Lessons Learned

Lama, Joseph, me, Hassan, and Swaray with calculus books sent from UWRF.

Ann and I are closing in on ten months in Sierra Leone and in less than a month we will be flying to Morocco for a ten-day tour of that country.  Then it’s back home in mid-July.  Time now to reflect on what Sierra Leone has taught us at this point in our lives. Here are just a few final observations from our experiences here.  This will be my final post.  Thanks for reading.  The blog has been very therapeutic for me.

1. Mama Salone has 2 toes in the twenty-first century and 8 toes back in the early 1900s.  As in America, cell phones abound.  My students at Eastern Polytechnic are as enamored with their phones as  students  in River Falls are.  Head phones are also popular for those who can afford them.  A few homes and business have satellite dishes that beam in programming from West Africa and Europe.  Internet cafes are thriving businesses in the major cities.  It seems that wireless technology is a boon for developing countries like Sierra Leone.  Yet, basic services: running water, sewer, and electricity, are woefully lacking everywhere, big cities as well as the rural areas.  Improving infrastructure takes time, money and will.  I am not sure that this country is up to the task.  Salone has trouble enough holding on to what it currently has.  Existing buildings are crumbling faster than new buildings can be built.  As an example, the roofs on campus here are rusting out and leaking, the once useful water tower keeps a silent vigil over all, and electric lines to classrooms have long since become nonoperational.  Everything seems to be slowly falling apart even as newer buildings like the library and science building are being built.  My fear is that this part of Africa has fallen further behind the western world in the 40 years since we were last here.  As the rest of the world zooms ahead via a technology revolution, Africa is very much in danger of being left further behind.

2. The human body has a tremendous capacity to sweat.  Ann and I gave up trying to keep dry long ago.  The best we can do is try to cope with the dampness that comes with sweltering temperatures.  We thought that after a few weeks our bodies would adjust to the climate, but they never did.  The Sierra Leoneans love the heat and are not bothered by sweat.  I have walking around town shirts (in other words, sweat soaked) that I keep separate from my in-house shirts.  Ann has the same.  Laundry could be a problem, but we have long ago learned to live with a certain lack of crispness to our clothes.  Also, when everything must be hand-washed, standards for cleanliness drop a few notches.  I am continually amazed at my colleagues and students here at the college who look sharp in their clean, pressed clothes and impeccably shined shoes.  I don’t know how they do it.  A great part of everyone’s weekend is devoted to washing and ironing.  Without readily available electricity, washboards and charcoal-heated irons are the tools of the day.  The washing machine has got to be rated in the top ten list of modern inventions. 

3. Change promoted by outside sources is extremely difficult.  Peace Corps titled our jobs here as teacher trainers.  We thought we would be bringing our ideas about teaching to future teachers attending the college here: Ann in English, me in math.  The main problem was that the education programs here were not interested in hearing our ideas.  Our colleagues barely had a clue about what our presence meant.  This mix-up was primarily caused by a lack of communication between the Peace Corps administration and the administrators at Eastern Polytechnic.  But, it also could be predicted because it is just part of human nature to be skeptical of change, especially when it is suggested from outside the community.  This scenario is played out all over Sierra Leone as goodwill oriented NGOs try to help this country change for what they think is the better. Initial efforts may seem to be fruitful, but it is very difficult to sustain that effort from within.  Sierra Leone, like many West African countries, has built foreign aid into its national budget.  The country has become dependent on this money.  No one can blame Sierra Leone for taking the aid that is offered.  However, it takes a concerted effort from both parties, donor nation and recipient, to think long-term about the consequences of their actions.  All too often, the focus is on the immediate, short-term, results with little regard to how a project will be sustained.  It is a tough problem - how to help a country improve without it becoming addicted to the aid. 

4. Ramen with added ingredients is a decent meal. Forty years ago, Ann and I had a cook who made us native dishes.  This time around we (I should say Ann) did the cooking.  The national diet, rice & cassava leaf sauce, or rice & potato leaf sauce, or rice & peanut sauce, were not in her repertoire, so we ate curried rice, black beans & rice, pasta salad, spaghetti with meat sauce, grilled cheese sandwiches, and yaki-soba prepared in one pot on one burner which is all we had.  Who’d have thought that ramen noodles, the cheap meal of college students that never graced the table in our adult life, would became our “goto” meal for ease and nutrition (with added veggies and an egg) and for the affordable price which helped stretch our meager Peace Corps living allowance.

