Wildlife on One

I live in a little area carved out of Sierra Leonean palm tree jungle but I have not yet seen wildlife in abundance. Unless you count the wildlife kept by the children and the aunties in the home - the chickens which frequently sneak into our house to peck at the floor and lay an egg or two in the shower or the mangy dogs which roam around with chunks of skin missing from their ears and an ever present cloud of flies. If you go through a day without seeing a brilliantly coloured butterfly or a night without noticing the streak of a firefly you quite simply haven’t been looking. Lizards are also a common feature, sunning themselves on the side of a wall or clambering noisily across the tin roof of your house. To the list of the ubiquitous could also be added what have been described as the “duck frogs”, though you will hear them more than you see them. During my first night in Banta I woke up in need of the toilet (the dehydration/peeing-all-the-time balance took a few days to perfect) and heard this ridiculously loud racket that sounded unnatural to my waking mind. It sounds like half-quack and half-croak with one blast always preceding a tumultuous couple of moments with every reptile seemingly wishing to have his say and then, as if they had all exchanged glances and agreed that nothing more needed to be added, the noise suddenly disappears into the darkness as suddenly and as randomly as it had appeared. When you actually see one of the duck frogs for the first time you can’t help but smile. They are tiny little guys.

Bugs are also generally everywhere. Big flying bugs, little flying bugs. The hateful mosquitoes and black flies, or moot-moot in krio, are also always around hatching some devilish scheme to get a taste of my blood no doubt. One brandishes malaria, the other river blindness and both can make you want to scratch your skin off. One night shortly after I arrived in Sierra Leone I woke up feeling a large pool of sweat that had gathered in the small of my back. Nothing to write home about. But then the pool of sweat started to move up my back and I realised that something else was going on. I swiped my hand across my back and knocked a cockroach into my mosquito net. There are quite a few large birds around but I need the bird watching brother to come and identify them for me. The only ones I do know are the weaver birds that you see quite regularly grouping themselves together to construct their little round works of art in trees near the fields of the farmers they torment in this the time for rice harvesting. I have also seen the bird of prey which hunts the little green and yellow rice thieves – what people here simply call an African hawk.

One of the interns earned the name Munda-Cobra Killer after an encounter with one of those famously dangerous snakes (Munda is a mende name meaning “our own”). Admittedly if you look at him with a dubious expression on your face for long enough he will crack under the pressure and suggest the possibility that his killer blow may in actual fact have really just amounted to a stone landing on a very recently deceased reptile, but I prefer the original version of events. Later in the interns’ time here I myself saw a snake seconds after it had been stoned to death…Munda again flexing his snake killing muscles in the effort (I am always amused by how quickly and directly but with an air of nonchalance he reacted to the cry of “snake”, lifting up the biggest rock to hand and running towards the noise. “No big deal guys, this kind of thing happens in my village all the time”).

However, it wasn’t until later that I saw my first live snake. It was slithering up the road that runs from our home to the school – not all that big, black and it moved sort of sidewinder-like – and initially I just passed by it. Then I realised that really I had to take the danger that this thing represented seriously. Not in Kansas anymore kiddo. In other words, I had to kill it. I threw a stone at it. Missed. I threw another stone. Missed again. Okay…okay…give me a break here – I was trying to kill this guy from a good if-this-thing-can-spit-then-surely-it-couldn’t-reach-me-over-here distance. I decided I should use a bigger stone. I threw a small boulder. Now, I am not prepared to say that I missed with this one but any possible hit wasn’t what you would call direct either. What I do know is that the snake curled up against the stone – either pinned by it or deciding this would offer it some protection from the inaccurate attack it was under. But in this Irishman the serpant had met its match. Brain over brawn was always going to be my only hope of survival in this world. Giving my reptilian friend a wide berth I walked around to the other side of my boulder and played my trump card. I rolled the stone forward with my foot. For the slightest second the snake’s flesh bulged before it popped. I had to use a leaf to scrape bloody yellow snake flesh off my trouser leg, before continuing my walk home with something like triumph in my step.

And so we come to my nemesis, the monkey. Sierra Leone is known for its monkeys with certain areas of the country set up as sanctuaries for them. The chief in a local village used to have a little pet monkey called Shipment but he seems to be no more. It became a running joke between my friend Andy (the aforementioned Munda) and I that I had not seen a wild monkey and even though lots of the interns saw their fair share and even though I have been here for a whole lot longer I have still found the little scumbags utterly elusive. I had to make a statement to these monkey creatures. So I ate one. It was very tasty and I reckon now that I’ve made my feelings clear.

