Heaven and Hell and In-Between

“Have you got a man yet?”

“No, have you?”

“You can see I don’t have a man and you’re asking me if I have a man?”

One prostitute, more accurately to be described as a young girl, walked away from the other. I am in Sierra Leone and am trying to work out how to feel about the fact that the girl beside me has not yet got a customer for the evening. I guess in a sense I should clearly view it as a good thing and yet... The truth is that everything about this situation is utterly tragic and truly sad.

And it is in this context that I am having a conversation about God.

The human drama of the Bible has been the topic, how the joyful and the seedy sit side by side with the murderous and the wonderous. My opinion is then asked of hell. Is this to be a place of fire and burning? I smiled, I have to admit, a little ruefully at the question, my own nature not excited about getting in to the nitty gritty of damnation with someone who is yet to follow the Father. “Well, so often what we get in the Bible are pictures meant to express an idea so it is difficult to be certain of such things. If man was created to be in relationship with God then heaven is where we enjoy the fullness of that, that relationship in its perfection. Hell is when we are cut off from that relationship totally. Hell is the absence of God. How that will look I don’t know.”

The conversation went on for a little longer but, as I thought about it, what came to mind was a question posed by The American recently. She deals with the ugly side of the human experience everyday and wondered, “How can we keep on working amidst human misery?” If Heaven is where our relationship with God is made perfect, where we are made perfect...and Hell is where God is entirely absent and everything is irredeemable...then our present state in this life can be seen as where the utterly corrupted can still find itself in the presence of God. In Douglas Coupland’s book, “Hey, Nostradamous!” one of the characters toys with the similarity between “God is now here” and “God is no-where”. The truth is that God is here, that though he can be ignored, betrayed and rejected he can not be avoided. And so as you work alongside the tragic and amidst the hatred people subject one another to, you remain in the presence of love. In this love is hope and the possibility of redemption, of the person and of the situation. And so by the hospital bed of a loved one and between the shards of a broken heart, perhaps...just perhaps...we can still wonder at the beauty of a relationship so important to us. Amidst the anger of the bitterest war we can tell tales of bravery, deliverance or self-sacrifice. When in prison or in pain, when oppressed or without, moments of relief could...perhaps...still be savoured. When everyone has given up, one voice might stand out that still has a strain of hope within it.

I am wary of a directness which could open me up to the criticism of bitter experience, to voices which would suggest that I don’t know what their lives have been like, that I don’t understand, that I am too idealistic, that I have a lot to learn about the darkness of this life. This is all true. I have much to learn and I am concerned that life might all too readily teach me. But in a world in to which the Kingdom has come, God is now here and so, to answer The American, we aren’t in hell.

It rained today...

It rained today, long and heavy, for the first time this year. The sky darkened and the wind blew hard, heralding the downpour for at least half an hour before the heavens finally opened. COTN, Banta is a great place to be when it rains. The leisurely pace of life means that you are often in a position to stop what you are doing and enjoy the torrent rather than cursing it for slowing you down or soaking you through when you were in the middle of some busyness. And so today, as the deluge began just as I had reached my house after work, I replaced my office nonsense with a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops and dashed out in the rain with Phillip who had been standing on my veranda when I arrived. Kids waved excitedly from the safety of their own verandas and for a few moments we all just watched the sky and the impact it was making around us.

Then...

“Phillo, the windows!” We dashed through the house closing all the windows as the rain gained ferocity. The hatches battened, we smiled at each other and enjoyed the fresh feeling in the air and that particular cosiness which makes its presence felt when you are in a place of shelter from externally raging elements. I was about to sit down to some food when I glimpsed inside my bedroom. My room is at the front of the house, the side which at that point was baring the brunt of the watery onslaught, and due to a defect in the design of the windows its defences had been breached. A growing pool was forming in the middle of the room as water streamed down the walls beneath the two front facing windows. Phillip and I spun in to action and before you could say, “Uncle, there’s a swimming pool in your room”, we had moved everything out of harms way.

