Where the streets have no name

Firstly, apologies for the long break in blog entries.  Two reasons, firstly we had a full week in Makeni without Internet access.  The two locations where we pick up a connection had no service for unexplained reasons.  The second reason is that I have taken a week out of my schedule to tour Ghana, which is worth a blog entry of its own.  It is just as friendly, raw and beautiful as Salone, but with more infrastructure, more options and a few added luxuries.  Other than pregnant mothers (risk of malaria) and families with young children (infrastructure) Ghana should be off-limits to no one and enjoyable for everyone.

Secondly, thanks for your interest in my blog.  I’m averaging over one hundred page impressions a week and it’s great to know that so many people are following our adventures while also learning about Sierra Leone.  Thanks also for your emails and messages of support, it’s hard to get the time (and internet access) to reply to all, but I will get through them eventually!  One of the consistent questions / requests you have been asking for is some pictures of Makeni.  I have added one below from our boys league game below and will try to put up one a week going forward.  But I’m not inclined to take too many pictures from around Makeni.  Firstly, I’ve always hated it when aid agencies use pictures of children living in squalor to emotionally blackmail viewers – I don’t want compromise anyone’s dignity while I’m here.  Secondly, the natives frown upon it.  Being white here equates to having money, and when they see white people taking pictures they think that the exploitive pictures will be sold in the West for a small fortune.  Finally, some of the traditional religions have superstitions about images of the living, and I while I’m not afraid to have a voodoo spell cast on me, I don’t want them burning down my house!  So instead, for this entry, I thought it might be interesting to paint a picture of the town of Makeni, to give you a better sense of our surrounds, friends and environment.

Our house is a tidy burnt-orange bungalow with a small front and back porch and an uneven corrugated iron roof.  It is a new build and is nestled in sight of about 10 other houses in a district in Makeni called New London.  It has four bedrooms, a bathroom and an open-plan living room and eating room.  You can’t really call the latter a kitchen because there is no sink or cooker; it just has a table and a cupboard and is suitable for only eating and, more recently, beer-pong.  Cooking takes place outdoors in Sierra Leone, starting at about 6am when mothers and young daughters emerge from their houses with enormous cauldrons that just about feed the average family of 10.  They cook in thatched roof huts and ignoring the fact that they might be 100 yards apart, the ladies shout loudly about whatever is vexing them.  While there is no way to sleep after they rise, the truth is that I’m awake earlier than this most mornings due to a combination of restless dogs and eager chickens – a combination that makes a full night’s sleep difficult.  

Our house is probably the second nicest in the immediate vicinity.  I haven’t seen the inside of any others but the generator at number 27 that kept me awake till 1am a few nights recently, indicating that they have more resources than anyone else in New London.  In contrast, the house that my bedroom looks onto has never been painted and doesn’t have glass in the windows – just wooden shutters and jaded curtains.  The owner, Eric, is a half-brother of Alusine’s and their father (the local Imam) has three wives and 21 children, symmetrically and considerately distributed with seven per wife.   Between the houses are a combination of mango and palm trees and the occasional outdoor toilet.  I haven’t quite figured out how many houses are as fortunate as us to have indoor toilets and showers, even if you do have to lug a couple of gallons of water into the cistern before flushing or showering.

As soon as you close the front door, you hear the chants of the children singing “a-po-to” (everyone tells us it means white man but we’ve convinced ourselves it’s derived from “Portuguese”) announcing our presence too all and sundry.  Sometimes they want to shake your hand or to be lifted up, other times they want a high-5.  In a typical day we probably hear “a-po-to” 200 times and get 50 high-5s.  The younger ones sometimes approach in curiosity but run away in tears, afraid of our “snowman” appearance.  Such is their unbounded friendliness and curiosity that you’ll occasionally be offered chop-chop (food) if they are eating.  The children are always happy in Salone.  Playing, chasing, observing, chilling, talking, eating, but always smiling.

There only a couple of miles of tarmac roads in Makeni so the path towards the town centre is an uneven mud-track complete with rocks, weeds and household rubbish.  It’s too bumpy for most cars and the okada riders have to skilfully manoeuvre around the same ridges to minimise the unrelenting undulation.  As the road meanders we pass the same people who are becoming our friends.  Alusine’s “corner boys”, each wearing a shirt from their favourite premiership team.  The “well girls” who seem to be continually pumping and playing in well water.  Then there is Fatima and her 9 brothers who hang outside their mom’s corner shop.  Our “Aunty Ellen”, who has promised to mind us while we’re away from our mothers, also has a corner shop that competes directly with Fatima’s mother’s shop.  We try to split our business fairly between both, but sitting on Aunty Ellen’s porch and listening to her pride when she talks about her children who are doing well in Freetown, is our preference. 