5. Life at its core is fairly simple.  The lesson that I knew we would relearn in Africa is that, fundamentally, living can be reduced to finding food & water, clothing, and shelter.  In Sierra Leone the last two items are not great necessities.  People living in Kenema can get by with few clothes (no winter parkas required) and shelter from the rain is all one needs as the temperature rarely dips below 70 degrees Fahrenheit.  As for food, with all the rain and sunshine, it is hard for things NOT to grow.  Banana, mango, orange, grapefruit, coconut, papaya, among other trees provide plenty of fruit for everyone.  Right now there seems to be a glut of pineapples on the street.  Peanuts, cassava, plantain, avocado (called pear here) are available almost every day for pennies.  Water requires some work to haul from a well which may or may not be safe to drink.  But, pure water is affordable, 2.5 gallons cost 50 cents. Of course, staying healthy is key to enjoying life.  This is a challenge in Sierra Leone.  All sorts of tropical diseases (malaria being chief among them) must be dealt with.  Ebola was a special case, and thankfully seems to be eradicated.  No matter how complicated we think our lives are in the States, the necessities of life still boil down to these few  things with affordable basic health care being included in the list.

6. A bucket of water is all one needs to bathe.  There is no question about it, my life in the States will seem ultra-luxurious compared to my life here.  I’ll have super-equipped home, a car to go anywhere I want, plenty of light to see at night, a great bed to sleep on, a variety of food to eat, access to the internet 24/7, and a big bathtub to sit and read in.  What more could a man desire?  Yes, I will think about the all of the abundance I will have, as well as the waste.  Hopefully, I will keep my good fortune of being born in the United States in mind when I think of others who desire the same advantages as I have as an American, but for whom fate had another plan.

7. Peace Corps tests the strength of a relationship.  Before we came back to Africa, I would joke sometimes to people that the first time Ann and I were in Africa the Peace Corps put us together, this second time around perhaps the experience would tear us apart.   Well...... Living together in more Spartan conditions with primarily each other to keep us company is challenging for sure.  Conversation topics seem to exhaust themselves. Stressful situations were more common.  Our most difficult times were during the three months when we did not have any work to do. Ann discovered that she needs to keep busy doing something.  I discovered that staying physically active was difficult in this hot environment.  I had thought that I would do a lot of biking.  A case of heat-exhaustion after one two-hour venture in the morning caused me to become more cautious.  Walking has kept us fit enough and  people on our common routes are used to seeing us together.  If I happen to be walking by myself, I get asked "Where is Mum?"  If Ann is walking without me, the question is "Where is the man?" Mum and The Man both realize that we probably could not have lasted almost a year here without the support of each other.

8. Being a minor celebrity is a mixed bag.  We get recognition from children everywhere we go in Kenema.  They run out to greet us with hand slaps, never tire of saying “hello” several times and generally treat us a someone special.  I have to admit the attention is ego-building.  Ann will forever remember a little girl at her primary school who ran up to her during recess and hugged her legs looked up at her and smiled.  This was after Ann's first day at the school when absolutely no child dared to touch her.  We have, in a small way, desensitized the children we meet to the strangeness of a white person walking about town.  On the other hand, being instantly recognized does have its drawbacks.  We are identified as rich, and therefore a target for everyone who thinks we have tons of money, food and water to give out.  There is a tendency to charge us extra for things we buy just because white skin equals more money.  This is perfectly acceptable in this bargain-dominated society.  As one who does not like to argue about the price of a service, I find this disagreeable.  And, there are times when we don’t want to be recognized, but that's totally impossible here. 

9. Sierra Leone is filled with good, hard-working people.  Yesterday, as I was relaxing by reading outside my back door, I began to hear the steady sound of someone chopping wood.  I turned to see a well-muscled man attacking a 18-inch diameter log with an axe not far away.  After he separated the three-foot section from the rest of the tree, he began the slow process of splitting the log with wedges.  In an hour he had a pile of firewood.  Then he went right back to work on the next three-foot section.  I have seen this kind of work ethic all over Kenema, from construction workers making concrete block, to yard workers yielding machetes to "mow" the grass, to women who scrub away at tubs of laundry on simple washboards, to the men who push tremendous loads on two-wheeled carts constructed from the rear axle of some scrapped vehicle.  At Eastern Polytechnic, I have students who under very trying conditions (no text books, no light at night, classes in heat and humidity, sickened by malaria) continue to pursue their studies with no promise of a job at the end of it all.  And, when they get a break from school, they go back to their villages to work the fields to earn money for the next term.  Life is tougher here, but the Sierra Leoneans meet the challenge every day with humor and grace that I am afraid that I could not muster in similar circumstances.  They have been unfailingly kind and welcoming to us. My time here has been inspirational in this respect and from now on any image of or reference to West Africa will remind us of these good people.