Coming Home

I try to go back to England at least twice a year, I miss my family and friends there, but I also miss England.  It is funny to me that as I have grown older, the more English I feel – I suppose thought that this has a lot to do with living in a culture so different from my own.  When I am in Sierra Leone I remember England as Hardy  or Wordsworth wrote it, the country side with its hedgerows and quaint cottages.  Although funnily enough I have never lived in rural England I remember it in summer, temperate, or I remember it in Christmas time, cold but lovely!

These are the times I try to return, summer and Christmas.  My parents live in what is probably the nicest area of London, a little village outside of Richmond-upon-Thames called Petersham.  I could only feign to live in this area myself (it is very expensive) but it has the perfect balance, it is a short train ride into central London but it has a real village feel to it.  When Thea and I went back this July we went to the Petersham Horticultural Society Flower Show, which my parents help out with.  This is serious stuff!   Members of the community put on show their vegetables, flowers, cooking and baking skills, arts and crafts, photography, knitting.  All are judged and given prizes.  I placed entries in a couple of categories and I have to say it was quite embarrassing to see my poor attempts next to the professional work there.

Decorated cakes - mine is the one with Tinkerbell, I got 'Highly Commended'

The photograpy

Jam and Lemon Curd entries

 It is a very traditional affair and they have an original Punch and Judy show (which Thea loved!)  It was really a lovely day, to me epitomizes a typical English fête and takes me right back to hazy memories of summers of my childhood.

Thea and me enjoying the Punch and Judy show.

 Going back to England this time it was very interesting for me watching Thea.  She was 22 months (1 year 10 months) when we travelled to the UK this time round and has just begun talking.  As we do not have a television at home it was funny to see her the first time standing in front of my parents TV staring at it like it was the most amazing thing!  It did not take long for her to become mildly addicted to children's TV though and every time we walked in the front door she would shout “ceebees, ceebees.”  It must be very hard if you live in the UK with kids to not just turn the TV on leaving your child engrossed to get on with your housework!  I am quite glad I don't have that option here sometimes it might prove too tempting.

Thea also had the chance to mix with other children at the Children's Centre in Ham (just down the road from my parents place.)  She does mix with children here, but not in a learning environment with toys, singing and games (early learning).  It is such an amazing resource, people in the UK are so blessed to have that, in the six weeks we were there it really helped me and I met some really lovely people there.  It was nice to meet other mothers and understand that all the things that Thea does that worry me are actually really normal!  Here, people do get support but it is with practical things like how to make appropriate food or how to wash nappies, it is sad that no one really has time for early learning and children mainly just hang around the house or with other children in the area. 

You do find though that young children here are very bright, socially, and I am sure this is because they are exposed to a lot of people from a very young age.  Emphasis here is mainly on a child's physical development though; how fast they sit up, or stand or walk.  There is little expectation for a child's academic or mental development until they start school at 4/5 years old, although many children, particularly in the towns can speak at least two of the many languages spoken in Sierra Leone.  Some of Winston's sisters can speak four different languages despite no formal education.

I love England; I love TV and going to the cinema, having a hot shower or better a bath, eating ice cream, macaroni cheese and a whole plethora of other foods not available here.  I love the temperate English summer, hay making season on my grandparents farm, South Devon, fish and chips, soap operas, other trashy TV...the list could go on forever, England is where my soul rests.  Nothing can compare though to coming home to Winston.

White Women are Crazy and Other Rumours

One of the many positives about Sierra Leone is that ‘grass roots’ community still exists and although the Nigerian film Industry threatens, that human contact (i.e. knowing your neighbours) has not been replaced with the soap opera, yet!

This, I feel is a great attribute to Sierra Leone, there is little depression here despite the fact that a lot of people have a lot of dire concerns like feeding their families.  People are supported within the community, disabled people who are not pushed to the borders of society and petty crime is often dealt with in the community too.

