Dear Ness,

Love, Mom

***

Dear Mom,

Here are some answers to your questions. They make for a nice blog!

1. Tell me about the food

When I was upcountry in Makeni and Kono, the only food we could get was traditional Sierra Leonean food, aka “chop”. We’d go into a small restaurant or roadside stand and ask “what for chop today?” There are usually only one or two choices, and it’s either cassava leaf over rice, potato leaf over rice, or groundnut soup over rice. Occasionally you can find pepper soup and sometimes couscous. The dishes served over rice look like green or brown mush (I think that’s a technical term) and tastes of the palm oil that everything – absolutely everything – is cooked in, plus tons of pepper. The palm oil is a thick, orange viscous liquid sold in old plastic bottles on the side of the road and in the markets. It’s easy to imagine it clogging my arteries daily or being used to lube a car.

I’m not yet a fan of traditional chop, but most of the time there’s no choice. Sometimes chicken and chips (aka fries) can be founf but these too are cooked in the palm oil. And by chicken they mean pigeon. And by pigeon they mean a grasshopper. Okay, maybe not a grasshopper but it sure is one tough skinny chicken.

If I just can’t handle it sometimes I just snack of bananas (that come in green here), oranges eaten African-style (peeled with a knife to the thin, white rind and then bitten into at one end and sucked while squeezing with both hands), rice cake (a thick banana bread substance), and sesame brittle.

In Freetown there is more selection because of the huge international presence — a few very nice restaurants, like Mamba Point, come replete with security guards, post-colonial colonialists, and New York prices.

Since there’s very little fresh food available when you eat at the chop shops, my teammates have been cooking veggie salads etc. And at the beach you can get amazing fish like barracuda and snapper cooked with a tomato sauce. It’s fantastic.

The merchant class here is Lebanese – they control almost all businesses - and so there’s lots of Middle Eastern influenced food like humus, schwarma, and falafel etc etc.

2. What are the sounds, smells, etc. like?

Sounds: dogs barking, howling, crying, and whimpering. Roosters in the morning. Chickens running scared. Babies crying everywhere. Children being beaten. Loud “African discussions” between enormous multi-generational families. The radio playing the BBC or reggae. Car horns. The hum of generators.

Smells: burning garbage of all sorts. Potent palm-oil sweat off the locals (and my teammate James). Open sewers. Citrus when you walk by an orange stand. Diesel. Marijuana.

3. How do you get around Freetown?

We have a car, a Nissan Patrol, and a driver to go with it (who also often acts as our translator, bargainer, and general guide). His name is Shaka and he was a refugee in Guinea during the war. When we got back to Freetown from the north, he found that his entire place had been burgled and the landlord had rented it to someone else. He could use some cheering up (and money and clothes).

I have also gotten my Sierra Leonean driver’s license and have just started to drive around town. The drivers here are crazier than NYC taxi drivers and there no rules of the road. The horn is used freely to communicate “we’re coming! We’re coming!” to pedestrians, dogs, chickens, and ducks. The roads are horrible – it’s the first place I’ve ever been where it makes sense to have an SUV.

Often on country roads we’ll be stopped by a few kids who have put up a makeshift blockade/security post (imitating the soldiers and rebels). They tell you they’re fixing the roads and ask for money before they’ll t lift the log bloackade. It’s really annoying but sad to see that this is what the kids have had to do to make a little money.

4. have you been to any UN things yet?

You can’t spit here without hitting something UN. It’s everywhere. But I haven’t yet been to any functions, if that’s what you’re wondering about.

Yesterday I went to the main UN base here at the Mammy Yoko Hotel to book some helicopter flights for my colleagues (since we’re partnered with them we can fly for free around the country). There are many UN peacekeeping battalions from a variety of nationalities, but most are Pakistanis, Nigerians, and Bangladeshi.

I’ve met a bunch of UN staff that have told me great stories about the cracker-jack operation they’re running. For example, up in the provinces locals are often finding UXO’s (unexploded ordinances) and selling them for scrap metal. Sometimes they bring them to the UNAMSIL gates. As the agency has no method in place to deal with bombs left hanging about in public, the UXO will sit there for days unattended.

The same office also left a bunch of grenades they didn’t know they had next to their garbage-burning pile, only to be discovered during a search for random and forgotten UXOs that locals may have secretly delivered.

Later I’ll post a fun true or false UN Incompetence Test.

Of course, I very well may end up working for them.

