Salone in pictures...

Here is a trip through my life in Salone, in pictures... enjoy... and thanks to all those people whose photos I have thiefed! Hehehe!

Home
My house: 29 Byrne Lane, aka the Byrne Lane fun house! My road, looking incredibly quiet...
My bed, complete with mosquito net and candle ready for night time!
The view from the balcony of my house. You can see the church. The church bell rings at 9am every Sunday and wakes us up... actually by rings, I mean clangs!
A different view from the balcony at dusk this time. This picture was taken on my last night...
Our neighbours, including little Abdul at the back who used to be terrified of me and scream and cry whenever he looked at me and is now my friend!
Work
My office... CCYA, 8 Kingharman Road.
The view from my office. You can see the Youyi building where some of the government minitries are and also a piece of wasteland...
The map in the VSO office shows all the volunteers and where they work. There were between 30 and 40 people in my time in Salone.
One of my first work trips was to do some interviewing for a piece of research with YAPAD. This pciture shows Desmond and Mohamed crouching by a river in Kono, interviewing diamond miners at work, as they didn't want to stop work to be interviewed.More interviewing, this time at a cookry/poyo hut in Bo.
My colleagues and myself at our office in Makeni after a workshop on Gender and HIV/AIDS. I always look so fluorescent white!


Freetown
This is a view across Freetown centre...
This is Murray Town Junction, where the VSO office is and where Krystle and I spent our final two weeks buying bread and sweet milk for our breakfast before heading off to job hunt in the office!
Lumley beach where much time was spent... just about 10 minutes ride from our house.
Paradise, our favourite beach bar, a bit like our local. We know EVERYONE who works there and goes regularly!
Sunset at Paradise... very rare to see the sun set right over the sea... and the groundnut seller girls (who all call me Aunty Jeneba).
Ami, the daughter of one of the beach traders. Her and her sister adopted me as their big sister and have to take some of the credit for me learning Krio as they would chat to me everyday.
Dressed as a zombie having performed the Thriller dance onstage at Paddy's in my second week in Freetown. A picture similar to this ended up on the front page of one of the newspapers here!
Krystle's farewell party (then she decided to stay!) this shows our living room full of dancing people. One of the best parties I went to, certainly the best I've ever hosted!

Out and about...
When I went up country with YAPAD in November, these pikin were at a village where we stopped to buy grapefruit and they danced to the music we were playing in the car. Children in Salone know how to dance!
Banana Island, where I spent Christmas...
A spot on Banana Island, where I said I would like to get married... unfortunately there were no takers...
Our Africana Christmas stockings, thanks Issifu!
New Years Day 2008 on top of a hill in Kabala. The picture doesn't really capture the atmosphere of being up a big hill with hundreds of other people...
Laka beach, where Simon lived and somewhere I spent a lot of time!
Bureh beach, I only went here once but it was my favourite beach, because hardly anyone else was there. This was where I famously fell over when I 'got my foot caught in the sand.'
Installing solar panels on Makeni library... or rather Simon doing that and me taking photos!
A thunderstorm in Makeni. Grant and I got caught in this on the way to Diya's house for dinner. We had to shelter in a palava hut with some friendly locals. One of them tried to talk French to me, which I could understand, but I seemed able to respond only in Krio!
Taken from the window of our guesthouse in Bo at Easter, these people were travelling on the back of the truck... people travel however they can in Salone... and enjoy!
Tiwai... beautiful and most certainly "dead pretty"!
A snapshot from the Peninsula Road. This road is amazing, goes out of Freetown across the Peninsula, photos just don't capture how awesome it is... I love this road!
Another shot from the Peninsula Road, people wash their clothes in the river and then dry them on the rocks.
A shot of Aberdeen Bridge... this bridge takes us from our house to the beach, and from our house to Paddy's! And on this occassion, from our house to the speed boat, which took us to the airport...
People
This story would not be complete without some mugshots of a few of those people who made Salone for me!

My lovely housemates... Krystle and Kate.
My CCYA sister and fellow VSO, Alona.
Grant aka Issifu, my favourite dancer in Salone and my favourite American (anywhere!)
My twin bro ABJ (my second favourite dancer in Salone!)
Diya - a wonderful, wonderful friend!