However it also means that people talk about each other, a LOT!  As Winston and I stand out a little because he is Sierra Leonean and I am English we are sometimes the subject of people’s speculation.  Sometimes rumours make their way back to us and are the cause of great entertainment:

I remember one incident around 2008 so Winston and I had not been living here very long; we were driving somewhere and decided to stop in a town called Masiaka to ask about buying some pigeons.  We were in the car and Winston was asking a lady about where we could find pigeons for sale, behind her stood 2 boys probably in their late teens.  These boys began to openly discuss us and one said to the other (roughly translated): “It’s all very well that he has a white woman but White women are crazy and if he so much as talks to another woman she will shoot them both, because all white women carry guns and are crazy jealous!”

Commonly in Bo we hear rumours that circulate about why we are here and the most common assumption is that Winston has been deported from England and we cannot go back together.  This, poor Winston, is exacerbated by the fact that we simply cannot afford for us both to go back on holiday so it is always me that gets to go back leaving him here looking after the business.

Winston and I worked very hard to save enough money to come and set ourselves up in Sierra Leone, we lived very frugally in a tiny studio flat in Brentford working full time and never going out for over a year!  So one of the more frustrating rumours is that I give Winston all of the money he wants and the business is solely my investment.  We do understand that there are many reasons why people would think this; extreme poverty has led many relationships being based on a financial arrangement - it couldn’t be that we actually love each other, someone in the relationship has to be gaining financially.

Sometimes I think that people like to see other people fail, in England there are celebrity magazines telling us of actors failed marriages and how much weight a certain star has gained. Television chat shows in which people expose their most embarrassing secrets are very successful.  I suppose it makes us feel better about ourselves.  Here, for the lack of magazines and talk shows, there is plenty of local gossip; about a year ago Winston and I decided to sell our car in order to fund our business venture and to save money on fuel etc.  Around Bo we were seen using the local motorbike taxis (called Ocadas) all the time and Winston would carry a bag around with him that looks like an Army issue ammunition bag.  Now, here everyone has pay-as-you-go mobile phones and the guys that sell the mobile top up travel around with bags such as the one Winston was carrying.  One day a man approached him, angry that he hadn’t received his top up, Winston’s friend Mohamed laughed and explained to him that a rumour had been circulating that we had lost all our money and Winston was selling mobile phone top up.  The rumour was exacerbated by the bag Winston was always carrying.

The rumours that initially caused the most problems for us were that Winston would be having an affair, it is almost inconceivable that a man who is perceived to have money here would not be having an affair with at least one other woman.  Once, whilst I was away Winston’s sister Marie brought food to him using an Ocada the driver gave Winston a wink as he answered the gate and still does when we see him around, whether I am present or not!  This is the cause of great amusement to us!  Another instance was when Winston was outside church talking to another of his sister’s called Musukala, another lady who attends the church came over and saw the two of them, she became very nervous and said “oh, I see that I am interrupting something” then abruptly left. 

All these things used to frustrate me and make me feel quite angry but I now realise that gossip is part of what makes us human and really as long as we know where we are and what we are doing what other people think is irrelevant after all we are not politicians!

Made in China, Dumped in Africa

Look at the electrical appliances around your home, in fact look at everything, I guarantee that about 90% of what you look at will be made in China.  It is the same here, however the difference is that the goods you have will last at least a year...here, you probably have about a day and even then when it breaks you have no consumer rights, no warranty, nothing... Our internet modem looks like the small mobile 'dongles' you get in the UK it is, obviously, made in China and overheats in approximately 5 minutes so we have to disconnect it, cool it down, and reconnect it all the time (I'm sure you can understand the frustration this causes.)  When paying the 225, 000 Leones for our month's internet subscription I asked the man about our modem to see if I could get a replacement.  He looked at me like I had asked the stupidest question possible and in fact asked me 'what do you mean?' I asked him "if I bought a modem from you and it broke in the same day..." he quickly said, before I could finish "you would have to buy a new one." ..."oh, OK" I replied, that was the end of that!