5. What clothes are you wearing the most?

I’m wearing anything that keeps me cool. Remember when you were helping me pack we decided I shouldn’t bring anything that would offend Muslim values. Um, big mistake. Here Islam comes in the ultra-light variety and women can wear anything. Upcountry they often walk around topless. Of course they’d be extremely surprised if a white woman did that, but it’s not too much of a problem to show some skin.

The only time I have been chastised here was once walking through a market in Makeni – my stomach was showing a bit and the women didn’t like it. They all tried to pull down my shirt or pull up my pants. Apparently breasts are fine but a bit of midriff is a no-no.

You can get clothes made here really cheaply with the beautiful gara material. I’m going to have some African outfits made up.

6. Is the heat like Thailand?

When we were up in Makeni in the North we were dying of heat -- sweat dripping down us all day, impossible to sleep, difficult to function. And there was a water shortage so we couldn’t even cool off with a shower – just one bucket shower per night where you scoop water over yourself with a cup.

Now that we’re back in Freetown it actually feels balmy in comparison. It gets hot during the day but not unbearable. And the nights are perfect – skin temperature, like spring.

In the rainy season I think it will get uncomfortably humid, but we’ll see.

7. how do you go about teaching?

Well, we don’t teach. My job here is to come up with ways to use our existing sport and play programs to inform people about HIV/AIDS. These programs are taught by local volunteer coaches, not us.

We haven’t actually begun real work yet because of some hold up on the side of the funder (which is basically USAID through a bunch of other agencies). In the meantime we’ve been doing in field research to figure out what HIV/AIDS education has already happened and how people feel about the issue. It’s been really interesting – it seems that many people have been “sensitized” (a word NGOs use ad nauseam here) to HIV/AIDS, but many people don’t believe it’s a real problem (they’ve never seen anyone with the disease, they’ve never had anyone close to them die from it). Many people believe AIDS stands for American Intention to Discourage Sex -- a conspiracy to keep the population down in Africa.

Also, life expectancy is about 39 here on average, so they’ve got lots of other shit to worry about that seems more pressing than AIDS.

8. Do you really not feel in danger?

Can you define danger for me?

9. Do you have any specific work hours?

Strangely enough, I’ve had to come halfway around the world to find myself with a 9-5 job.

10. when can I come that is sooner than November?

October, November, and December are the most beautiful months I’m told – before the Harmattan winds ruin the view and after the rainy season. If you want to come earlier, May might work – the rains will be just beginning.

Lots of love to you and everyone at home!

XXOO,

Ness

In the distance we could see the clouds gathering, an unusual dark grey. The winds came, unexpectedly cool, sharp, dusty. The children ran in from out in the dirt field. There was a rumbling of thunder and some loud claps, and then the rain came – too early for the rainy season. No, it was not the start of the rain, it was the end of the Harmattan wind, the wind that blows off the Sahara for weeks, making the West African sky white, hazy, ugly.

I was inside a dark office of the school building, a tiny cement room with only the window for light. I was interviewing one of the villagers, a woman of 29, asking her questions like, “do you know what a condom is? Have you ever used one?” I had already interviewed a seventy-year-old man who had twelve children. He had never used a footsock, as they are called here, but he told his sons to do so, which makes him progressive in my mind. In the government hospital over 100 people have tested positive for HIV but none have yet been told – the doctors are waiting on counselors that may or may not materialize.

I’m in the Kono district in the Northeast, the place where diamonds come from. In the center of the town of Koidu (the “city” of the region) there are fields of lunar landscapes, mounds of dirt and shallow ditches as far as the eye can see where hundreds go to work each day breaking earth with makeshift shovels and sifting sand to find sparkling stones. The diamond miner’s bodies are seriously cut, as we would say, rippling and lean (no need for a Bally’s or Crunch here).

Kono was ravaged by the war – the rebels and the government fighting over control of the mines, one of the only sources of money for the country. Homes, stores, and schools were all looted and burned. The skeletons of these buildings, now roofless, burnt out, with blackened crumbling walls, line dusty lanes and roads. Families have come back from the refugee camps in Guinea and Liberia to make homes of these shells – sometimes just a few dark concrete walls -- for their 20-plus size families.

There is no one here in Koidu, or in the country at large, who has been unaffected by the war. Almost everyone I meet has lost a parent, child, or spouse. Or they have walked for hundreds of miles in flight, often losing family along the way. One security guard told me in casual conversation, “my wife was slaughtered by the rebels. I don’t have new wife because I don’t want her to be bad to my small children.” In our own house in Freetown our houseman, Abu, walked all the way from to Koidu to Freetown, a total of over 200 miles, after the rebels came and burned his boutiques and house. He has gone from owning businesses to ironing our clothes and washing our dishes. But in today’s Sierra Leone, he’s just thankful to find work. His story is here is a common one.