Pa Simon... there are many better pictures... but he belongs in this hammock!
Mario... who will never really understand what I say...
Yankuba, ABJ and Desmond.
My fake boyfriend, Asaf, who looked after me on many occassions and who generally had his love life ruined by the presence of me, his fake girlfriend.
And finally... four very special people who I miss very much... Gianni, Krystle, Haida and Tim.

A don kam bak

Writing my blog in the last few weeks has been hard. I’ve written a few different posts, but never published them. The right words just weren’t there. So I’m trying again, sat on a train, from London to Newcastle on a sunny May morning in England.

I flew into Heathrow on Monday morning, I felt quite numb as the plane landed, as though maybe I was dreaming. There’s probably more money in Heathrow airport than there is in the whole of Sierra Leone. And yet it’s so ugly.

The immigration official looked at my passport, and asked me if I still lived in Macclesfield. I said no, and had to stop myself from saying that I live in Sierra Leone, because I don’t live there anymore.

Personally, emotionally, socially, I’ve had the most awesome experience in Sierra Leone. But professionally it’s just not right, and when you come to a country specifically for the purpose of working, that’s a pretty big issue. So, the last few weeks have been a time of thoughts and discussions with the organisations out here and the only conclusion that we can reach is that it’s just not the right time for me to be here.

So, I took the decision to return to the UK.

And I believe that this is the right thing for me to do. Even now, as I sit and I would do anything for this train to somehow find it’s way to Freetown, I know that I did the right thing by deciding to leave.

Going to Sierra Leone has easily been the most amazing experience of my life. I met some of the most wonderful people I will ever meet and I fell in love with a place that welcomed me, accepted me and made me a part of it.

So right now, it’s a strange time for me, I will be happy to see my friends and family here, but I don’t want to be here right now, I want to be in Sierra Leone.

I don’t have a job, or anywhere to live. I’ve forgotten how to work a cash machine and I keep talking Krio in shops. I wonder why no one is staring at me in the street and I nearly cried when a friendly Somali man started chatting to me in a waiting room yesterday.

I don’t know exactly who is reading this blog. I know Diya reads it, up in Makeni, because she always knows what I’ve been up to before I get round to telling her, Mario, because he likes to remind me how self righteous I sound when I write it (and I have needed that!), Dan because he’s started one too, Caroline because she has to keep an eye on me, and Jonny and Prize and Ben because they have it on RSS feeds.

I expect that a few people who I never imagined would read it, do and I strongly suspect that some of my nearest and dearest have never ventured near it.

But, for those who have been reading, now I am back in the land of fast internet connections, I will finally post all those photos.

Wildlife in a War Zone

Tonight, I went to a special screening of a documentary about Sierra Leone’s wildlife, with a particular emphasis on how the war affected the wildlife. It was interesting for many reasons.

The first is that it made me realise how much I have started to take for granted the kind of wildlife that I see regularly here. The lizards and the birds and the bats and the insects that I see everyday that most people in the UK will just never have seen as they look out of their bedroom window. I’ve seen wild monkeys twice, how many people have done that? I should appreciate this a little more whilst I am still here to enjoy it.

The second was that I have visited myself some of the places featured in the documentary. The Tacugama chimpanzee sanctuary where I visited before Christmas, and Tiwai, the island I went to over Easter. These are beautiful places and I am incredibly lucky to be able to recognise them and see them as familiar. The third place he visits is the Lomu Mountains, not been there yet, but if all goes to plan, Kate and I will be climbing Mt Bintumani, Sierra Leone’s highest peak, sometime in the next couple of weeks. The filmmaker found evidence of baboons, buffalo and leopards, fingers crossed I might get chance to see a few of these myself. The film is a fantastic piece of evidence that shows just how beautiful and somewhat untouched Sierra Leone is. At the same time, it doesn’t hide the destruction caused by the war and you do get an idea of the condition of this country, the ruin. I would recommend that anyone watch this film should they get the chance.

But, I have to be quite critical of the way the film maker dealt with the subject of the war in Sierra Leone. This man grew up here, leaving 15 years or so ago when the war began and having lived in America since then. He was shown on camera, asking a market trader in Kenema if she knew of anyone who had been affected by the war. The civil war here lasted around 11 years. Almost half of the population were displaced as a result, not to mention the deaths, the mutilations, the sexual assaults. I have never met a Sierra Leonean who didn’t know someone who was affected by the war, most witnessed these things happening. I find it incredible that a man with a personal connection to the country would need (or in fact want, if it was purely for cinematic purposes) to ask such a question.