Take lamps, I mean lights, they used to used the good old hurricane lamps, you would clean the lamp, trim the wick, fill it with Kerosene, light it and away you go.  A long time ago these were English made and as far as I know pretty good quality, by the time we moved here the market was flooded with Chinese made hurricane lamps, these didn't close properly leading to the glass getting covered in soot and they would extinguish with the lightest breeze or movement .  Now you cannot find these lamps anywhere, instead they have been replaced by plastic 'LED' lamps which are quite frankly, a joke.  They are made up of a number of LED lights (the amount varies depending on the size of the lamp) and are battery powered (batteries are a another story!) They seldom work longer than a week and with no waste disposal system let alone the idea of recycling these end up littering the streets and roads of Sierra Leone.

Chinese Lanterns

This follows true for a multitude of things, the markets are full of 'things,' compact mirrors made of wafer thin glass that break in minutes, earrings, necklaces (which turn your skin green), bangles, watches, belts, clothes, underwear, flip flops, batteries that last little more than 2 hours and come apart in your hand.  Then you have large machinery, the mills, cement mixers.....the list of 'Africa grade' Chinese rubbish in Sierra Leone is endless.  That is how it seems to be, China have differently graded export goods; Europe/America grade and Africa grade.  Africa is full with Chinese flotsam.

Jewelery and toys

Hardware goods - all made in China.

Another questionable Chinese import is MSG or Monosodium glutamate for those unaware this is a chemical flavour enhancer often associated with Chinese food.  My personal experience of it is that 20 minutes after I have eaten anything containing MSG I feel like I haven't eaten for a week!  Now although there is nothing solid that says that MSG is deadly it can have some nasty side effects if used to excess, see article:


 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Health_concerns.  


Here MSG is seen as a 'super seasoning' and is used liberally - you can also use it to remove rust stains from clothes!

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) and salt are both used liberally in cooking

Now, I am not so naive as to think that the Chinese have done no good in Sierra Leone, in fact the two countries have a relationship dating back decades and the Chinese have donated and built buildings in the country, they are building a railway, they have rice research farms to find the type of rice which grow best and I am sure they do a lot of other work here but I have to question why and does it justify them using the country as a dumping ground for their own bottom grade goods?


I also have to question myself, if China were not providing these good to Sierra Leone, who would?  However, I am pretty sure that everyone would have got on ok with the old hurricane lamps.

Ginger Beer 'Salone' Style

I have not yet been able to independently make any of the international dishes here like Saki (Cassava Leaves) or Jola (Potato Leaves) (both sauces or plasas served mostly with rice.)  They are both delicious but difficult to make, I don't beat myself up about not being able to cook them yet, most girls here start cooking these dishes at around 10 years old so they have quite a head start on me.

The first thing I have been able to prepare is the local equivalent of Ginger Beer or Ginger as it is known here. When it is 35 degrees Celsius and the sun is blazing hot a really refreshing way to cool down is to drink some spicy sweet Ginger.  I am going to show how we make it here:

First, the ingredients:

Root Ginger

Limes

White Sugar

One of the essential kitchen implements here is what is called a Matowodo  and Matapencil (I state here again that these are Krio words and I am spelling them how they are said because I do not know written Krio and have no dictionary to refer to) or a mortar and pestle in English but I am sure that before I came to Sierra Leone I had never seen them this big:

Mortar or Matowodo

My friend got this for me from a village and had engraved I Love Africa and the date on it for me, this made me laugh because I know very little of Africa and have not travel anywhere else on the Continent but it was very nice of her and I haven't seen anyone else with a Matowodo quite like mine.

Moving on, you need to wash the root ginger very well in water:

Once done, put the ginger in the mortar and begin to beat it:

No tap water here so we have to buy our drinking water in packets:

Put the ginger in a sieve and dip it into the water.

Squeeze out the ginger then place it back in the mortar.  Wash and cut the limes in half adding them to the mortar and beat the ginger and limes together.

Once you have crushed the limes into the ginger sieve the mixture into the water again.  Remove the limes and beat the ginger again, repeating the process until the water has enough 'heat' (from the ginger - Sierra Leoneans love spice and many add chillies to their mixture, for me the ginger is enough.)