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I am sorry to all those who have subscribed to this blog and just got a flurry of emails... I finally got a chance to add this stuff and I grabbed it with both hands!

Life...

My life is faintly ridiculous. I can think of no other word to better describe it. This morning I walked to church through a farm and jungle and crossed a stick structure that I’ll call a bridge only because I can’t think of a better word. Yesterday a man came to my house hoping to sell me a large monkey for dinner, having cleverly fashioned a carry strap by pulling a section of skin from the animal’s tail and pushing the head through the hole that created. Regularly I will find myself sitting on the veranda of a family’s mud hut, maybe on a stool or in a hammock, playing with kids whose language I barely understand and engaging in the smallest of talk with their parents or using an older child as a translator. I live amongst almost a hundred orphans, these little lives with no-one in the world able to care for them apart from those provided by a man in America, a man whom many of them barely know but whom they all call “Daddy”. I get to be their uncle, to play with them, read them stories, help them with their homework, discipline them, hug them good night and even put them to bed. That this is what my life currently looks like is ridiculous but what is more bizarre is how seldom I am struck by my situation’s strangeness. As The American might say, “I’m in Sierra Leone, West Africa. No big deal.”

And with this thought there comes another one, one about whether or not the reality of this place has really sunk in. Do I adequately realise that this is real, that these people are real, that this is their life, that these are their daily struggles? This isn’t some movie that I am in in which I, the main character, have embarked on an adventure in some strange tropical land, a strange land which will cease to exist when the action returns to the temperate climate of the main character’s home. My friend and former COTN-SL associate Sarah talks about her feelings of being sweetly broken by this place. Am I allowing this place to break me as surely such a place must do? Or have I found ways of keeping it at a distance…but then surely that would not be possible. What is clear to me however is that we live in a thoroughly surreal world, one where you can leave an air conditioned office with computers and mars bars (not something I do very often you understand...twice in 4 months I think) and walk a short distance before stepping in to someone’s mud and thatch home where children live walking a tightrope with malnutrition. The experience is entirely disorienting but thoroughly real. I want to be entirely infected by the reality of Banta, Sierra Leone. I will strive to continue to work and live in a way that puts me in real danger of being just that.

Baby business

A fuzzy BBC World Service report recently informed me that Sierra Leone continues to have the worst rate of infant mortality in the world. More children die here before they are five years old than anywhere else, according to the UN. I am no authority on why our babies are dying but I can share a few stories. David is just three months old. His mother is Michaela, a beautiful nineteen year old girl who was at school in Bo, Sierra Leone’s second city, when she got pregnant. The father did what men do – he ran away and denied all knowledge of mother and son. Without things like paternity tests shirking your responsibilities is a bus ride away. Michaela’s father died some time ago and so she came to Ngolala to be with her mother, a poor lady from the village. When I first met Michaela she proudly showed me and my friend, the much missed Auntie Adama, her baby saying, “Watch me fine pikin!” Some weeks later David was running a temperature and every day I went to the village he was the same. After talking to a nurse I organised to bring Michaela and David to COTN’s clinic, thinking that David would just need some small help to ease his fever. But, as my friend Butterscotch once said, “Things just get nasty here”. It turned out that malaria and an enlarged spleen meant that David needed a blood transfusion, something beyond his mother’s finances. But without this treatment David could be killed by the slightest little infection. We got the money, David got the blood and David is now safe and well again. The whole thing, including transport to the hospital, cost about 150,000 Leones. All that was needed was a little knowledge and 30 quid. But that is exactly what Michaela and so many other mothers like her don’t have. David is amongst the lucky ones I guess, he lives near an NGO with a working clinic. I am now working on trying to help his mother to get back to school. I pray that the second chances keep coming but this isn’t a place where people often enjoy such things.

A lady brought her baby to our clinic and our staff explained to her that the child had cerebral palsy. I could have cried as this mother talked about how the people in her village had told her to stop taking care of her son because he was a devil. Another woman came speeding in to our compound on a motorbike yesterday wailing with her baby in her arms. The child had been sick for a while but his mother had waited and waited until he got really sick before rushing him to our clinic at which point there was nothing we could do for them. They had to continue on their journey to the nearest hospital but those who looked closely at the baby were convinced he wouldn’t make it. Why had she waited so long? She didn’t have money to pay for treatment and just hoped that the boy would get better. A little knowledge. A little money.