He also talks repeatedly about the atrocities committed by the rebels. Yes, there were atrocities committed, to man, animal, landscape, structure, process. But it is not simply a case of rebels as the bad guys.

I do not claim to understand much about the conflict here, but what I do believe is that to reduce the civil war here to a case of good vs evil is an insult to Sierra Leoneans.

Films like this one can do a lot to help raise the international profile of Sierra Leone. This is a wonderful and beautiful country, with much to offer. It is also incredibly safe, what the film did do well is to explain how successful disarmament has been here – even poachers can’t get hold of guns to shoot monkeys for bush meat! Sierra Leoneans generally, to me, seem to be committed to the idea of peace.

To truly represent Salone, we have to start understanding that this is not a country with only a civil war to blame for it’s position. Atrocities were committed during the war, no one is going to deny that, and justice and reconciliation are being sought for those things. Their impact will echo for decades, if not centuries.

But atrocities continue to be committed daily. I see their evidence in the decadence of the new Vice President’s Office, just a few minutes drive from the deprived Kroo Bay slum (link). I see it in the boss man who charges $300 for one day of work, but hasn’t paid his own staff for two months. I see it in the absence of youth parliamentary representation in a country where three quarters of people are classified ‘youth’.

We need to move away from the idea that because someone picked up a gun or a machete to defend their family, their rights, to protest against their situation, because they believed it would somehow improve their life, they are automatically evil, and that those who didn’t have the moral high ground.

I’m not saying that the war was right. I’m not saying that the people who suffered injury and trauma in the war should ever have had to go through that, or that any condition, political, environmental, economic, justifies their experience. I’m not saying that those who took arms, on either side, should relinquish responsibility for their actions.

But don’t go blaming ‘the rebels’ for every problem in Sierra Leone.

Challenge Jeneba!

OK, so many people believe that when people like me come out on voluntary placements it’s all about building schools and repairing hospitals. It isn’t, but sometimes it is. Like this weekend.

I went to Makeni (yes I go there a lot it’s my favourite place in Salone) to help my friend Simon with installing solar panels on the library. I had a 10 minute lesson in how to construct and re wire light fittings and was left to it for the rest of the day. What an experience… in between helping small children in the library with their reading “aunty aunty, what’s this one mean?” and generally causing a bit of a scene (it’s not often you walk into the library in Makeni and find a white woman fiddling with the electrics!) I managed to fit a few new lights. The guys working at the library told me that they had never seen a woman do that kind of work before. Then they thought I knew allsorts about electrics, and tried to get me to repair all kinds of appliances. Clearly I was good at convincing them I had a clue.

Anyway, there were some problems, and we didn’t get the light to work in Makeni that day, but it will do after a bit of rewiring (even I spotted that the wiring was a bit strange, which says something). And I learnt a bit about electrics. And got to visit my kids and my friends in Makeni. And buy lots of lapa.

We also had a lovely evening with Simon’s colleague Foday, who drove us to Makeni and his brother who invited us to eat dinner with them on Saturday night. Delicious food and great company… washed down with the best poyo in Salone.

So a good weekend all round.

Easter Monkeys

We had a five day holiday for Easter, as there was a Muslim holiday on Thursday, so we decided to take advantage of our long weekend and take a road trip. So, myself, Krystle, Kate, Patrick, Simon and Gianni headed to Tiwai a nature reserve on the in the south of Salone, in the district of Pujehun. Tiwai means ‘big island’ in Mende and it literally is a big island in the Moa River. The island is uninhabited, but the EFA (Environmental Foundation for Africa) have set up a wildlife reserve, so you can camp in the bush and go for forest walks etc.

Tiwai is easily one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been, and incredibly peaceful. It was the kind of place where seeing people on the landscape just looked wrong. You just don’t find that sort of untouched landscape in the UK.

On Easter Sunday morning we woke at 7 and went on a forest walk. We saw many monkeys of different types, mainly in the trees, but also one on the ground. It was amazing. We also saw all kinds of birds and butterflies and insects and lizards. There were some fantastically old trees, with roots that I literally had to climb over. No Easter bunnies though. And no Easter eggs this year, although somehow without the commercial Easter stuff surrounding me, I never even thought about that until yesterday.