Add sugar to taste, for me this is a lot as I like it very sweet!  Here I put the ginger in quite small quantities into these plastic bags, because we don't have electricity much for it to get cold, it has to be in small volumes. 

I put it in the freezer as a gain lack of electricity means that for anything to get remotely cold it has to be in the freezer not the fridge.  The closer to freezing though, the better!

This is a very refreshing drink and though I have not tried it would be very nice with some Vodka and lots of ice!!

Chicken Drama

Over the last four months we have been processing Cassava (a starchy root vegetable and staple food in West Africa) into something called Gari in Winston's village, Luawa.  This involves uprooting the Cassava, grating it, pressing it and roasting it.  The end product is a dry course powder which is mixed with powedered milk, sugar and water and eaten as a snack.  We intend to sell the Gari when the price peaks.

Now, we are having to store the 45 bags of Gari that we have finished in our house.  Poor SK (Winston's youngest brother) has a bedroom full of bags of Gari...

We're pretty sure it won't fall on him as he sleeps.

So, we have a bit of a mouse problem (or 'aratta' in Krio - but they are mice not rats) in the house and we often hear them scurrying around at night.  As we don't want them munching through the gari bags, we had to take the decision to lay rat poison (sorry mum - I should state here that when my parents had mice they used 'humane' traps which just caught the mouse, my mum would then take each mouse and liberate it in the park.)

This was to be quite an operation because we have our 21 month old daughter roaming around the house putting EVERYTHING in her mouth which meant that any remnants needed to be cleared whilst Thea was still in bed.  So one evening the poison was mixed with left over rice and strategically placed around the house at night once the monster was in bed - Thea that is.

Good Quality Chinese Rat Poison.

 The following morning I had to restrain Thea in the bedroom whilst the poisoned rice (and expired mice of which there were 3) was disposed of.  This was for SK to do.

The next day Hadja (for those who have not read previous entries this is Winston's sister who lives with us) called me into the garden to show me a dead hen by the dustbin (this is a big hole in the garden in which we burn our rubbish.)  At night we shut our chickens up in their house so it was strange not only that the chicken was dead but that it was outside.  With no marks on it to suggest an attack the mystery deepened.  I went and opened the chicken house and found inside another dead hen and 4 dead chicks (I have spared you a photo of this.)

Some thinking later it clicked in my nappy brain (yes Thea is nearly two and my brain still works at about half speed!) and I asked SK how he disposed of the poisoned rice, he looked at me like I was stupid and said "I put it in the bin." Oh!  The chickens had obviously thought it was an extra meal!

After apologies, my own 5 minutes of quiet mourning and explaining to Thea who was repeating "hush chick, hush chick" (hush is what you tell someone who is ill or has hurt themselves here) but didn't seem too affected, discussions came about the camp about the consumption of the two hens.

Immediately I stated that neither Winston, Thea or I would be eating poisoned chicken but additionally before they attempted to cook any chickens they would need to find out from someone if the poison would affect the meat.  I should explain that the confusion came about because in the villages they use certain poisons in hunting and these do not affect the animals meat.

Winston returned home and said "no one in this house is eating that chicken!"  Hadja and SK were quite dejected but Abdul Rahman (next door neighbour and general odd jobs man) was delighted!

I told Abdul Rahman at this point that should he decide to eat this chicken and he got sick that he was not to come here as we have clearly warned him, with witnesses (witnesses for everything are important here!)

That evening Abdul Rahman told me that he had cooked the chickens and as he had boiled them they were "foaming like soap" and that they tasted terrible, I told him that as the chicken was laced with poison that I was not surprised.  I asked him, "did you eat it all?" a little embarrassed he said "yes", I asked, "does your stomach hurt?" to this he replied "it takes a lot to give me a stomach ache,"  "clearly" I said.

Gallus Gallus Domesticus

One of the good things about living in Sierra Leone is that I can keep Chickens, something I am sure I would not be able to do living in a flat in London, without breaching my tenancy agreement anyway!