The rain was still showing no sign of letting up so Phillip and I quickly lined up five buckets outside to gather water and give me a break from pumping and carrying for a few days. Then we took the plunge to see what other people were up to. Behind House Nine a team of girls were taking advantage of the abundant water to scrub the drains that run around and behind each of our houses. They were laughing and, their eyes squinting in the wet, trying to encourage me to show them a film that evening. House Two were washing their veranda. The boys at House Five were out front in their underwear aiming karate kicks at the sheets of rain. Now soaked through I decided I may as well go the whole hog and washed my hair. Phillip had grabbed Amidu and the two of them were saving my room from destruction and by the time they were done a few others would arrive as the buzz of excited, opportunist industry would build to a crescendo. In typical acts of respect and affection two girls fought over who would wash my flip flops, another asked if she could wash my door mat, a fourth started to wipe my veranda, a fifth and sixth would collect the full buckets, empty them into the barrel in my bathroom and replace them. Amidu and Phillip would move on to wash the picnic table at the front of my house and that done scrub the walls, a task which Joseph also joined in to help with.

Slowly the rain began to ease and then stop all together. Little insects I had never seen before started to buzz around in the cool air and the kids told me how good they taste when fried or parched. With an, “I’ll show you”, Massah jumped down from my veranda and ran after something she could see but I could not. After a short but amusing chase she darted back and, having pulled the wings, popped the little guy in her mouth. She chewed for a second before sticking out her tongue where the remains of a bug rested. “If I fry some would you eat them, Uncle?”

Of course I will Massah.

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As so often is the case with times like yesterday in a place like this there is another side of the coin. Because as we excitedly enjoyed the change of weather and made the most of the abundance, some others in the villages were hoping this would not happen.

People have had time to burn their farms as this rain is far from early. Using machetes (called cutlasses here) and rudimentary axes, farmers go in to areas of bush in teams and, felling trees at an impressive rate, hack out an area which they then burn and plant. It is hard work and with poisonous plants, falling wood and flying machetes, far from safe. A friend of mine recently visited our clinic with a large gash of a machete wound in his hand. I observed and assisted at the clinic as this strong farmer winced through the stinging, cleaning process and the nurse struggled to get the needle through the tough skin of his palm as she stitched him up. But the rains held off for a decent length of time and so every day for weeks, on at least one place on the sky line, a grey pillar has been seen rising up. On Saturday a ferocious fire raged behind a thick section of bush visible from my house. The fire reds and yellows could be seen through and on both side of the bush green and the smoke streamed up in shades of grey, purple and black.

So it was not the farms that I was so concerned about but something a lot simpler, more basic. The last time I was in Ngolala my friend Brima had pointed to the top of his house where the thatch had fallen away. “I am praying that it won’t rain tonight or everything will be soaked”, he said. Again, the time should have been there for Brima and his grandfather to sort out their thatch but, as my own window showed, this was the kind of rain that tested every defence and, where that was found wanting, would take no prisoners. The rainy season will pose this kind of question throughout so it won’t come as any surprise to anyone in the villages. But it is just another one of the things on a fairly lengthy list that can make life uncomfortable, and at times darn right deadly, for the people around me.

A ramble through Culture, Jon and Junks

Jon Krakauer knows how to break my heart. First with the haunting, agonizing Into The Wild and then the enthralling, crushing Into Thin Air he shares intimate, wonderfully crafted stories of the strength of the human spirit, the beauty found at the fringes of the world and the precarious grip we have on life. Amidst many other things. In one aside in Into Thin Air Krakauer comments on western influence on the Sherpa people so relied on by those wishing to climb Mount Everest. I wanted to share...

“Longtime visitors to the Khumbu are saddened by the boom in tourism and the change it has wrought on what early Western climbers regarded as an earthly paradise, a real-life Shangri-La. Entire valleys have been denuded of trees to meet the increased demand for firewood. Teens hanging out in Namche Carrom parlors are more likely to be wearing jeans and Chicago Bulls T-shirts than quaint traditional robes. Families are apt to spend their evenings huddled around video players viewing the latest Schwarzenegger opus.