What has gone on here is unspeakable. There are 20,000 estimated amputees – men and women and small children whose limbs were chopped off with machetes by the Commanding Officer Cut Hands, an official position in the rebel army (if anything was official). War brides had the initials of the rebel force, RUF, carved into their chests with broken glass. Pregnant women were ripped open, rebels betting on the sex of the unborn child.

The country’s own army in many circumstances behaved no better. Many came to be known as “sobels” – soldiers by day, rebels by night. When they “pushed back” on January 6, 1999, they turned on the population, accusing them of supporting the rebels. They visited the same atrocities on the population and blamed the rebels. And the ECOMOG soldiers (which consisted of almost 25% of the Nigerian army) who were here to protect the country also gave it a go. In addition to selling arms and home-baked PCP and methamphetamine concoctions to the rebels (which in turn were given to young “small boys unit” to make them more capable of violence), they also looted, pillaged, and raped. They had seen too many of their forces go down, and they took it out on those they could find – to them, in the end, everybody was a rebel.

And the resulting conditions read as a catalog of social disaster: poverty, hunger, widespread domestic abuse, institutionalized child abuse, rampant HIV/AIDS, mass unemployment, horrific sanitary and health conditions. Adding to all this is a devastated infrastructure – power only for the lucky few with a generator, water near undrinkable. Corruption is general all over the country from the street level on up to the government, even in some of the UN peacekeeping forces who are here to protect the delicate peace.

As we travel throughout the region collecting data for an assessment of the HIV/AIDS situation, we hear increasing desperation in the stories the locals tell us. The price of rice and palm oil (two main staples) has gone up steeply, and the UN-fueled economy has created huge inflation. When the UN pulls out (which should not happen anytime soon but is scheduled to happen this December) the economy will collapse. People are hungry, they have nothing to do, and they’re angry. They recognize the corruption of the government, and they are frustrated by the snail’s pace of reconstruction of the most basic infrastructure.

I want to stop and note here that all of the above information comes from no official sources, rather, it has been gathered from personal accounts and stories from across the country.

On our ways over the potholed and rutted dirt roads that link towns and cities together, I wave and smile at the women and girls carrying massive plateloads of pineapple or jugs of water on their heads. I greet all the men resting under grass-roof shelters or hiking down the highway with sifters for mining. I smile at every child I possibly can when they yell out at us “white man! white man!” or, if they’re near a UN base with Pakistani troops, “Pak-i-stan! Pak-i-stan!” (Similar to what’s perceived as Caucasian racism, they too think we all look alike -- Americans, Pakistanis, Lebanese, whatever! I am often called “Bangla!” after the Bangladeshi battalions stationed here.)

Sometimes on these roads I feel I’m carrying out a one-woman public relations mission on behalf of the white people in the country, not only because I want to convince them that there are some good people in the world, but also in the hopes of saving my ass if chaos breaks out (please have mercy on me, I think to myself).

Speaking of breezing down the roads here – I would very much appreciate some “why did the chicken cross the road?” jokes. It has suddenly become very relevant. You can send them in to me at vanessa (at) vanessawithoutborders (dot) com. I will post the best ones in an upcoming blog.

Also in an upcoming blog I will try to tell the story of Koidu Holdings (aka Branch Energy), the big Afrikaans-owned diamond mining outfit in the Kono region (imagine ex-mercenaries the size of small tractors in a exclusive compound, blasting minerals out of the ground). It’s too complicated and rich to note on here, and I imagine that my run-ins with them have only just begun.

I had imagined, I suppose, that I would be one of the only people boarding a Sierra National flight into Freetown, Sierra Leone (named “the worst country on earth” by the United Nations a few years back). Perhaps, I thought, there would be a few UN workers here and there. Maybe a NYC taxi driver coming home to his wife and kids. But mostly I thought that Sierra Leoneans would all be far too poor to be on an airplane.

I hadn’t figured on the elite bunch I saw in the check-in line at Gatwick (having come in via Toronto the night before). One man looked as if he’d sauntered off the Armani runway during fashion week, styled impeccably down to his shiny, pointy, Prada boots. I imagined he was a famous Sierra Leonean musician (and later found out he was a Paris-based DJ of Sierra Leonean origin). Other men were decked in flamboyant three-piece suits. I started wondering if I should have left all the trappings of my New York City life behind.

