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.