Day 17 - Easter Monday

Monday 25th April

On Easter Monday Freetown is, I'm told, usually heaving. Especially the beach. Today it was not as busy as might be expected, presumably because of the forthcoming 50th anniversary celebrations stealing Easter Monday's thunder.

Typical Easter Monday activities apparently typically involve going to the beach in your fine clothes and wandering photographers will take pictures of you. You then take the photographer's card and order the photos to be sent to you for a charge.

People in Freetown are happy to enjoy Easter Monday regardless of their religion. I don't know what it's like in the more Muslim-oriented provinces.

In fact in general people seem to have a much more liberal attitude to religion in Sierra Leone. Locals state this with pride, and it seems to be true. For example it seem to be fairly common for a Muslim and a Christian to marry.

I think I've had a moderately in-depth conversation with about four people in Sierra Leone about their religion, and each of them has changed between being a Muslim and Christian at least once in their life.

Valid reasons for changing seem to include

• When I was a child I moved in with a family who were Muslim, so I converted.


• It's easier to get a job as a teacher in Freetown if you're Christian, so I converted.


• The mosque was closer to my house than the church, so I converted.

This free and easy willingness to change religion seems to treated here as the natural consequence of a society in which there are no religious tensions. Not like the attitude back home, where I imagine that some would judge this as demonstrating a lack of genuine faith.

Days 14-16 - Trip to River Number 2

Friday 22nd April - Sunday 24th April

For the Easter weekend, Miriam (country director of EducAid) kindly decided to take me as well as some of the EducAid staff and their kids to a beach near Freetown. It's called River number 2.

It is very beautiful, as the pictures will testify when I finally get a chance to upload them and add them to the blog.

The management of the site perhaps doesn't quite exhibit the same level of competence that we might expect from a tourist resort in the developed world though. The rooms that had been booked for us were occupied when we arrived, the toilets in the room had no door on the doorway and not even any kind of covering over the doorway to give the user any privacy. Orders taken for food were often incorrectly handled or misunderstood.

I find it easier to forgive these transgressions when you learn that the outfit is essentially a not-for-profit organisation, since the profits go into a community fund that helps to improve the lives of local people.

But I'm surprised there isn't a thriving tourist industry in Sierra Leone. There has been peace for 10 years now. The beaches are beautiful. I would have expected a European hotel firm to have built a hotel on the beach and to be selling package holidays, whereas in fact this resort consists of only about 10 rooms, and they are largely occupied by development workers and local Lebanese people.

Come to think of it the tourists would have to make it through the money-grabbing airport and the roads that are so potholed that I sometimes see people lifted off their seats because of the bumps. Maybe I'm not so surprised, come to think of it!

But there did used to be a decent tourist industry in Sierra Leone before the war. Brima, the Lumley site manager for EducAid, told me he used to work in a hotel, and I think it was French-owned (certainly European anyway). So there's still hope...

Day 13 - Love and marriage

Thursday 21st April





I walked through the school today and heard, as I often do, the sound of bollywood music blaring out of someone's radio or laptop. Bollywood films are very popular here, for reasons that are not clear to me. Maybe the Lebanese community introduced them?





I have been asked more than once whether I plan to marry an Indian girl. My response that I have no particular bias for or against Indian girls is perpetually met with surprise. "Ah! But Indian girls are all very very beautiful! I want to go to India so I can walk in the streets and see all the beautiful women!" My suggestion that the attractiveness of Indian women may vary from individual to individual is met with flat denials!





Contrary to what the title of this blog post might make you think, the climax of this post won't be the revelation that I have fallen in love with and got married to someone in Sierra Leone! However people I talk to are typically surprised that I've managed to get to the grand old age of 29 without having had any children (and they're not afraid to say it - thanks folks!) Typically a man in Sierra Leone will probably have fathered a couple of kids by the time he reaches his early twenties (not that most people born in the villages know their age).





Also in the provinces it is still common for a man to take multiple wives. The site manager of EducAid Lumley told me that his grandfather had 9 wives. They would all live in one hut which was connected via a corridor to another hut where his grandfather's room was. The wives would get summoned to his room one by one according to a set rotation.




Kumba (Mohamed's girlfriend) told me that men are told they are lazy if they only have one wife. This is particularly true in the military, where it's common for a man to get a wife, and then be posted away for a few months and come back with another wife. Her father had four wives, but apparently there was a pretty good sense of harmony among the siblings and half-siblings who all viewed each other as siblings. Apparently this level of family harmonyh does not always arise.

Day 12 - Wurie and the photocopying project

Wednesday 20th April

Today it happened again that Mohamed was unavailable for part of the day. So during that time I sat down again with Wurie to look at the photocopying project. The thing that most touched me about this project was that Wurie was willing for the proceeds to go the members to fund their tertiary education, which meant that he himself would not get any financial benefit from the project.

Wurie told me his story, and since he told me it's on the EducAid website, I'm sure he won't mind me repeating it here.

He lived near Port Loko with his uncle. (I think he is an orphan) One day Miriam was returning from one of the sites to Freetown and the vehicle broke down. It was getting fixed across the road from Wurie's uncle's house, and that is how Wurie found out about EducAid. At first his cousin was hesitant about going to this school, especially since it would require a significant amount of walking to get to the school. But Wurie persuaded him. Since then Wurie went on to become something of an academic star, as far as I can gather (although Wurie was too modest to tell me this himself)

He got sponsorship to go to university in Freetown, and will soon be taking his final exams. As he spoke I realised that I was speaking to someone who, in many ways, had been transformed by EducAid from a nobody into a somebody. Having a degree in Sierra Leone is no mean feat if you start life as a poor kid in the provinces, and it warmed my heart that his natural response to having received this life-tranforming gift was to want to share it with others.