I started about two months ago with 1 cockerel, Buddy and 5 hens.  Then hens have no names, I was under strict instructions that the chickens are for eating so not to get too attached so they are nameless.  Our compound is perfect for keeping chickens, we have a large area at the back of the house for them to forage and as the compound is fenced people cannot steal them, as they would if they got half the chance!  We had a little chicken house made for them which they all go into of their own accord at 6.30pm every night.

Our little chicken colony has now expanded and until yesterday morning we had 22 chickens in total but unfortunately the hawk swooped down and stole one of the chicks!  We plan to make a trap to catch the hawk but judging by our failure to catch the ground pig I don't know how successful that will be.  Further I don't know what we would do with the hawk should we catch it.  Everyone here will say eat it, eat it, but it just wouldn't seem right. I suppose in the UK hawks and such birds of prey are so rare it would seem like a crime to eat one.  The other option would be to keep the bird as a pet, but even then tying up a bird feels so very wrong!

It is quite therapeutic to watch the chickens. They have very distinct personalities and you can really see where the expression 'pecking order' comes from. There is a definite hierarchy.

This is Buddy, our cockerel.  He is neurotic and you will often hear his high pitched warning calls which makes all the other chickens freeze, it's like chicken musical statues!

This is my least favorite hen, she has a hold over Buddy though, he loves her and follows her everywhere.  She even led them into the house the other day sqwarking and flapping their wings, Thea got very excited!  I have voted we eat her, she leads Buddy astray and is clearly at the top of the pecking order, she pecks at the other hens and chicks!

This is my favoruite hen, when we got the chickens this one wasn't old enough to lay but even up to today she hasn't!  I couldn't understand why, I asked Mama (Winston's mum) so she showed me. We caught the hen and on her back, near her tail she had a spike (sorry no photo) almost like a feather that didn't grow properly.  This had prevented Buddy from mounting her.  We removed the spike but it must have really put him off, he won't go near her.



This was the latest hen to lay, she hatched five but only has four, it was her chick that the hawk took.

These two hens came together and are very close, the white one has two chicks and the grey speckled hen has four.  They seem to help each other in looking after their chicks.  The grey one refused to sit on her egges once they had begun to hatch so Hadja (Winston's sister, who lives with us) put her under an upturned basket with the eggs, showed her the kitchen knife and told her in Mende (their Tribal language) that if she didn't sit on the eggs she would be killed with that knife and eaten, she put the knife next to the hen.  I don't know if these chickens understand Mende but the hen sat down on the eggs until they all hatched!

These are the teenagers, they make the most noise.  There are four cockerels and two hens, the children from the 'bad' hen.

I feed the chickens rice twice a day, anything left over is eaten by these lovely  and tiny little birds.  Hadja says she wishes she could catch them all - they come at least a hundred at a time - so she could roast them, she says they're very sweet! I say no!

Thea feeding the chickens.

We have great fun with the chickens and I have to admit that sometimes they keep me sane in this crazy place.  They help me keep perspective.

Driver Troubles

Right now we own two tipper trucks (1 Scania P93 1995 & 1 Scania P94c 2000 - for those who are interested) this is our business, we hire the trucks out to people doing construction work.  For convenience the trucks are named Benedict-George and Benedict-John i.e we need a tyre for Ben-John.....  Both tippers are currently hired by a South African company,  they are growing sugar to make bio-ethanol in Makeni, a town four hours north of where we live (controversial I know, but a country's got to create revenue where it can!)

I want to tell you about our drivers, this might seem benign but I can tell you straight off we have gone through six drivers in the last three months!  Now I debated over this but have decided to change their names - despite their criminality and the fact that there is very little likelyhood that they would use the internet / know I had written about them, fair's fair and you never know I might get sued.