One of the big issues in Sierra Leone is roads. Most of the roads are pretty bad, which makes travelling around hard and long work. However, the road to Bo, which we travelled along, is starting to be redone and it’s easy to see what a difference it will make to industry and to life in Sierra Leone to get the road network repaired and give transport infrastructure a chance to improve. There are so many places where people are isolated, they don’t own vehicles and they have to take any chance to grab a lift to the nearest town, sitting in the back of a truck or on the roof of a poda poda. The picture below shows some people we saw in Bo travelling with their furniture on the back of a lorry. We travelled six in a hilux, with me and Krystle sharing the front seat. It wasn’t always that comfortable, but at least we were inside the car!

I have some pictures to post, but the connection is slow right now so I'll post them seperately later...

Someone shoot me, I’m turning into a feminist

Last week, my entire organisation took a trip to our extension office in Makeni to engage in a workshop concerning Gender, HIV and AIDS. This was organised by my fellow VSO volunteer, Alona, who also works there as a gender advisor.

The workshop was fascinating, not only because of the different information that was presented to us, but also because of what the associated discussions revealed to me about some of the views that are ingrained within society here.

We had a quite heated discussion on some of the issues surrounding the treatment of women, gender based violence, womens position in society and in the family and the relationships between women and men. I have to admit, and I’m not proud of this, but I did get angry. I found that my colleagues would say one thing, say what was considered progressive, but then the underlying view, the humour, the jokes, would reveal a different view altogether. It upset me, more I think than I ever expected it to, to hear women discussed in such a way, so openly.

Of course, the week wasn’t all work. We managed to fit in a trip to Apex with some of my friends from Makeni and of course my lovely colleagues. I stayed the weekend, had some quality time with Yankuba discussing football hooliganism, with Grant eating peanut butter cookies (girl scout ones no less) and talking the meaning of life, lapa shopping with Diya, watching James successfully highjack one of Sierra Leone’s top artists album launches... I got caught in an amazing thunderstorm, gave an impromptu spelling lesson to the local kids and coped through an all in Krio conversation with some of the girls from COG about traditional cultural practices. I even managed a picnic under some palm trees, and I had my first experience of going to church in Sierra Leone (catholic mass none the less, another first). I made friends with the latest additions to the Makeni ex pat scene (welcome to Mackay and Rachele), caught up with my favourite ocada driver, Abass and was eaten alive by mosquitoes. All in all it was a busy few days and I was grateful to snatch a few minutes nap on the journey back with my two favourite Abu Bakarrs, ABJ and ABK.

Next week, it’s Easter, we get 3 days off and I’m going to find monkeys and hippos in the bush. Yay.

Pondering in a pia tree

Being ill gives you time to think. Especially when you’re ill in a house with no electricity and a hammock. My time being ill led to me spending many hours in the hammock on my balcony, watching the pia tree and the birds, listening to the hustle and bustle of life on Byrne Lane and thinking. Thinking about all kinds of things, from how to get the pias down from the tree (I’m going to climb it!) to how I ended up living in a house with a pia tree anyway.

Before I came here, VSO sent me on various training courses to prepare me for life in the developing world. Unsurprisingly, one of them was about development. Now, on the YfD scheme, there are a lot of people who had studied development academically. I felt a little bit out of my depth at times, having never done that kind of academic study. Looking back, I think that gave me something of an advantage. I didn’t have expectations or preconceptions. I was ready to just take Sierra Leone as I found it.

What it did do though, was make me really think about what development means. It also made me question whether I should come here at all.

I never answered that question.

I came anyway.

I don’t regret that for one second.

But I still haven’t answered that question…

I sat on the beach a couple of weeks ago with a good friend of mine, eating grilled fish and looking out at a starry sky over the Atlantic Ocean. “How can this be the least developed country in the world?” we said.

I think this everyday. I’m here to help Salone develop. But develop into what?

Right now, I spend my weekends on beautiful, empty, unspoiled beaches. I met a man recently who had come to investigate the possibilities of building a hotel resort up the peninsula. Simon and I lied. We told him that the best beaches were before York. We don’t want tourists coming to invade our relaxed weekends. But maybe Salone needs it.

I spend my days and nights talking and laughing with an assortment of people. In the absence of TV, it’s amazing the hours you can spend discussing all number of things. As a result my friendships here are richer and deeper. But maybe Salone needs TV, electricity, improved communications methods.

Children can’t all go to school, and the ones who do go, no one can guarantee what they will be taught. People don’t have enough to eat, 75% live below the $2 per day threshold. In the UK we complain about having to wait to see a doctor, but we have 230 physicians to every 100,000 people. In Sierra Leone, we have 3. Running water, electricity and shelter are taken for granted back home. Here they are luxuries.

