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.