Extension

To make it short and crispy:
My planned date of returning to Europe is postponed. Instead of February 6, I will now fly back to Germany March 6th, 2009. Planned return to Sweden is April 2009.

Take is as a proof how much I appreciate to be here. But I still miss u all.
Hugs, Juliane

Merry Christmas and a Wonderful New Year 2009!!

For me Christmas is usually about spending time with family and friends, catching up with thing which have been neglected throughout the years, listening to other people’s stories, watching family movies on TV, receiving Christmas cards and emails from people you like and appreciating the feeling of being at home.

This year it will be different. Sitting here in the Sierra Leonean sun (waiting for the water to start running again and being happy that the power came back after another blackout :-)) and being far away from all the people I love, it is very hard to believe that Christmas eve is coming so soon.

However, I have a wonderful time here and do not want to miss one of the experiences. Life is not necessarily a piece of a cake here and it would be a lie to say that I am not struggling. But it is definitely worth to struggle and I guess it is also worth to try, maybe to fail, but then to try again. Everyday I am facing situation I have never been into before and I have to make decisions where I am struggling heavily to figure out what is wrong and what is right. The people are just great here and they have stories to tell I had only heard from in books if any. The setting is just crazy, crazily beautiful, crazily sad, crazily encouraging and crazily discouraging sometimes.

Being a white person in a country where white is deeply connected to prosperity and wealth, working for a local NGO in a country where everyone is extremely familiar with the ‘good’ work NGOs are doing and where people are not afraid to ask for money (to put it in a polite and rather neutral way), being in a country where you can find incredible social networks, with people helping each other without asking for reimbursement, where they share their food with the dogs living on the street although they have hardly anything, is an outstanding experience. I found people I trust and who I may call friends at the end of the day. I found people telling me about their country, sharing their perspectives with me (sometimes hard to digest when it e.g. comes to female circumcision) and letting me step a bit into their lives.

However, I know that I can only be here and just deal with these things because I just have such great friends and family, always supporting me and being a great source of inspiration. Thank you for all your support in different ways, for all your love, nice words and for sure also for all the fun, parties, great time we had together during the last year(s).

It is Christmas time and I wish you all a merry Christmas wherever you are on this world. I hope you will all have people around you like and that you will have an awesome time.

Have a happy new year, full of joy, satisfaction, luck and happiness and I hope to see all of you next year and that we can party and laugh.

I miss you all very big time and sometimes I wish you could be here or I could be with you to share the experiences.

But since this is not possible, just be aware that I took tons of pictures and whoever meets me first has to suffer and go through all of them, hahaha.

All my good wishes go to Germany, Sweden, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Colombia, Brazil, Palestine, Rwanda, Kenya, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Argentina, Spain, Australia, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, Mexico, Austria and all the other places I missed but where you enjoy life!

Take care, see you soon and with a big hug
Juliane

Attempt to Catch Up

I posted pics again and again, always with the promise to give some explanations at some point, but I never found the time to really write down what happened during the last weeks. But today, it is different. It is 8am and I am sitting outside the office on a kind of covered veranda and it is raining like hell. The first time in about three weeks and the streets were flooded after a couple of minutes. Andre (my housemate) was nice enough to drop me on his way to work so I didn’t get completely wet but only slightly. A raining day here is very refreshing, the air is cooling down and no one and I mean NO ONE is on the streets. Hardly any taxis and poda-podas are around and it is as calm as I have never experienced it here before. Now I am waiting for one of my colleagues to show up and open the office for me and until then I will catch up with the last weeks.

The pics I posted first were from a workshop in Makeni. This is a two-to-three hours drive from Freetown and rather a big village / small town than a city. You can easily reach it by taxi (12 000 Leones = 3 Euros), however, you are sitting with 7 people in total in an ordinary car (3 in the front, 4 in the back). Poda-Podas cost only 10 000, but then you have even less space.