Further down Frontier Road, you begin to realise how much rubbish is just lying around in Makeni.  There is a limited refuse collection service in Freetown but in the rest of the country, rubbish just accumulates on the side of the road – no one has responsibility for it.   The local men are equally as shameless in their toilet habits and in any given walk in Makeni, you’re likely to pass one local relieving himself in broad daylight.  You also notice how dusty the town is, every car or okada that passes throws up a burst of red powder.  If you spend too much time on an okada it beings to accumulate on your skin like foundation makeup, fooling you into believing that you’ve got a great tan…until you check your towel after showering.  Jah knows how much of this we inhale as we stroll around town.

At the next junction, where Frontier Road meets Lunsar Road, you finally meet tarmac.  Taking a right brings you down to the two petrol stations (NP and Total) that are the transport hub of Makeni.  This is where poda-podas, taxis and okadas depart every morning and afternoon for Freetown, Lunsar and apparently even to the Guinea border.  Rumours of bus from the state run bus company departing here for Freetown at 6.30am are just that, rumours.  Going straight at this junction brings you down Ladies mile which is one of the centres of entertainment in Makeni.  On the left there is a concert venue where we saw Shady Baby, Sierra Leone’s most famous artist, “perform” recently.  I’m not lying when I say it was not worth the £1.20 entrance fee to see him lip-sync – I mean he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page!  Further down is Flamingo’s night club.  We’d heard a lot about this place before we arrived and it has lived up (down?) to its reputation – providing a location for expat miners to find local prostitutes.  At the end of Ladies Mile is MJ’s hotel, where David Beckham stayed on his visit here in 2008.  As the only in town (at the time) that had running water, it was a good choice.  MJ’s motto is “the best hospitality” but you shouldn’t let this statement increase your expectations regarding the service on offer – this is still West Africa.  Ladies Mile is a great walk at night - dozens of street traders sit side-by-side under candlelight selling a huge range of street-food - oranges, popcorn, roasted peanuts, goat kebabs (or so we’re told!), cassava root, fresh coconuts, toasted coconut, oranges, packet water and sticky toffee – we’ve tried and loved all the street food Makeni has to offer!  Music can be heard from every direction on Ladies Mile, with block parties adding to the afro-beats from the two nightclubs. 

A left hand turn at the Lunsar Road takes you towards clock-tower, the town centre.  On this journey, houses morph into businesses that specialise in beds, motorbike parts, mobile phone credit, stationery, more street-food and more mobile phone credit.  As you approach the clock tower, the buildings mostly improve, some are freshly painted and some even have a second floor!  The clock tower is a broad arch that spans about 60 feet and has four large clocks.  But don’t set your watch by them as they all tell a different time.  It’s also a bit of a death-trap as Okada riders are as likely to go around the tower clockwise as anti-clockwise.  In addition to the road we’ve approached the tower from, there are three other roads leading off it. 

The first is Mugburaka road.  It’s a long road that dives downhill for half a mile, then flattens for half a mile before it bounces back uphill for the same distance.  The first structure you meet on it is the town Mosque, painted in different shades of green paint, all of which are peeling.  Unlike Mosques in Northern Africa, it has four minarets, each one topped off with a crescent moon lying casually on its back.  A little further down the road there’s one of the dozens of “football cinemas” you find in Makeni, which is the real Mecca here.   These are effectively large, sweaty, tree-huts with two to three TV’s and a satellite dish that shows every English football game broadcast globally.  The entrance fee varies between 14 pence and 28 pence and is worth infinitely more than that to see the passion, desire and fear with which the locals watch the Premiership.  The African Cup of Nations, which has been on since we got here, just doesn’t matter.   In one of these cinemas recently, I watched Wigan vs. Everton - I had a packet of biscuits in my bag, which I passed around to the other viewers – each one to a man took a single biscuit and passed the rest on to the person beside them.  The packet was returned to me still half full in a country where 40% of the population don’t get their requisite number of calories in a given day!  No greed, no gluttony, no selfishness - just as I’ve come to expect in Sierra Leone. 

At the mid-point of the road is the Clubhouse bar, that serves an English (Irish!) breakfast, western food and even has a projector for the six nations.  Our housemate Ed works here, racking his brains to come up with marketing ideas and events to fund the Street Child project that benefits from its profits.  At the end of the road is a roundabout leading to Mem’s and Hemingway’s, two of our favourite spots in Makeni.  The former in particular is where big nights out get started with cool beers and maybe even some dancing.  Just before these two establishments is a billboard saying “always condomise”.  The AIDS rate here isn’t as bad as further down the continent, but the high level of teenage pregnancy and open relationships / cheating we’ve come across means that these messages are incredibly important. 

