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Yesterday, Samuel and I set out on an epic trek to visit the half of Sierra Leone that I hadn’t met while traveling with Johnny Kamara on New Year’s Day. At 10:00, we set off from the Navy Dock and caught a poda-poda, out to Waterloo, a suburb to the north (I think) of Freetown. The ride up was characteristically crowded, with people crammed into the minibus. After arriving, we stopped to visit Samuel’s parents in their home for a few minutes before going off in search of an ocada (motorcycle taxi – hop on the back and hold on!) to take us the rest of the way to the Mount Mizer church where his aunt and uncle are pastors. It was a bit of an awkward situation for me, though, because Samuel’s sister was topless as we walked in.
After a high-speed ride on the back of the ocada (Helmets? We don’t need no stinking helmets.) over red-clay and rock roads, we arrived at the compound where Leonard and Fatmata Davies are lay pastors running a small church and a primary school that serves 300 students. Mr. Davies wasn’t there when we arrived, so Fatmata, showed Samuel and me around the compound, pointing out the space that they had within the compound where they hoped to build additional classroom buildings and a larger church. They also have plans of converting the existing church building into a clinic that will be able to serve the community. A doctor (wearing a black suit and white gloves!) from Freetown also happened to be in the compound on unrelated business and we all discussed the need to establish community clinics in partnership with churches and schools so that children’s health can be monitored on an ongoing basis.
When Mr. Davies arrived, we at on benches under a tree in front of the main house, surrounded by children who kept coming up and beaming at me and reaching out to touch my white skin, something many of them had never seen before. Never before – not even during my travels in China in 2001 – have I felt so conspicuous as I did during my travels with Samuel. Not only did children keep coming up to me, but adults would greet me with a perfectly straight face, saying “Hello, white man.”
At one point, while we were walking down a road, Samuel started laughing when he heard someone inside one of the buildings call out to someone else “There’s a white man passing by.” At a later stop, one of the small children just started crying whenever she looked at me. After leaving Mt. Mizer Church, we took another ocada and another poda-poda to go off in search of another one of Samuel’s uncles (the one who is the Methodist superintendent). When we arrived at his house, he, too, was out so we visited briefly with Samuel’s aunt and promised to try and come back another day. We then walked a half mile or so to go and visit another one of Samuel’s relatives that was also – you guessed it – not there.
We then caught another poda-poda and came back to Freetown, where we spent an hour or so walking through the central market district, which made New York’s Chinatown seem spacious and uncluttered. Traffic was snarled by pedestrians who had to walk in the street because the sidewalks were completely filled with people selling every imaginable item. There were even people sitting underneath parked 18-wheeler trucks, selling things to people walking down the street.
By the time we were ready to head back to the Navy Dock, Samuel and I were starving, so we went in search of something to eat. Ever since we had been sitting at Mt. Mizer Church, my stomach had been rumbling, but I hadn’t been able to find anything other than a few groundnuts to eat that didn’t set my danger sensors jangling. To make matters even worse, mealtimes, as we know them in the US, mean little to Africans, who tend to eat when they’re hungry, not at set times and in group settings. As such, Samuel had also gotten hungry but hadn’t mentioned it, since I hadn’t mentioned that I was hungry. By the time we were back in a place where we could get something to eat, my blood sugar had tanked and I had a pounding headache, due partly to the 90something degree heat and partly to hunger. Rule number one when traveling in Africa: take more food and water with you than you think you’ll need. You’ll need it.
After getting back to the ship, I took some ibuprofen and went to bed right after dinner. Today has been a watch day for me and I managed to get laundry done. This is, of course, hand-washing in 5 gallon buckets on deck. The water we’re using for washing is from the Navy base and is a bit iffy, so we’ve got it stored in barrels on deck, with bleach added to kill whatever nasties might be living in it. Washing clothes in water with bleach isn’t such a big deal, but using bleach-water for rinsing doesn’t work nearly as well as one might hope, as the bleach leaves a slippery film on the fabric and, since we don’t have other water that we can use for laundry, we just have to make the best of it.
Due to the unrest in Kenya, the entire African banking system seems to have shut down. This is because Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya form – at least metaphorically speaking – the three legs of the African Financial Stool and, whenever one of them has a problem, it causes the entire stool to collapse. On Amistad, this has meant that the usual funding channels for the ship have also ceased to function. Since we’re paying to have bottled water delivered to the ship for cooking and drinking, this has meant that we were unable to be resupplied until we could come up with enough cash to pay our water bill. After several phone calls back and forth to Amistad’s office in New Haven, we received a big stack of bills this afternoon. I had never held such a huge pile of cash in my hands before, but some of the thrill went away when I thought about how little value such a large stack of Leones actually represents.
I had a couple surprise visitors this afternoon when Sandy Jumu, whom I had met in London, appeared on the dock and asked if he and one of his friends could come out to see the boat. I’m pleased to be able to say that I didn’t embarrass myself in my handling of the small boat and that their hour aboard AMISTAD made them both very happy. Now, the crew is settling down for the night. Once again, there’s loud music playing on shore, so I hope everyone’s got the earplugs in. I’m on watch until 03:00, so I’ll try to get this sent out this evening, as the Internet connection is a little less slow during the wee hours.
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