Day 11 - Secret societies and bodily mutilation

Tuesday 19th April

I thought I would use today's blog post to talk about secret societies, which are a particularly interesting aspect of Sierra Leone's culture.

Females - Bondo
Before coming to Sierra Leone, the only Sierra Leonean secret society I had heard of was Bondo. The Bondo secret society is notorious as the forum through which female genital mutilation (FGM) occurs. My gut reaction has always been to detest FGM. I read about Bondo in a book written by a woman who had been initiated into the Bondo secret society, and said that she underwent FGM, but was still very positive about Bondo. She said that it was an opportunity for her to learn about how to manage a household, how to manage her relationship with her future husband, and provided a sense of sisterhood with those who were initiated with her.

Secret societies for males
The only people I have spoken to about this so far in Sierra Leone have been male.

The process of joining a secret society for males seems to involve the following steps:

(1) Goading
People in the village where you live will have discussed this with you (it is more of a provincial phenomenon, and doesn't happen much in Freetown). These people will include your friends and family. They will probably have goaded you, telling you that you are only half a man, or you're a woman because you are not a member of a society. If you express disapproval to your parents, they are likely to tell you that you are young and don't really understand things yet, but you will appreciate it once you've joined.

(2) Agreement and Payment
You will agree and hand over a payment, which will probably involve just cash, or maybe cash + a she-goat + a chicken + etc (varies by region). Many people I have spoken to suggest that you almost certainly will agree in the end. There seems to be a sense of inevitability about this.

(3) Mutilation
You will get bodily mutilated. One pupil I was talking to told me that he was sitting in his village one day drinking palm wine with his friends. Some men arrived. Some of them had cuts in their arms with blood pouring out, another had a knife sticking out of the back of his neck, another had a knife sticking out of his belly. They took one of his friends away. He then heard his friend screaming. The screams lasted from 2pm to 6pm. He described these as deep howls coming from the core of the man's soul.

Nobody will ever tell you what sort of mutilation happens to these people. Apparently if you find out you will die - I think some secret societies are willing to kill people who find out secrets without being members of the society. Rumour has it that if you give away the secrets then parts of your body will swell up and you will die.

(4) Benefits of membership
Those who aren't members of society tell me that they are fearful of joining, and can't really see any benefits. Those who are members tell me that they get a sense of camaraderie from membership. They learn valuable skills from the society such as how to extract palm oil and how to treat your wife. Also to be successful in politics it is essential to be a member of multiple secret societies. I also gather that if you are already a successful politician or powerful figure, you can get membership with a "reduced-pain" version of the initiation ceremony, although I obviously couldn't get any more details about this (on pain of death!)


Some have told me that you don't really get forced initiations into secret societies. Others (from other parts of the country) tell me that if you say negative things about the secret society, then people will grab you one day and carry you off to perform the initiation on you. They will get the payment from your family. Once a member they can then mockingly invite you to criticise the society which you are now a member of.

Day 10 - Leadership team meeting

Monday 18th April

Yesterday evening Miriam (country director of the EducAid schools) returned from doing some work in the Congo. Today there was a day-long meeting for the leadership teams of the 5 schools of EducAid, which are in different sites in Sierra Leone.

I found out this morning that Miriam would like me to talk in this meeting, so I did so at 11am. We discussed budgeting and financial planning. I proposed changes to the approach which would give more autonomy and financial responsibility to the leadership teams of the schools.

If approved by the trustees, this will be a big step forward for those management teams, and I hope they take on this responsibility effectively.

Day 9 - Walk off the beaten track

Sunday 17th April

When you come out of the driveway for the Educaid building, people always turn right to go onto the main road. Today I went for a little wander to see what happens if I turn left.

Then road curved round and I soon reached what looked like a dead end, but to the left I saw a rocky incline which led down to an open area with some stalls. I stepped gingerly down, carefully placing my feet on safe-looking bits of ground, much as I would when hill-walking. To my right a statuesque man sat on a chair silently in the shade of tree and stared out onto the path I was walking as dogs barked around him.

When I got down I crossed a bridge, walking slowly as a woman came the other way carrying firewood on her head. Beneath the bridge I saw a stream that may have looked quite attractive if it weren't generously framed on either bank with piles of discarded rubbish.

On the other side of the bridge I followed a dirt track. A girl with wild hair who looked about 6 deep-fried sugary cakes made from rice dough. I walked past a tree in whose shade a gaggle of children started chanting when they saw me. I soon worked out that they were chanting "Lebanese! Lebanese!" I read that at some point in the twentieth century, I think after the second world war, a number of Lebanese people came to Sierra Leone for reasons of commerce. I think they are relatively rich, so it would be rare to see them in this part of Freetown, hence the children's excitement. I stopped and talked to them, much to their excitement, and then continued.

A girl walked through the streets gleefully playing with a toy car made from an old sardine tin.

From the bridge onwards, the paths were sloping up a hill, and as I got further up, I increasingly saw dilapidated half-constructed buildings and shacks made of corrugated iron or zinc. I later learned that these buildings high up the hill are often poorly constructed and attract rent as low as Le 10,000 per month (just under GBP1.50) I quite liked the view from high up the hill, but apparently the practical difficulties of getting water and fuel up the steep incline are locally considered to offset any aesthetic benefits of the location! For a living, many of these people get large stones and break them down to a useful size and sell them on for Le 1000 each (c. 15p). They live near the poverty line but were smiling and friendly as I walked through.

As I walked, many people said hello to me. One of them got talking to me and asked if I wanted to come with him to watch the Arsenal game in the nearby "cinema". I declined, but now wonder what else I would have learned if I had joined that man.