I went with Ibrahim and Michael, two of my colleague, and we were supposed to meet Joy and Bockarie in Makeni. They just started a project called “Towards the Abandonment of Harmful Traditional Practices” which aims on the abolishment of early marriage, child pregnancy and female genital cutting (FGC) or sometimes better known as female circumcision. In Sierra Leone more than 90% of the women are circumcised. The workshop was focussing on FGC and aim on exploring which reasons still exist to continue with FGC and which strategies could be used to work against it. Hence, Campaign for Good Governance in cooperation with others invited a number of traditional female practitioners, the so-called soweis, to discuss with them about their profession and how to go on in the future. It was extremely interesting and I learned a lot and I could understand that the women do not wanna lose their source of income, at the same time there is no way that I could tolerate that anyone continues with FGC. All in all, the cutters were quite open for compromises and I am quite sure, with an appropriate strategy it is possible to stop FGC in Sierra Leone step by step. Most important is the inclusion of all stakeholders; “victims”, “perpetrators”, politicians, civil society, men, international community, etc….

The other pictures are from my first Africa cooking experiences. Over the weeks I managed to get in touch with the people from the community our compound is very close to. They live there is their very simple shelters (some of them could be also found in a slum), have their small shops selling fruits, water, candies and top-up cards for cell phones. One of them is Aisha, she lives there with her two daughters Josephine and Sally and another girl, an orphan she picked from the street. The father of the children is gone, but she has her brother and a lot of friends around. However, we somehow started talking and then we agreed that she will teach how to cook in an African way. I would pay for the ingredients and also would give her some money for teaching me. She can sell what we are cooking (apart from the part we would eat by ourselves) and I like the idea that I can support her without just giving her money as the rich white girl. Anyway, the first time we made Akara, which are rice-banana-balls, fried in oil and served as fresh as possible. It was so good and I had a really nice time spending my day on the street with the people.

The week after Andre and I went on a hike organised by the British military. They meet every Saturday morning, 9am and have a hike and this time we went to a Chimp Reservation which is located at this huge lake you can see on the pictures. I guess I will return there one day and spent the day up there, it is apparently a great experience. Anyhow, at night we finally ended up dancing and it was sooooooooooooooooooo good, I really missed going out and the weekends before had been a bit too quiet for my opinion. So when we came home around 4.30am, I really felt good and there was no problem to get up at 8.30am the next morning to enjoy a nice Sunday. I walked over to Aisha and she took me with her to do the laundry and so I spent a big part of my day sitting on the rocks next to the sea helping to clean the weekly bunch of laundry. It was a great fun, they tried to teach me Krio and I have to admit that even the 7-years-old Josephine is better in doing the laundry by hand than I am.

The week went over quite quickly again without great surprises apart from Wednesday, which was the International Human Rights Day. This year the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had the 60^th anniversary and worldwide big celebrations took place – worldwide but not in Sierra Leone. Although a big march and an extensive programme at the parliament had been planned, everything got cancelled on a 12-hour-notice. The reason? The Mano River Union (Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone) plus Ivory Coast and Gambia had to meet in Freetown and hence, no march was allowed due to security reasons. Do not ask me why it is not possible to figure this kind of overlapping events before, I have just no clue. I got really angry with the entire situation and also with the civil society organisations and the government and could not understand that my colleagues just accepted it. Anyway, everything was postponed to Thursday and it was a nice march and nice speeches, although with one day delay….

Work is otherwise going alright and later the day Renée and I went to a poetry night, which was really nice. People were just reading and performing their poems and it was really, really nice. On Friday Jen (my other fellow intern) and I went to the national stadium in big excitement to see the “Who is Who”-HipHop battle between two different crews here. They were supposed to start at 8pm, we showed up at 10pm, they started shortly after midnight and unfortunately it was very lame….the sound system was not even close to be sufficient for the stadium and they did very obvious lip-singing. However, it was a nice experience to be the only white persons in a very big bunch of black people and we felt like glowing because everyone paid us attention. We felt very comfortable and just enjoyed the atmosphere despite the rather bad performance. However, we left around 1.15am and went to China House, a local club, to have some dancing pleasure until 3.30am and heard later that the big acts didn’t show up before 4.30am in the morning and the entire event went on until 6am. I guess it was the right decision to leave at some point….

