Back in Salone

Post by Lara and Kevin

26 September 2013        

We arrived back on Sierra Leonean soil yesterday, after 24 hours of travel from Freetown to Cincinnati, 7 days at home, and 24 hours of travel back—it’s been a whirlwind week for sure, and we’re incredibly grateful that we were able to make the short trip, spend time with loved ones, go to Stephen and Jen’s wedding, and have awesome things to eat and drink all the while!  We took some notes as we were traveling and wanted to point out a few of the things we noticed during our first venture outside of Sierra Leone in over 15 months:

• Potable tap water is awesome! (And it’s everywhere!)
• Electricity is, in the words of our good friend Matt Hoza, “not a big deal” across the pond. You can plug things in almost anywhere!
• High speed internet is double awesome! Also, some cities in the US have free wi-fi. For the whole city. Apparently this is not an abnormal thing. For us, it’s mind-blowing.
• It’s really hard to un-learn the Sierra Leone handshake.
• We frequently felt cold during our trip, which we expected and dealt with fairly well. What we didn’t expect was how dry we would feel. Here in Salone, we almost never go anywhere with air conditioning and the humidity hovers between around 80 and 100%, so we’re used to feeling sticky and sweaty, and we were not fans of feeling dry and papery instead.
• In the 15 months we’ve lived here, we’ve gotten used to all the dogs looking the same (they’re all some form of medium sized brownish mutt).  The variety of dogs in the US is super fun (and kinda strange).
• Lara did not get carded for buying alcohol at all on this trip, and Kevin only got carded once—apparently we look older than we used to!
• If you’ve been to sub-Saharan Africa before, you may have noticed that it has a distinct smell—a blend of palm oil, fish, smoke, sweat, maybe some exhaust fumes or burning plastic mixed in there…etc.  Well, we stopped really noticing that combination of scents months ago, but it’s apparently still there—the flight attendants on the flight from Freetown to Dakar to Brussels fragrance-bombed the airplane twice (as in, walked down the aisles spraying air freshener at the ceiling). Twice!
• Call us sheltered, but we loved the airplane food.
• We were a little worried that our family and friends would think we were too skinny after our time in Salone—especially since we published a photo or two that made us look skinnier than we actually are. Most everyone we saw was happy to see that we haven’t wasted away to nothing in our time here. Lara’s Uncle Tom put it best: “You look good.  You don’t look bad. I was afraid you would look bad”. 
• We ate as many available-in-Ohio fruits and vegetables as we could in the week we were back—strawberries, raspberries, cantaloupe, beets, bell peppers, etc.  Now that we’re back in Salone, we’re filling up on bananas, guava, “plums” (not what you think), cucumbers, and other available-in-Salone fare. 
• Believe it or not, we were more uncomfortable after about 15 hours on airplanes from Cincy to Brussels to Dakar to Freetown with our own seats and video-on-demand than after 5 hours in an un-air-conditioned mini-bus from Freetown to Bo sitting 5 people across with two backpacks piled on our laps.  I guess you get used to things.
• One thing we forgot until we were back in rural Salone was how much influence the sun has over our lives here and how little influence it has over yonder.  When the sun goes down here, we get settled in for the night; whereas, when we were spending time in Ohio and Kentucky, we didn’t always know whether it was daylight outside.