Safely Arrived

I’ve been in Sierra Leone for about a week and a half now, and decided it’s time to endure the painfully slow internet connection here and try and get my first blog post up.

First, a quick intro to the country. Sierra Leone is a former British colony in West Africa with a population of 6 million. Freetown is the country’s capital and largest city, with just under a million people. Those who have seen the movie Blood Diamond have a sense for what things were like here during the civil war, which ran from 1991-2002 and left 50,000 people dead, with another 2 million displaced in neighbouring countries as refugees. An estimated 70% of Sierra Leoneans currently live in poverty.

Things have been eventful here since day one. My flight landed at 3:30am at Lungi International Airport (see the map to the left) and, due to some miscommunication between myself and the person picking me up, I wasn’t sure what ferry to get on and ended up missing the 4:00am ferry crossing to Freetown. I was told by airport staff that it would be at least a 5 hour wait until the next ferry. I was also told that I could not wait at the airport terminal until then, as they were closing. Great.

As a foreigner travelling alone in a developing country, I wasn’t sure what to do at this point, so I just started walking. I passed an abandoned parking lot / trailer park where there were a few locals hanging out at this late hour. I couldn’t tell if it was particularly safe or not, but was tired to the point of not really caring anymore. I walked over, found a place to sit and settled in for what was going to be a long wait. One of the locals wandered over and we started chatting. After about an hour, I learned that one of their friends had a car and might know someone who could get me on a boat to Freetown. Slightly hesitant, I was also exhausted and struggling to stay awake, and thus not excited about the prospect of sitting there doing nothing for the next four hours. I decided to go for it. What’s the worst that could happen?

Below deck. I hope this boat actually goes to Freetown.

I was driven to a small boat terminal about 20 minutes away from the airport, where I paid $55 for two guys to get me below deck on a small boat as soon as the captain wasn't around. I sat there nervously for a good 30 minutes, waiting for the moment when I was going to be thrown off the boat and left to find my own way across. Miraculously, the engines fired up and we were on our way! 

Pirates of the North Atlantic! The most exciting ferry crossing of my life.

Halfway across the water, the two guys came down, took me out onto the deck, a bit of an argument ensued which quickly ended, and we spent the rest of the journey watching the sun rise across the ocean. It was a completely surreal moment and I arrived at the dock having made my first of many friends in Sierra Leone.

By the time I got to the hostel in Freetown it was 9am. There was no water pressure, so the shower wasn’t working. Despite having sweat more in the last 6 hours than the rest of my life combined, I wasn’t really that fussed. I’d forgotten to pack a towel anyways.

Two days later, the trip out to Makeni went equally as smoothly. I arrived at the government bus stop at 5:30am for what was supposed to be a 3 hour bus ride that left at 6am. Things got off to a bad start right away, as the bus was nowhere to be seen. It did eventually arrive, at 7am, and by the time we were on the road it was 7:30, already an hour and a half behind schedule. We drove for about 20 minutes before the bus driver pulled over, with no explanation, got off the bus, and disappeared. After waiting about 45 minutes, he finally returned, started up the engine, and we were moving again. We travelled literally 10 meters (across the road to another parking lot) where he pulled over and disappeared for another 45 minutes, leaving us sitting on a packed bus in sweltering 35 degree heat. Unbelievable! We finally got moving again and completed the rest of the journey to Makeni with relatively few issues. Total travel time: 8 hours. Total distance travelled: 260km. Yup, that's an average speed of about 30 km/h.

"New London" in Makeni. Home for the next 6 months.

Makeni is a much more rural environment than Freetown, though it is still Sierra Leone’s third largest city. My house has no running water, though I’m fortunate in that the well is very close by, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that electricity had been recently installed (I found this place through a friend of mine from the UK, who had no electricity when she stayed here about a year ago).

Interestingly, lack of food isn’t really a problem here. If you try hard, you can get three decent sized meals a day for 15,000 Sierra Leonean Leons (about $3.00), including the inevitable “white man” mark-up. I’d be surprised if a local who prepares their own food is paying even a quarter of that. That said, as a foreigner, if you want to avoid getting sick, you probably want to eat somewhere that’s relatively clean and charging at least double this. Throw in a few snacks and drinks, and my food bill averages out to around $10/day.

The real issue here is nutrition. The aforementioned meals consist of a loaf of white bread for breakfast, white rice and sauce (such as ground nut soup) for lunch (usually with a little bit of chicken mixed in) and white rice and a different sauce (maybe potato leaf this time) for dinner. Some fruits (such as mangos) are pretty common as well, though I haven’t actually seen a vegetable since arriving in Sierra Leone. This poor nutrition is one of the primary contributors to Sierra Leone’s extremely low life expectancy at birth of less than 50 years (insufficient health care is another major factor) and is one of the things that microfinance organizations are trying to change by raising the economic status of the average person here.

SMT's Head Office.

I’ve been working at Salone Microfinance Trust (SMT) for a couple days now, though I’m still going through the orientation process. The office is comprised of a group of about 20 Sierra Leoneans. The team here is extremely friendly and passionate about microfinance, though not terribly sophisticated compared to the calibre of people I’m used to working with back home. I’m also sharing an office with an American volunteer from Kiva. For those not familiar with Kiva, it’s an organization that runs an online platform that connects lenders (regular people like you and me) with microfinance borrowers in developing countries. You simply log on to the Kiva website, create an account, and start browsing profiles and photos of entrepreneurs and business owners in the developing world that you can loan your own money to directly. The incredible thing is it costs you nothing; you’re not making a donation at all. The loan amount is charged to your credit card, but when the borrower repays their loan (microfinance repayment rates are typically around 98%), you get all your money back, and can either then loan it out to another borrower, or withdraw the funds completely from your Kiva account. Since being founded in 2005, Kiva has facilitated over $400 million in microfinance loans though its partnerships with local microfinance institutions (of which SMT is one). I highly encourage anyone who hasn’t looked into it to visit the website and consider making a small loan or two (www.kiva.org).

Anyways, that’s all I’ve got to say for now. Hope all is well back home, and I’ll do my best to keep everyone posted in the future.

Jesse