Post by Lara & Kevin
3rd 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 1st,
2nd, or 3rd 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.
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