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!