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.