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.