7th day in freetown

for most of yesterday and today it has rained and rained and rained. joshua told me the rains have set in early this year and now it will rain solidly until the end of august. i woke this morning to the deafening roar of rain slamming into tin roofs, plastic sheeted huts, palm trees and finally landing onto the muddy road below the hostel, where it made its way into red-brown torrents of water rushing down gutters & roads. while most people i could see were sheltering under road side huts and little homes, some intrepid school kids with great big umbrellas carefully picked their way among various streams running along the road. one woman carrying crates of eggs on her head had no defence against the rain and walked with a look of grim determination on her face. mangy dogs appeared to laugh at her from the comfort of their shelters.

then it was time for me to face the rain. the hardest thing is negotiating ankle deep streams of water rushing across roads while wearing flip flops. i nearly lost them several times. the boys sheltering in the huts kept shouting out ‘white gyal white gyal, how you?’ and i kept answering ‘wet’ and i could smell their ganja in the air.

we had enough money for diesel for the generator at the youth centre today which was exciting, because that equates to internet access. but the most endearing thing was watching the kids sit at the computers before the generator was turned on, practicing typing on the keyboards with all their fingers. typing messages into thin air. some are quite good, others struggle. when they get a chance to type properly, most of them type ‘my name is hawa, i am 17 years old, i live on wilberforce road and i have three sisters’. or something like that. a few actually surf the net and open yahoo accounts and all the spam mails that come with them. the computers are riddled with viruses.

i had an enjoyable conversation with precocious 12 year old jaz who gave me the low down on the differences and similarities between the three main political parties running for the presidential elections in august. according to jaz, they all promise to provide electricity, piped water and roads and so voting comes down to who you think is being the most honest. when i asked him where he learns about politics, he answered that his grandmother teaches him everything about ‘politricks’ and he wants to learn all about politricks so he can be a president one day. it seems a common ambition.

when moses turned up, we headed off to meet his friend in the military barracks in wilberforce. i met alvie sitting outside a house with some of his friends. i told him about what i’m interested in and what i’m studying and he offered to help me out by getting a group of people together who i can talk with. once practicalities were out of the way, talk descended into sierra leone politics, as always. we mostly talked about freedom of speech (and lack thereof), journalists, corruption, ‘what is a bribe’, and most of the boys seemed to agree that military dictatorship was preferable to the current system because ‘at least when the NPRC (?) overthrew APC, things got done, electricity came back’. alvie said you need someone strong, even if brutal, to get things in order and that to call the current system a ‘democracy’ is a farce anyway.

when the rain died down enough to leave, moses and i made our way to his aunty’s house in the slum behind the barracks. i love going there because it is so crammed with life. everything is done in the open. cooking, washing, cleaning, talking, arguing, playing, listening to the radio. there are washing lines strung about and clothes also hang from useless electricity wires. chickens dart about the place, hopping across sewers and narrow rocky steps to find little bits of rice. most dogs just lie about looking faintly amused. the kids there are really not shy at all. it seems they all want to hold my hand, i just don’t have enough hands for them all. and i just seemed to collect more of them as i walk along. moses and i talked to a few ladies about joining my group for talks. most of them said no. i’m not sure if they are shy or don’t like me or maybe just suspicious of white girls wanting to talk about politics. but then we talked with aunty who, although shy, agreed to help me get a women’s group together. we start tomorrow morning.

we sat outside moses aunty’s hut and i had kids draped all over me. fatu took special dibs and instructed all the other children not to touch me, i belonged to her. a bossy 6 year old. like 6 year old girls anywhere in the world. i watched moses’ sister cooking plasas. she had two coal fires going outside. one for the rice and one for the plasas. she finely chopped up potato leaves, pounded chillis (peppers) with a large mortar & pestle, added small pieces of dried fish and a she emptied a little knotted plastic bag full of bright orange palm oil into the mix. i think she added an onion and a few other things, but i’m not sure what they were. moses said every meal is plasas. they cook once a day in the afternoon and then have cold leftover rice for breakfast. moses and i shared a plate of very oily plasas. when moses finished he had orange lips. i probably did too. afterwards i gave the kids a lollipop each. they all sucked happily and when i wasn’t looking, fatu stuck her lollipop in my mouth and i briefly wondered how clean her mouth was... and then decided best not to worry.. and handed her lollipop back. it was nice to lean back on the little wooden stools and just watch life go by. moses step sister warmed some water on the coals and went to wash. some military men walked by and looked surprised to see me sitting there. moses and i talked about the relative merits of australia and england and sierra leone. and then his artist friend came by and i pulled out my laptop and showed him some banksy pictures. then they looked at my other pictures and i learned that there are no horses in sierra leone, or so they said. apparently there might be one left at family kingdom restaurant in aberdeen, all the others died. moses seemed outraged that family kingdom charged people 2000 leones (less than 50 pence) to sit on the only horse in sierra leone. i also played them ‘beds are burning’ on my laptop and we talked about aboriginal issues in australia. a few guys found it funny that we don’t have many black people in australia. they think it would be strange to be surrounded by all white people. then jyoti rang and it was late and i had to go home. reluctantly.