The next road is Station road.  It too has a large Mosque but the first shop you come to is owned by Abu, who will sell you anything from Obama school bags, to Tesco Value teabags to a 1,000 watt RMS stereo speaker to a can of Fanta lemon.  We’ve tried on several occasions to go to Ab-Zain’s restaurant next-door to Abu’s, but although the door is open, there is never anyone there!  The council offices are a little further down station road, and these were the infamous headquarters of the RUF during the civil war.  There is nothing to indicate that the rebel mercenaries, funded by Charles Taylor (shame on you Naomi Campbell), who dragged this country into the dark ages in the 1990s were based here.  But everyone knows.  Having been reclaimed, the Sierra Leone flag now flies high and proud outside once again, with its message of “unity, justice and freedom”.  With the market in close proximity, this road is stuffed with ladies bringing goods to and from the market.  A glimpse of this road is all you need to know that there is nothing Salonian women can’t or won’t balance on their heads.  Two gallons of water, 25 foot bamboo poles, a huge basket of flip-flops, an orchard of apples and a up to 100 fish are regular sights on the top of women’s heads, expertly balanced with minimum body movement in their stride and a stiff neck providing a steady base. 

Xxx Road is next, possibly the liveliest and most congested road in Makeni.  Bama’s restaurant, hidden at the back of a nondescript building does excellent beef shawarma but they rarely have more than two portions in stock, which has led to the odd disagreement between the flatmates!  We were here a couple of Sundays ago for the first time and while the food was great the toilet was straight out of Trainspotting and at one point the waitress emerged from the kitchen with just a towel on to serve us our dinner!  What you find going down this street is that the stores and stalls get repetitive – with a lack of capital and limited supply of goods arriving from Freetown – there just isn’t a broad variety of consumables for sale.  The equivalent stores in Freetown sell luxuries such as scented soap, solar phone chargers and books – these never make it to Makeni.  

Further down there is an old petrol station that is converted into a bar.  Well, not so much converted as maintained with the addition of some plastic chairs and a beer fridge.  We were sitting here one night when a guy saw me drinking Guinness and joined our table.  Mohammed (not his real name) loved Guinness and was thrilled that I was from Dublin (I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was from Limerick).  We had a bit of banter with Mohammed, until we found out that he was a mercenary soldier based in Iraq.  The conversation got a little more serious as we questioned him about what he was doing in Iraq.  Turns out, while the US government claims that they have no more ground troops in Iraq, they have at least 2,500 Sierra Leoneans troops on the payroll.  This was further confirmed by Hassain (not his real name!) who joined me for a run around Wusim field a few days later.  He even said that the Americans provided them with women for their off-weeks.  I wonder where those services fit in the Department of Defence budget. 

The final road off the clock tower (doesn’t have a name and) is an alternative route home that passes by Wusim field, the home of the local soccer team and apparently the best soccer pitch in the country.  I passed by there last Sunday and there were kids peering over the barbed wire and through holes in the wall.  On enquiring, it turned out that the national girls under-17 team were playing against Guinea.  I’ve no idea what the attendance was but it was about 4 deep around the pitch and a full stand – so I’m guessing 3-4,000 people – with an entrance fee of half a days wages.  You can’t question passion for football here – England’s womens team doesn’t get that kind of turnout in a country with eight times the population.   

Wusim field is named after Wusim hill, a “mini-Uluru” (my description) that can be seen from any point in the city.  Although the Bradt guide indicates that the hike can be done in 30 mins, it took us more like an hour and was tough going.  The views from up here are great and you get a sense of how lush the land is and how full of life Makeni is. 

If a picture paints a thousand words at this stage I should have described three pictures worth of Makeni.  I hate making this comparison but it does have some validity – Makeni today reminds me of the Limerick that my grandparents and Frank McCourt describe. I don’t mean to infer that there is anything backward about Makeni or its people, but when I recollect my grandparents talk about being poor but happy it is what I see in Makeni. 

One of the things we’ve remarked to ourselves is how easy it is to live here, and I hope that has come across in this entry.  The town is walkable, has sufficient amenities to keep us well-nourished and coupled with the friendliness of the people and the work we are doing, we are definitely enjoying ourselves.  In addition, the four of us are getting on incredibly well and it would be much harder to do what we’re doing without such good company.  But all this enjoyment occasionally makes me feel guilty – should volunteering in the second most underdeveloped country in the world be this enjoyable?  The answer feels like it should be no, but in reality, it is yes.