On Sunday I learned how to cook groundnut stew and spent a couple of hours in the newly built community school. I gonna teach there in January but the first thing I will do is compiling a list together with the teacher (who works for free) what they most urgently need and Andre and I will get some of the stuff (stationeries, black board, etc.).

I guess now I am more or less covered all interesting things which happened in the last weeks and hope that you are all doing well, enjoying the Christmas time and looking forward for a nice break before a new year start all over again.

I am doing good here, I really like it and hope to extend my stay until March ’09. As soon as I know more, I will let you know….

Take care and a big hug to all of you! Be sure that I miss you!

Watching. Hiking. Laundring. Enjoying

Football match on a field very uphill in Wilbergforce, Freetown. It is the area where

Last Weekend and A One Day Working Trip to Makeni

Some impressions from this weekend in Freetown, Lacca (beach) and Makeni (located up country) where I went yesterday for a workshop...enjoy!
More explanations will follow tomorrow, I am running out of time today...
But I am great so far and hope that you all had a good start into december..

Things Are Just As They Are

A rather Islamic neighbourhood downtown - and the mosque is under construction, as usual

This happens to cars when even the best African mechanics give up their hopes....

In da office .....Salifu and Rashid

Renée, my dutch fellow intern

Ella and Joy

Life is turning into a routine - again! Considering how often in the previous years life had become a new adventure just to turn into rountine quite quickly afterwards, I know why I am so calmed down compared to when I went to Botswana. I just got used to it. I appreciate the new things completely capturing my mind and I also like when the daily life is just as it is and leaves you some time to think and digest you impressions and experiences.
Routine has nothing to do with boredom, don't get me wrong here but rather the feeling that you managed to adjust yourself somehow to a different way of how to live life. I also like the experience of getting to know myself better, it is always interesting to see what you are able or dare to do when there is no other option....don't get me wrong here either, I didn't do anything extremely risky, it is more that you would usually choose a more comfortable option, but this one is missing here...

Since my last post nothing extraordinary has happened, but many small things which made my heart or my mind move.....or in case of my first motor bike ride my bones shaky...it was Sunday night and I went to meet some other interns (who has been here for a while and are fairly involved in the expat community) for dinner at restaurant Mamba Point. Since my housemates did not wanna join I jumped in different shared taxis and found my way to Lumley police station from where on I was supposed to take another one uphill. Unfortunately all taxis were crowded so I ended up on a okada, the motor bikes here... I told the driver that it is my first ride and he promised to drive safely and so went on this very, very steep road and it was great....lovely panoramic view and a cool breeze - no better option after a day in the heat....

Children always make my heart move. There are so many here and most of them seem to be happy and lucky, but it always hurts me to see how they grow up and how unfair chances in life are distributed and allocated. Yes, I know, I should have known before and I knew but it something different when you see it...anyway, we have this school here next to our compound, just as big as an ordinary room, maybe 14qm (if any), and apparently funded by some Mongolian people working for the UN here in Freetown. The school is busy from the morning until 6pm (when it starts getting dark) and also on Saturdays. When I passed the building two days ago they just finished class and more than 20 children stormed out, happy to be done with the day's work. They all greeted me and one of them was brave enough to touch my skin....he realised that he is not getting white hands by then and told his friends about and within seconds I had all the children hanging on my arms and back, touching and smelling my skin and trying to rub my skin colour on their arms. When they realised that everything will remain as it is, they rather decided to tell me about school -we repeated the alphabet and they told me all their names and it was the best cheering up after a slightly annoying day I could have imagined....I guess I will ask if I can teach at the school one day....maybe on a Saturday when I am off work anyway...

Yesterday Salifu (Sierra Leone) and Renée (Netherlands) took me out for a football match in Wilbergforce, the area where Salifu lives. We had to climb very uphill and were starred at as the only white persons, but we got used to it anyway and enjoyed the second half of the game with some excellent Sierra Leoneans candies...it was really nice and we won't miss the semi-finals next week...

