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…