And it seems that I have begun to meet, one by one, the characters I had constructed for my going away party (see previous blog “Hearts of Darkness: A seedy expat bar in the tropics”). Waiting to board the plane I spotted an extremely tall, white, older man who, in addition to course black hairs on the bridge of the nose, also had two round patches of fur on each cheekbone. He wore a yellow-checkered button down and khakis (looking very Banana Republic before it went high fashion for Gap addicts) and told me that he values diamonds for several West African governments. (“That would make you, a…?” I asked. “A consultant, shall we say,” he spoke with a formal British accent. I imagine he takes high tea and says “old chap” often. “His people” had been in Sierra Leone for over a century. “It used to be a beautiful country,” he went on, “we never could figure out why they blew each other up and destroyed everything.” I was thinking: “Wasn’t it over control of the diamond mines?” )

The man sitting in the seat directly in front of me turned out to have been born and bred in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and had come to the country years ago, staying on to develop a diamond export business. He used to manage the Wu-Tang Clan (a huge hip-hop group for those of you old foggies), he claimed, and asked me if I wanted to help him plan a huge benefit concert with some hot new American talent (those in the music industry take note!).

There was also an African man sitting a few rows in front of me who had been dragged onto the plane by two British immigration officers, hands-tied, kicking and screaming. He had made for the door while we were boarding on two separate occasions and was summarily put back in his seat. The Icelandic Air stewardess-on-loan assured us that he was not violent.

I slept for most of the trip.

When we arrived in Sierra Leone, finally, after 7 hours or so, it was getting dark. The sky was hazy and grey. The earth below us was red and overgrown with jungle vegetation. We flew over a compound lined with white trucks and helicopters marked with the black UN insignia.

We put our seatbacks and tray tables to their upright positions and landed.

If I were making a movie of my trip, I would probably begin with two scenes.

In the first scene, I’m in a dirty, random, and slightly touristy bar in the West Village -- some place you would ordinarily never find a hipster like me. There’s an R&B cover band playing at one end, and I’ve got my back pressed up against the bar trying to defend myself against a few overenthusiastic local drunkards.

“I’m moving to Africa,” I tell them. I had just found out myself a few days back, and I was telling anybody I came across just to hear the words out loud.

“Africa!” one of them sprays (rather than says) back at me, “I was in Kenya for years in the army! I loved it! I love Africa!”

He is middle-aged, bearded, and speaks with an accent of some Scandinavian origin. He’s far too drunk. He gets right up in my face. (Imagine the camera close-up on him from my point of view.)

Fueled by a vehement enthusiasm and beer, he goes on.

“You,” he says, “are you going to have the time of your life. Oh Africa. Oh the dirt. Just wait until you feel the dirt of Africa. In your hair, all over your skin, in your mouth. It will get under you tits.” (And here he presses his hands into my ribs cage). “ I was in the army in Kenya When you shower it will run down the drain. It will grit between your teeth. You will love it. There’s nothing like it. You will have the time of your life. Oh Africa!”

Cut to the second scene in which a tall, lanky, and bespectacled editor at a newspaper stands over me, doling out advice. His manner is restrained but his concentration and attention are flattering.

“You’re doing a very important thing,” he says, “it will be difficult and dangerous, and you’re taking a real risk that very few young people take these days.”

“There are two things you should remember: first, don’t get involved with someone over there. You want a relationship to the country. You want to fall in love with the country. And you will, if you don’t get involved, and you’ll be tempted to because you’ll be alone in a strange land. But don’t. And second, there will come a time when you can’t take it anymore, and you will want to come home. Stay through it. You’ll come out on the other side. It’s a great life. A phenomenal life, if you can stay with it.”

And then, after those two scenes, I might cut to my going away party, entitled, as some of you know, “Hearts of Darkness: A seedy expat bar in the tropics.” And you will all be there (some of you are dressed, as instructed, as characters you’d find in the scene: missionaries, diamond smugglers. deposed dictators, drug mules, expats, AWOL vets, and, of course, cheap women), and I am there, looking tropically phenomenal. And DJs are spinning in this wacky tiki bar, and people are dancing, some karaokeing in the back room (I will later sing a rocking rendition of Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With You Best Shot”), and I am trying to manage saying goodbye to everyone.

And everyone is very serious and sad, wishing me wonderful things, and I’m not even there. I’m already halfway out the door to Africa.

In any event, that’s me up there -- a photo from the makeshift seedy expat bar. I know it’s generally bad form to post a photo of oneself looking like some sultry babe or whatnot, but I had to entice those first time readers.

Now I’m off. Off to Africa.

For background on who the hell I think I am and what the hell I think I’m doing, see the ABOUT page.