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.