Sierra Leone needs to develop. That is true. Sierra Leone needs people, like me, to come here and help it to develop? For me, the answer to that changes everyday.

I doubt I will see much obvious change in the development of Sierra Leone in my remaining 7 months here. I am certain that should I come back in 7 years, I will see some. In 27 years, hopefully more.

Maybe they will ruin the isolated beaches, and everyone will be watching TV and, God forbid, there might even be a McDonalds or a Starbucks.

But does it matter, so long as the sick can get well, the children can learn and people have enough to eat and drink?

If development means that people start to have more access to essential services, that they live longer, eat healthier and have the freedom to pursue their dreams, then that is why I’m here. But sadly, everyday working in development, I see the rich getting richer and the poor staying exactly where they are.

My view is a simplistic one, based on just a few months of experience in this field. It will be interesting to see how my views themselves develop too…

Woof! Woof!

Dogs are everywhere (I think that’s a line from a Pulp song, Jonny please confirm?) maybe Jarvis had visited Freetown. Here there may well be more dogs than people. Actually that’s an exaggeration, but there are a lot. People don’t keep pet dogs in the same way here as they do back in the UK. Dogs generally live on the streets or in compound yards. They roam around fighting each other at night causing a lot of palava. These days I’m so used to it that I just sleep through it. Noises of people talking, music playing, goats and frogs and crickets and dogs and the constant buzz of generators are commonplace and they rarely disturb me now.

Anyway, back to the dogs. There are some really mangy dogs around, full of injuries and fleas and allsorts. But they rarely approach you (unless you’re trying to get into their compound!) and they’re very much just a part of life here. Where Simon lives there are about 6 compound dogs, that are nicer than the typical dogs you see around and they follow him when he goes out. (In fact I remind him of one of the mangier dogs, so he’s nicknamed me after him. It’s not a name I’m going to post on here, because it’s taken off quite enough with Krystle and Simon without anyone else adopting it too!)

Names are important. I was cursed (sorry mama and papa, but it’s true!) with an unusually spelt name, which means that I am obsessive about (a) people spelling my name right and (b) spelling other people’s names right. In Sierra Leone, my name has become even more important to me, but in a different kind of way.

At work here, they always called me “Jayney” and quickly this was turned into my Salone name, Jeneba. So, I am Jeneba. Jeneba Jalloh. Now, whenever I meet anyone, I introduce myself as Jeneba. The other day in the taxi, I was talking to a guy and he turned to the driver (also a Jalloh – the surname Jalloh suggests that you’re from the Fullah tribe) and said “Do they have Fullah’s in England?” he replied “No, she must be from Guinea!” I’m still chuckling from that one.

To make matters more complicated, I also get called Zainab and Yebu, which are different versions of Jeneba, when I’m in different parts of the country. That’s a lot of names to answer to!!!

But why take a Salone name (or three)? There are plenty of English names here; I have Leonean friends called Charles, Michael, Elizabeth, Florence, Daniel. My name is not difficult or unusual.

Do I introduce myself as Jeneba because I don’t want people to know my real name? Yes, in part I do. I meet a lot of people, everyone wants to know my name. Also, using my Salone name makes people laugh, starts a conversation.

Having a Salone name makes me feel a little more settled in, a little more part of this country. But in the process of being here and experiencing so many different things, it also starts to become confusing at where Jayne ends and Jeneba begins. It’s such a cliché to talk about this place changing me, but it’s true. Jeneba in Sierra Leone, is not quite the same person as Jayne who you all know back home. She’s part of a different life and a different world. And I guess the person who returns to the UK will be some sort of hybrid Jayne/Jeneba mix.

I wonder if anyone will recognise her…

Do you believe in AIDS?

My friend Greg and my bro ABJ made this film about HIV/AIDS in Sierra Leone.
Have a look at it and let me know what you think...

Living in a bubble

OK, so I’ve had my ear infection for 8 days now – in one or the other ear. It’s not much fun, firstly it hurts. Secondly, I’m almost deaf. It’s meant that I’ve had a fair bit of time of work in the last couple of weeks. Which is a bit of a nightmare given that I’m really busy right now, with quite a few deadlines coming up. But I’m getting better.