So as you can see life is very fine here....however, sometimes it is annoying to be white...the problem is not the colour, but tha fact that peopel will constantly mayke you recognize that you are different. That can be happen in nice or not so nice ways, but you are always kinda outstanding. And the men....well, it is nice to get attention, but sometimes it is too much....I just do not believe that people fall in true love with me just on the first sight....I am def not so adorable, hahaha. But otherwise it is fun and it is good when people know you in the city anyway...

For the weekend nothing so special is planned yet, but I guess we are going out to dance a bit and we are going to the beach, city centre and maybe church on Sunday....
And on Monday I leave to Makeni super early in the morning, since we will have a workshop there and I will accompany my colleagues on their trip....

So far for now, hope you are all doing well and please, Chels and Kathrine, watch yourself in India...I am not so worried yet but want to know you in good health!

Miss you all and wish you a wonderful first advent weekend with friends and family...

This Country is Just Stunning After All

Sweet Sweet Salone

Time is just flying by, as usual. Now it has been already a week since I was arriving in Freetown and things seem to settle down a bit. Just to give you an idea, it is 10pm, I am sitting outside on the veranda fairly covered with mosquito repellent and it is still super warm. The human need for sleep at night is not always a relief – it is quite hot when you lie down and sometimes it takes a while to fall asleep….anyhow, no need and time for complaints. I am still doing great here and I like this country a lot. And the first weekend was fantastic…..on Friday we were all just hanging out after work and I got in touch with my two housemates while on Saturday I was invited to follow them on a fishing trip far out on the water…..right, I went fishing. Although I would have preferred to release the fishes right after catching them, they were killed and served later as an apparent delicious dinner on the BBQ. We managed to get three fairly big barracudas despite of my efforts to convince the fishes not to bite….hahaha… apparently I wouldn’t be a successful fish whisperer…

The day on the water was great anyway and I was impressed how easily the local fisher could locate where they would find fish without using any kind of high-tech stuff (as we did) but being a two hours paddle ride away from the coast. We further drove along the coastline and it was interesting to see how different Freetwon looks….from rather rich areas with bigger houses it would turn into the ‘official’ part where the government but also all the big international organisations are located before eventually showing its poor face…..huge areas full of simplest shelters of which a part must be called slum.

However…at night we went to a spontaneously organised party since one of my housemates just turned 28 and wanted to celebrate…I got in touch with quite a lot other people working or interning here and it was a great start for further parties. Sunday was beach day and I met Renée from the Netherlands (she is one of my fellow interns at CGG) and we walked down to Lumley beach which is not more than 30 min from the place I am staying….I have to admit, it is quite nice to relax on the beach while knowing that there are minus degrees in Sweden right now.

Further, I managed to go to the market, changed some more money and did all these small things you usually don’t have time for during the week (or you are just too lazy).

And today was a usual work day again……am trying to get all the information together I need to come up with a proper annual report for CGG and I just feel thrown back into Botswana….slow down the speed a bit. Otherwise it is fun at work and slowly but surely I can remember names plus related faces and vice versa. After work I went for a run at the beach and hell yeah, I guess the Sierra Leoneans thought I am kinda crazy since my face must have been as purple as an aubergine….but it was fun and I will do it again soon soon. The city is still fascinating me, I figured out that instead of the official number of about 800 000 people more than 2,5 million spend their life here…just guess how crowded it is…

Next weekend I will definitely use to stroll around a bit and to advance my orientation here, since this is still a bit tricky…..so I will go downtown, yeah….

Well, I guess, that’s it for now…as you can see my post getting little shorter and less detailed, as I promised. I hope you all had a great weekend wherever you are and I hope to hear from you all quite soon. My messenger chats today guided me from Japan via Rwanda, Sweden, Switzerland eventually to Germany….it is just great to hear all these experiences but also all the stories from home far away….

I hope you’re all doing great and just take care! Miss you all!

fishing boats

This is the ferry I took when I came from the airport -
I am kind of glad that I was too tired to see how it looked then....hahaha

The first fish we got...

He knew also without a fish finder where to get the popular tuna fish....

my 'house beach'

little dirty, but actually not too bad

backside from the street our compound is located on