredibly difficult to resist the urge to throw in a Samuel Taylor Coleridge reference here).  Another challenge we face as foreigners living in Salone is the poor health education surrounding water and proper food-preparation techniques among our local friends and neighbors here.  We do our best to educate and sensitize those that we interact with, but cholera still exists and is still making Sierra Leoneans sick, so we have more work to do on that front. 

For any of our regular readers—do you have any requests for post topics?  Let us know in the comments section!

Not a Real Blog Post #8

Post by Lara and Kevin

10 May - 11 June 2013

 Random thoughts about life etc:

• In true form, Africa by Toto came onto the iPod while a rainstorm just opened up the sky to dump water on our little town.  Thanks again Pat for leaving your footprints all over my iPod.
• Did you know mangoes come in several varieties? So far we’ve noted “common” mangoes, big cherry, small cherry, “Laberrie,” “Shape-tone,” kerosene mangoes, “rope-rope,” and Guinea mangoes.  We like Shape-tone and big cherry best.  Kerosene mangoes, as expected, are not yummy.

Left to right: Common Mango, Big Cherry, and Shapetone

• Our new favorite thing to buy in Bo and Freetown and take home with us is ultra-pasteurized milk and a box of cereal. We buy ice to cool the milk and then eat the whole box in a sitting because if we don’t it’ll get stale really fast.  Fun fact: the days we eat milk and cereal are some of the few days that our daily intake of calcium comes from something other than fish bones.

Adam Reim is so happy with his milk shake that we found in Freetown!

• We were enthralled last week when our house was visited last weekend by a flock of Great Blue Turacos—they’re basically really pretty chicken-sized birds that eat fruits and buds from trees, usually flying from grove to grove in a group of 6 or more.  Look them up—they’re awesome!

Unfortunately this is the best picture I could get of one in the trees.

Occasionally we would have people try to sell us animals. This is a baby Turaco.

• You may or may not have noticed from the pictures we’ve posted, but both of us have lost some pounds since moving to Salone.  In a recent doctor appointment, our doctor told Kevin that he doesn’t think it’s right that the two people in our group known as the “cooks” are losing weight here. I guess we need to work on that.
• We recently came into some furniture—a couch and an armchair— by means of what I’ve decided to call “African Craigslist”.  Our friend called one day: “You said you want a couch, right? Well my friend is selling one. You can pay her the money and pay the man with the tractor to deliver it to your house”. And that’s what we did! The furniture came chugging to our house on the back of a power tiller.  I wish I took a picture.

After some exhausting work, it was great to have some nice furniture to sit in!

• We just spent 20 minutes explaining to our Sierra Leonean friends that where we used to live, we would commute 20 to 40 miles daily for our jobs—here, the 52-mile trip to Bo is pretty much always done over a weekend so you have recovery time in between trips.
• When we first moved to Sierra Leone, we were weirded out by all the strange things for sale everywhere we went. Now we embrace it. In a recent trip, Kevin bought bread, flip-flops, ginger beer, sunglasses, and a knife without leaving his seat on the bus.

In this drive thru, you can buy a pint of honey and some pineapples.

• On a related note, one of our taxi drivers in Freetown went "shopping" for a pair of white socks while driving down the road one time. He ended up looking at all the options and deciding not to buy, much to the chagrin of the boy who had run a few hundred yards alongside the car by that point.