It’s strange living in this bubble not quite able to hear anyone. Just getting to work becomes a lot more stressful than normal, because social interaction is so important. The other morning I went into work just for a couple of hours. I met a lovely man, Pa Roland, who was chatting away to me, and I felt terrible because I couldn’t hear half of what he was saying to me, but neither could I make him understand that it wasn’t because I don’t speak very good krio (although to be fair it could have been) but just because I was a bit deaf.

It’s also meant that I’ve ignored a few people who’ve greeted me and I just didn’t hear. And also that I’ve given a couple of people a shock (Krystle had to check I was breathing the other morning when she couldn’t wake me up!)

However, the time at home in the hammock on my balcony, has given me a lot of time to think and reflect on my experiences here. So it’s been a pretty good experience overall in that respect. It’s very easy to go for days and days without any real alone time here. Now you all know that I’m not really one for alone time, I get pretty bored hanging out with myself for too long. That was probably one of the things I was most worried about coming here. As it turns out, the personal challenge that is spending lots of time with me has largely fallen to Krystle, who seems to have remained relatively sane as a result!

Anyhow, this is just one of those quick and random blog posts to let you all know that I am here, I am alive and thanks to all my thinking time, I have a whole host of more interesting posts to write soon…

Yesterday was my and ABJ’s birthday, although the celebrations have been going on for days before that. They comprised a mix of singing karaoke, eating, dancing, cooking, candle light, tequila and clothes. It was great fun, made all the more special by the wonderful people I got to spend them with. Una tenki!

ABJ and I share the same birthday, and therefore we are twins. Some people struggle to tell us apart. Now it’s even harder… because we have the same clothes!!! My wonderful brother had me my first Africana outfit made for my birthday, in the matching gara to his and I think it’s the most amazing gift I’ll ever be given. You can see us in the picture above (I’m on the left btw!).

I am incredibly lucky to have met such amazing people since coming to Salone. I can honestly say that since I arrived here, there has not been a single morning when I have woken up and not felt happy to be here. There has not been any time when I have wished I was back home, rather than being here. Right now I have an ear infection. I woke up this morning in a lot of pain. Krystle made all the arrangements to come with me to the doctor and got me all sorted before she went to work. Now I’m stuck in the house, my ear hurts and I feel pretty rubbish but try as hard as I can, there’s just no way I can manage to feel sorry for myself.

Of course I miss people and things. The night before my birthday I was remembering the year before, hanging out and seeing my birthday in with Ringo, Rob and Sam. I was really sad to have missed friend Alison’s wedding last week. I’d really like a bottle of brown ale (!). But there has not been a second of this experience that I would trade.

This is a wonderful country and it is a pleasure and a privilege to experience this life I have here.

Salone Food (1)

Food is a pretty important thing. Kate likes to joke that me and Krystle start thinking about our next meal just an hour or so after we finish the last one. The truth is it’s probably even sooner! I’d like to say it’s because we have to plan so much here, with having no fridge etc, and it is partly that, but also that we just like to eat! In fact, given what I eat it is a miracle that I’ve lost so much weight since getting here! I blame the heat and the dancing!!!

Salone’s most popular food is plassas, which consists of rice (what else?!) and then a sauce made with either cassava leaf, potato leaf or krin krin, lots of pepper and magi and some meat and/or fish. And of course palm oil (quite a lot of it, eh Mario?). I’m a big plassas fan and I often eat this at breakfast time from the cookry shop. Another cookry favourite is groundnut soup (which is a stew made with groundnuts (peanuts) and meat and pepper and eaten with rice.

There’s also plenty of street food in Salone that you can buy for a few block (quick conversion: 1 block = 100 leones. 6000 leones = £1). Salted plaintain chips in plastic bags are an essential when you travel up country. ‘Ice’ is some kind of frozen yoghurt type thing that you eat out of a plastic bag (a slightly less sophisticated version of yoghurt in tubes!), which we always get on the way to the beach. Bread with sweet milk, which is bread that is spread with sweetened condensed milk (real comfort food). Roast meat, usually goat meat that is fried with onions and pepper and wrapped in newspaper to take home. There are an assortment of biscuits, beniseed cakes and banana breads or fried doughnut type things that people carry round ready to sell. You can buy green bananas everywhere and orinch (oranges) that have been peeled, that you bite the top off and suck the juice from (it’s a method I have almost mastered!).