We have a malnutrition clinic for kids under 5 as COTN tries to respond to Sierra Leone’s depressing statistics. When the children come, Auntie Agnes, our head nurse, has me take their pictures. The little kids stand there, often in tears brought on by the presence of the horrifyingly pale skinned photographer, completely naked apart from the little black juju cord their parents have tied around their waists in a desperate attempt to appeal to the spirit world to protect their child. Painful sores invariably cover their bottoms, their legs, their arms and their faces as the lack of nutrients sees their little bodies start to quite literally disintegrate. We had a case about a month ago of a boy a little older than we usually see, probably 8 or 9, come in a really pathetic state. What was remarkable to me was that he came with his sister, a girl who was in good health and who I knew from the youth camp we had when the interns were here. It was Mussu, still wearing Larish’s American Eagle top. They had explained that the brother had gone to stay with some relatives and this was the state in which he returned. His pictures were taken with him lying down as standing up was too painful for him.

And then the clinic goes about the business of building these little bodies back up again and teaching their mother’s how to take care of them despite their limited resources. That malnourishment is a problem in Sierra Leone is itself surely remarkable. This is a place where I have been struck by nature’s abundance, by how we gain the means of life as a by-product of the natural life around us. There is something about walking down a city street and seeing bananas growing out of the path that affects the way you think of food. But somehow, despite its climate and the richness of its soil, somewhere along the line Sierra Leone has lost the ability to feed itself.

A little orphaned boy who came to the clinic in this kind of malnourished state in June may actually be coming to stay in the home, the newest member of the COTN family here in Banta. The latest in a list of children whose stories have defied the typical narrative of where they live and instead enjoyed the transformation of that elusive, miraculous, second chance.

Sit with me for a moment

I am sitting on a slightly rickety bench, with the uneven floor adding to the precariousness. I steady myself with my wet feet – I am soaked from the thighs down after my Honda ride (Motorbikes are all called Hondas in a vacuum cleaner/Hoover kind of way). Water drips down from a hole in the tin roof, creating a large puddle in front of me and the dripping rhythm adds to the peace of the morning. I look out from my raised position on the beginnings of the day’s bustle in Gbangbatok. A lady walks past with a basket of cassava on her head. Some children wash outside their house. Behind the covered area, or barri, I am sitting under and down the street towards the river estuary which makes this an important market town, the branches of a large tree teem with chattering weaver birds and their little spherical nests. The barri is empty apart from a few rows of benches facing two tables, one in front of the other. The second table is decorated with a table cloth and sits on a raised section at one end of the barri. I am the only one here until a small black goat decides to venture up the steps and stroll between the benches. This is Gbangbatok’s court and I am waiting on the arrival of the magistrate.

Two days before I had stood at the front of this court, in front of those two tables, when the place had been full to overflowing with gawking Sierra Leoneans. The chief witness, the complainant even, I had stood beside a friend and been told to refer to him as “the accused” when I called him by his name. I had tried to explain that the two people who had been wronged were a dying girl and a poor village woman but I am sure the picture of white versus black spoke more words than I managed. A ripple of laughter spread through the assembled crowd when I was told not to look at “the accused” when he asked me the questions that he had for me.

Later today I will stand in front of this court again, once it fills up and the magistrate has taken his seat at the top table. I will have already have met with him and explained my desire to withdraw this case from his court in favour of a private agreement that has been come to. A colleague will wriggle our way out of paying a “token” to the powers that be and so my second court appearance will be something of a formality – a “once again for the record”. When I finally get home I will be walking across the school’s football pitch when about twelve of our nursery school kids will see me and sprint towards me, jump all over me and then start singing, “So we dance, dance, dance” – the most popular line of a song my friend Andy made up for our children’s camp. I will breath a sigh of relief that I am back doing exactly what I came to Africa to do. And then I will dance, dance, dance.

But for now I will just sit on my rickety bench and watch the drip, drip dripping and the goat’s sniffling around. For now I will just enjoy the quiet morning atmosphere and pray that the day runs smoothly. For now I will just sit, watch, pray and wait.