I am told that Sierra Leone's first president said (my written Krio is not good) "which si u dae ti cow, na dae u de eat" this translates as "where you tie your cow is where you eat."  This means that you must get what you can by any means from the place where you work because that is where you make your living.  This makes legitimate sense if you have a farm in the bush, you must try to get what you can through your own hard work.  However, this small saying seems to have legitimised workplace pilfering and is the driver behind our big driver problem.

We started out with one truck and one driver 'James,' and before we had the tipper we had a box van which he had been driving and seemed to do a good job, also we felt we had an understanding that we would pay him well and as we expanded he would benefit i.e we would pay him more.  All was well until we found out about more and more incidents in which he had lied to get extra money from us.  Further, as we spoke about the new truck coming he began to shout the odds: "I want to drive the new truck, I want a louder horn on my truck, I will be the boss of all the drivers, you should fire who I say you should fire...it became clear that power was very important to James and after the straw broke the camel's back we fired him.  The next couple of days there was a tirade of people begging for us to give James his job back which was horrible but unfortunately we had decided and we didn't fire him lightly.  It is a strange part of the culture but people do things wrong and once it is done other people come and beg for them and they 'arrange' until the person is forgiven, rehired or reinstated.  Where I come from if you do wrong and you're fired unless you go to a tribunal that's it!

In the mean time we had got our second truck and found a driver for that (Ben) who still works for us and whilst he is a bit slow he has been more honest than any of the others - well at least we haven't caught him yet!  Anyway, we also found another driver for the P93 (or Ben-George), a Mr Smith, who was recommended to us by a cousin of Winston, whom we trust.  Mr Smith was a good driver, honest and hard working but he only lasted three days....James, thwarted at having lost his job went back to Makeni where the trucks were working and began to intimate that he had 'done something' to the truck (here this means that he has done some witch craft on the vehicle.)  Mr Smith was petrified, he called us as he was leaving to  return to his home in Freetown (about 4 hours away again) to tell us he couldn't work on that truck, that we might not be 'ordinary' (by this he means that we may have protected ourselves using witchcraft) but he was a soldier in the government forces during the war and he had seen what witch craft could do, and beseides he is 'ordinary'.  He said he was afraid for his life.  So, that was that!

James continued to threaten us indirectly and directly but neither of us have suffered any ill fate yet!

After much searching and many interviews we found another driver, Spencer, Winston found him to be very eager and he was keen to start straight away.  So off he went....after about two weeks the truck had had some shaft problems (for those who are alien to trucks this is a pole that attaches the axel to the gearbox on the undercarrier - or underneath the truck) which had been remedied with the purchase of a new one..grrr very expensive!  It was Spencer and his apprentices' job to make sure that the thing was on securely, something which they failed miserably to do because it fell off in the middle of a busy town called Masiaka. This not only damaged our new shaft but caused another car to have an accident and burst it's tyre!  Following this Spencer was seen in the town by someone to whom he owed some money, he was subsequently arrested and gave the keys of our truck to the police telling them that if they called his boss (us) we would pay the money to get our truck back!!!  Well the police then held our tipper to ransom..we managed to negotiate it back by give the guys wages for the month he had worked (this was about half of the owed money.)  I know, I know, it is absolutely outrageous that the police would hold our truck for someone elses debt!  I cannot tell you how many times I have wanted to tear out my hair at the injustice of situations like this but believe me there is no point....that is the way it is here and there is no point having a heart attack about it, the longer our tipper was off the road the more money we were losing.  So anyway, we got the keys back and the truck was back on the road afer some repairs.  Needless to say Spencer no longer had a job and it further transpired that he owed money to several people in the town where he was working.  He had also been plotting to steal fuel from the vehicle (the company using the tippers fuel them) someone that worked at the local petrol station came looking for him because he promised them 450 000 Leones worth of fuel, he took the money from them and obviously did not deliver!

Next was 'Henry' he only lasted a day, he was caught by one of the employees of the SA comapny with a hose and a funnel by the truck (a clear sign he was stealing fuel) and he was promptly arrested.

Now we have another driver who has not proven troublesome ...yet

 Thea, Benedict John and Me.