Finally, but one of my favourites, there is fry fry. We have a fry fry lady who comes to our office every lunchtime. She sells fried chicken and fish, fried plantains, binch (beans cooked with onion and pepper and oil), boiled cassava roots and fish balls. My regular lunch is fried plantain with binch and if I’m lucky, hot bread from the bakery across the street. Yum yum!

Sierra Leone is not exactly renowned for it’s cuisine, in fact a friend of mine (who will not be named here… answers on a postcard!) once commented whilst eating my (English) cooking that “this is alright really, or maybe I’ll just eat anything in Sierra Leone!” However, I’m a big fan of Salone food. In fact, it struck me whilst writing this that there is a whole host of other food that I haven’t yet mentioned, not to mention the drinks, so I’m going to call this post Salone Food (1) because I’ve got 8 months left on my placement and lots of eating still to do!

Busy bees

Makeni is a town in the north of Sierra Leone, it’s one of the biggest towns after the capital city and it’s home to a CCYA extension office and extension officer, Yankuba. I really like Makeni, so when I was offered the chance to run a workshop on research and advocacy at Diya’s organisation and then spend some time in CCYA’s operational communities around Makeni, I was delighted.
Yankuba took me to our communities on his Honda, after making sure I was well protected with my helmet on and jacket zipped up. Roads are not good in Sierra Leone, and to get to Thonkoba and Mabamba involved taking some pretty bad tracks.

In these communities, we run a few projects. We have an animal husbandry project. Participants are given goats to breed, the first time they bear a female goat, they are to pass this to someone else in the community so they can also start breeding, after this all the offspring are there own. We also have projects growing rice and cassava and groundnuts. And finally, my favourite project, the bee keeping project. Our communities keep bee hives from which they harvest honey which we then sell in Freetown. The honey is completely pure and it’s delicious, I’ve eaten quite a lot of it (paid for of course)! I’ve also designed the label for the bottles and done a fair bit of sticking of labels onto bottles, so it was great to finally meet our bees and beekeepers who start the process off!
Now, I’m scared of bees (not a fact I’ve revealed to my colleagues!) but I managed ok and I didn’t get stung. The photo above is of Yankuba and I near to the place where the hives are situated.

I learnt a lot in my time in Makeni, about how different life is in the provinces compared to the capital. This is going to really help my work here and I’ve come back from the trip much more focused and aware of the areas where I believe I can be of the most assistance to CCYA. I am here as research advisor, but it looks like my role will extend well beyond that.

Whilst in Makeni, I also caught up with the Children of God group who make the radio show that I’ve helped out with a couple of times. It was great to see them all. Grant had kept it a secret that I was coming so they were surprised to see me. I didn’t really help out all that much, although I did sit in on the show and got to press the ‘record’ button (my special job!) and then on my last day the girls gave me a plant (that’s a hair braid). I should have taken a picture really, but didn’t and it’s all gone now! I’m always sad to leave Makeni, as I love it there. But this was made slightly better by the fact that my colleague Yankuba travelled back with me and that I arrived home to find my first two letters! They took 2 months to arrive, but now we know that the post system is working, so if anyone would like to write that would be great, just ask me for the address.

Layt de!

There is a limited mains electricity supply in Freetown, and it is one of the main issues that people believe affects development in Sierra Leone. At Christmas, we were promised electricity… and eventually, it came. Although not to my house.

Most houses get electricity for a few hours each day. But not us. When all my neighbours had their lights blazing, we were still sat with candles. Then one night last week, when I was sitting in my room, reading the newspaper with my torch, the light in my room flicked on and off. I thought I was going mad. Then it happened again. I panicked, I shouted my roommate Kate, and asked her if it was happening upstairs too. No, she said, then 2 minutes later, yes, it was! Cue lots of running around flicking light switches and talking excitedly. Then there is a knock on the door, it’s Ayo, our security guard. He was just doing some checks of the circuit box, has he caused a problem. A problem? No Ayo, you legend. You’ve just fixed our electricity!

OK, so it still doesn’t work everywhere, but now, every couple of days, we get a light and a plug socket in each of mine and Kate’s rooms, lights in the lounge and on the balcony and the odd plug socket here and there. Nothing in Krystle’s room, clearly the wiring still needs some work, and we need to buy some lightbulbs. But we still get excited every time we come home and flick that switch and find light there!

For the people of Sierra Leone of course, this is not enough. An intermittent, unpredictable electricity supply is better than nothing, but it does not make the difference to health and education and industry and security and family life that would be made by a permanent supply. And it’s still only in Freetown (and a couple of big towns in the south).

