A day in the life...

I was asked to write this for VSO, so I thought I may as well post it on here...

My alarm goes off around 7.30am, but usually I have been woken earlier by the noises that begin once the sun rises and my neighbours start to go about their daily work. I get up and have a bucket shower and drink some water and then head to the kitchen to heat up last nights leftovers to eat for breakfast (we don’t have electricity, so we don’t have a fridge, so any food needs eating up quick!). I usually chat to my flatmate over breakfast, then we walk up to the main road to take transport to work. The walk takes about 10 minutes and we greet many of our neighbours and friends along the way. On the main road we hail a shared taxi and sometimes have to bargain with the driver to get the right price. Then my flatmate gets out at her office and I continue to mine.

I’m usually one of the first to arrive in the office and I like to sit outside the door and greet my colleagues as they arrive. Then the generator is switched on and we get to work. There is plenty for me to do in my role as research advisor, planning work or analysing data, but I also get involved in other work too, for example helping to write a proposal, or designing a leaflet or helping someone with computer skills or reviewing some work. There is a real sense of team in my organisation and we often talk through ideas as a group and everyone contributes. At some point in the morning (depending on how hungry everyone is) a few of us will head out to eat rice and plassas. Sometimes we eat in the office, but I prefer to go to the cookry and eat there, as I enjoy the break from the office and the chance to talk to different people. People usually laugh when they hear my colleagues talking to me in Krio, and they laugh even more when I try and talk back! All my colleagues speak English, but I try to encourage them to speak to me in Krio as much as possible and slowly my language is improving.

The day in the office passes quickly, there is plenty of work to do and also a lot of fun to be had. I am working with several colleagues on different projects and I really enjoy that diversity. I learn a huge amount each day, in terms of language but also about life and politics in Sierra Leone. There are many great characters in my office and we regularly get involved in debates and discussions. At first I listened quietly, but now I have been here longer I am starting to be able to join in as I understand more and my language is improving! Mid afternoon, I take a break for 10 minutes and go downstairs to sit with our office assistant and secretary and catch up with their news, which is one of my favourite parts of the day.

Work finishes at 5pm, and we head home. It can be really difficult to get transport at this time, as everyone is travelling home. Sometimes I take a poda poda, othertimes my colleague and I might walk 10 minutes down the road until we find a taxi that can take us. On the way home I might stop at a stall or at the market to pick up food for dinner or essential supplies like water and candles. I take a different route home to the one I take to work so there are different people to greet and catch up with. Greeting is a really important part of life here and one I really enjoy. It’s a very welcoming feeling to have your neighbours shouting to enquire about your day and to learn a little more about them each day.

I usually reach home by about 6, and I might try and use the last hour or so of daylight to do some chores or to read or sometimes just to sit and watch the world pass by. Then I will cook and eat dinner with my flatmates, often we will have friends and colleagues stopping by to eat with us. Later on, we might be going out to meet friends, or we might spend the evening sitting on the veranda and talking in the candlelight. Our house is often full of people coming and going, so there is lots of laughing and conversation. We never seem to run out of things to talk about!! Generally at 11 or 12 I will head to sleep under my mosquito net, I fall asleep to the sounds of dogs barking and frogs and crickets and generators whirring away, but quickly I have got used to the noise and so I get a good nights sleep ready to begin another day… There is a really relaxed pace of life here, and it always amazes me how quickly the weeks pass and the weekends come. Weekends tend to involve chores like cleaning, shopping and washing clothes, a night out dancing at Paddy’s our local nightclub and then Sunday afternoons are spent relaxing on the beach. Often we might have other VSOs visiting from Makeni or we might take a short trip ourselves, there is always something going on, so that by the time it gets to Sunday evening I’m tired and in need of a good night’s sleep ready to start it all again on Monday morning!

Ups and downs

So I’ve been here two months now, I really wish that I didn’t count the weeks like that, but it just seems to happen that way in my mind. Naturally, there have been some ups and downs since I came here, something that I was prepared for before coming here, and I think that this week I’ve had a couple of ‘downs.’ What is amazing though, is that the downs haven’t been that bad, and that is so much as a result of the people I have around me.