For me, living without electricity for a few months has been exciting, a novelty, part of the fun. For Sierra Leone, this is one step forward.

Something about CCYA

I never write as much as I should about work on this site… so I’m going to make a conscious effort to from now on!

However, my writing isn’t up to much, and this lovely lady from VSO does it for a living so I thought why not just post a link to this… it’s a story about the work of CCYA: http://www.vsointernational.org/what-we-do/casestudies/abass_koroma.asp

I will attempt to write more about work soon. I’m working on some funding proposals and a big piece of research and I do a sideline in designing labels for bottles of honey and to be honest anything else that needs doing… I’m busy and enjoying myself. At the end of next week I’ll be travelling up country to Makeni to spend a week working at our extension office there. I’m going to be visiting some communities up there, hopefully including Abass, who is featured in the article above.

I’ve also had a few people travelling from the UK recently who’ve bought me wonderful gifts such as raisins, newspapers and chocolate (and a toilet brush, thanks Krystle!) and a couple of packages with shoes and clothes from home (thanks mum and dad!). The packages and letters that I know people have sent in the post have not yet arrived, but I live in hope…

Greetings pop pickers

OK, so I didn’t manage to say the words on the radio… but it was a show about young people and advocacy, so it’s not entirely surprising!

So, yesterday afternoon, about 2pm, my boss runs into my office and says “Jayne, you’re going on the radio tonight to talk about the state of the youth!” and so I did! We were invited to go on a show called ‘Insai Salone with Ismeal Koroma’ which is aired on CTN (www.cottontreenews.org) and is an English language show about life in Sierra Leone. I took part in a radio discussion with Femi and Desmond, two of my colleagues at YAPAD (Youth Alliance for Peace and Development) which is an organisation closely linked to CCYA and one that I work with frequently.

It was my first time on air in Sierra Leone and I really enjoyed it – I was on for an hour which is more air time than I’ve ever had in the UK! Because I was the only woman on the panel, I got asked a lot of questions about gender mainstreaming (which is not exactly the state of the youth). As my colleague Charles pointed out this morning “you are not too much a feminist” so I probably didn’t give answers that were as provocative as they’d hoped. I tried to talk about the idea that men and women experience things differently, and that this needs to be considered in all parts of life, education, health, employment – that men experience marginalisation too, but perhaps in a different way to women. I also managed to talk about CCYA and the bee keeping project, which is something that has taken up a fair bit of my time recently. Anyway, everyone seems happy with it and it looks like I’ll get the chance to go on air again sometime. So, I've been in Sierra Leone for 3 months, I'v helped to produce a radio show, I've had my photo on the front page of a newspaper and now I've been a radio panellist too. This really is the land of opportunity.

And the funniest thing? Apparently (though I didn't notice this myself) a few krio words slipped into my English! So I must be learning, small small.

The Cold North

New Years was spent in Kabala, in the North of Sierra Leone. Everyone was telling me that it was cold there. I didn’t believe them. How wrong I was! It was absolutely freezing at night and in the morning, I needed a blanket to sleep in and also long sleeves!!

We spent our New Years Eve in a nightclub with some friends, and let the new year in at 12 midnight on our watches. Five minutes later we let the new year in again when the DJ realised that he’s missed midnight, or maybe we were just on BMT. We danced round a bonfire and had a lot of fun!

The next day, as is tradition in Kabala, we climbed the hill next to the town. We took the long, easy way up, but in the midday heat, Diya and I still needed a rest at the top (and a few on the way!). As more people arrived, there must have been around two thousand people on the mountain top and it was a fantastic atmosphere. The view was awesome. The climb down later that afternoon was the ‘difficult’ route and I must have fallen at least 3 times! I have something of a reputation for always being dirty out here (it’s very dusty and I’m very white so the dirt shows up more on me…) but the state of my legs and arms was unbelievable! I would post a picture here, but I’m too embarrassed…

So, our holiday ended although I spent a couple more days in Makeni as I still had some days off work. It has been an amazing couple of weeks and really made me realise how much I love being in Sierra Leone. I’ve missed my three travelling companions in the last few days, especially Diya, whom I seem never to run out of things to talk about with!

I’m really excited to explore more of the country and of the West Africa too, and hopefully some of the other trips we are planning will come off, Liberia, Guinea and Senegal are top of the list at the moment, but we will see what happens…