This week, Krystle left to go back to the UK and because she is my housemate and good friend and we spend a lot of time together, I knew I would miss her. But it’s been great that the people around me realised this and have tried to help me out. Kate and I had a ‘friend date’ which was great and we also had some people over for a Hanukah dinner which again helped me to know more people. I commented to one of my work mates that the morning was a bit lonely as I had no one to eat breakfast with. Everyday since then, I have arrived at work and gone for a breakfast of rice and plassas with a group of my colleagues. I really do work in “di CCYA fambule den” (the CCYA family). Those small things make a huge difference out here and I’m really grateful for them. This weekend, I have a whole host of people who have offered to come and collect me to go to Paddy’s as they know I can’t travel there late on my own. And Rob and Sam will be pleased to hear that I have replaced their bellies completely in my life, as I even have a couple of friends who I regularly feed (that reminds me, is anyone feeding them in my absence or are they surviving entirely on a diet of pasta, pesto and cheese?)

I’m so well looked after, and by people who have known me such a short time. It makes me sad and to be honest it makes me embarrassed, because I know, from my experience working with refugees and asylum seekers in the UK that we just don’t give people that kind of welcome back home. We don’t greet strangers in the street, we don’t go out of our way to help a new person settle in. In fact we often make people feel unwelcome.

Christmas is coming, and it should be a time when I really notice the absence of my friends, and of course, I do, and will, miss my friends a lot. It’s been more than two months since I spoke to anyone, and that makes me feel quite far away from all of your lives (so email me, call me, text me!!!). But, despite being so young in this country, being a stranger, a foreigner, a white girl, I will not be lonely. If only that were true for everyone.

Sentimental drivel and chimpanzees

Before I came here, I did warn everyone that there was a chance I would be bad at this blog lark and that it would end up just being sentimental drivel about chimpanzees. Well…last night, I went to a very strange place… it was the IMATT HQ in Sierra Leone and I went there to watch a National Geographic film documentary about the CHIMPANZEE sanctuary, Tacaguma, which is about an hour from Freetown. This evening was fun for several reasons (a) I got to watch a film on a projector. I’ve not watched anything like that for weeks (b) I like chimpanzees (c) lots of my friends were there and (d) I got to talk to some of the people who work at the chimp sanctuary and they told me all about the animals.

However, it was also a really strange night because it was like going back to England. I swear, I was looking down one of the ‘streets’ on the complex and I could have been looking at a suburban cul-de-sac with it’s streetlights and shrubs and little houses. It was a very strange experience and not one that I liked. The other absolutely insane thing is that, in a massive complex, in an international organisation, Krystle and I had to use the mens toilets because we were told there was no ladies (thank you Julian for guarding the door for us!). Gender mainstreaming failing miserably.

So, as much as I enjoyed the company, the film and the trip to ‘England’ I was very happy last night to get a lift back down the hill in the boot of my friend’s vehicle, eat some chicken soup (thank you Julian again) and head by candlelight to my bedroom for a good sleep. Sadly though, I didn’t dream about chimpanzees, but about shopping for shoes…!!!!

Party time

On Saturday, it was World Aids Day. I went with my friends Grant and Davina and took part in a march through Freetown and spent the morning listening to various speakers talk about Sierra Leone’s approach to HIV and AIDS. One of the speakers was the new president of Sierra Leone, Ernest Bai Koroma. It’s quite strange to think that I’ve been closer to the president of Sierra Leone than I have been to any prime minister in the UK. It also made me realize how little we consider HIV and AIDS in the UK. It’s shocking really that this is the first World AIDS Day event that I have attended.

In addition, on Saturday night we had a big party at my house, to say farewell to my flatmate Krystle. We borrowed a generator and so we had electricity in our house which was pretty exciting, and we had a DJ who played some great music. Lots of people came to the party, as Krystle has made many friends here, including ALL of my colleagues, which I was really proud of. It was a great party and despite a few organizational traumas, we had a lot of fun. There are pictures on my facebook site!

Krystle flies home on Monday and many of my other VSO friends will be traveling to the UK for Christmas also, so it will be a strange time. However, myself and 3 other VSO friends of mine Diya, Grant and Julian (see you have a mention now!) have plans to take a trip to Banana Island for a short break, so I will be spending Christmas Day on the beach. Can’t complain at that!

Time to get back to work now… I’m working at the moment on designing a label for the honey that is produced through a community project my organization is running. Hopefully we’ll be able to sell quite a few in the run up to Christmas to help generate some income for the beekeepers. In fact I hope none of my friends here are reading this or they are all going to guess what their Christmas presents will be!