The transformation of the Khumbu culture is certainly not all for the best, but I didn’t hear many Sherpas bemoaning the changes. Hard currency from trekkers and climbers, as well as grants from international relief organisations supported by trekkers and climbers, have funded schools and medical clinics, reduced infant mortality, built footbridges, and brought hydroelectric power to Namche and other villages. It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum.”

Before I came to Sierra Leone, Leech requested two things. 1 – “Don’t cut your hair until you come home.” I managed this Samson-like lifestyle for about four and a half months, which was about as long as cultural sensitivity and the girls’ incessant desire to braid my ginger locks would allow. 2 – “Bring me back some genuine African jewellery, not that mass produced crap you get in Topman. I want something with a story.” The problem is that even here the demand for such things has meant that they are (fairly) mass produced (not that we’re exactly in a tourism hotspot) so the stuff you can buy on the street or in one of the craft markets looks awfully like the kind of crap you can get in Topman. Indeed it quickly became obvious, if I didn’t already know, that if I wanted to buy some genuine, “it’s what the locals wear everyday” African gear I should go to an Oxfam shop anywhere in the world and pick the first t-shirt I see. Visitors to Sierra Leone might accuse me of over stating my case – plenty of people regularly wear bright gara and lace cloth tailored with African style and lappas are worn all the time. But it is true that the “non-African” is as common as the “African”.

Second-hand clothes are big business globally, worth something like $1 billion annually. More than 1.7 million tonnes of used clothes were imported into Sierra Leone from the US alone in 2007, worth $1.4 million, a figure up 141% on the year before. So Nyandewa regularly wears her yellow “Ditch Him” t-shirt (though she seems to have now passed it on to a smaller sister), oblivious to the meaning until I embarrassed her with it. Festus, who I call “Little Chief” on account of his father’s position in the nearest village, has come to primary school in an oversized purple t-shirt saying, “Tighten your bra straps...” on the front and “...we’re coming for you” on the back. A little girl in Gbangbatok, the market town where I went for court, wore a U2 Elevation Tour t-shirt, though no-one here has heard of Bono. And when you walk the streets of Freetown you are greeted with huge mounds of clothes, known as “junks”, from one of which I pulled the renowned 30p shirt. The question is, as posed by Krakauer, should this western influence be lamented? Is what is affected just the tourist’s romantic picture of the traditional Africa or something more important?

I don’t know jack about anthropology but my own observation and thoughts suggested that there is what I will call “surface culture” i.e. the way people dress, what they eat, how they entertain themselves, and “deep culture” i.e. the way people interact with one another, how people view the world around them, spirituality etc. These two layers of culture would interact and influence one another. For example if people eat out of one dish as they do in Sierra Leone that has an effect on, or says something about, how people relate to one another. Arlene has more of a clue about what she is talking about than me when it comes to most things and so I asked her. She outlined one idea of how culture is built. At the core we have the value system and world view of a people which influences their institutions, behaviour and so on. So it is the wrong order to see those people eating out of their one dish and wonder what impact that has on their value system but we have things the right side up if we question what this behaviour tells us about their value system. Having said that, over time both external and internal influencers will see those value systems and world views change.

So what do we have to say about people in Sierra Leone exchanging their traditional clothes for second hand goodies from…oh I dunno…Wisconsin? Particularly since a lot of this is opportunistic...the stuff they can get at the junks is simply cheaper. And thinking about what Krakauer said, do the people themselves care? Certainly the President seems concerned about Western influence on Sierra Leone’s “surface culture”. Ernest Bai Koroma has issued a presidential decree that every Friday should be a celebration of Sierra Leonean culture. Everyone should wear traditional dress, should eat traditional food, dance traditional dances and sing traditional songs. On the food front, to those of us who are doing our surviving on rice and plassas (sauce) the question is begged, “What is the President eating the rest of the week?” Many of those who have the luxury of picking and choosing have listened but most people wear what they’ve got and make their way to their farms every Friday just as the men in their village have always done. You would have to ask Ernest himself if he is keen for people to hold on to the traditional because he wants to retain something of the romantic image of the past or because he is concerned about the impact these things have on, or what they say about, his country’s culture.

Indeed when we think about what the “real” Sierra Leone should look like we do not find an easy answer. What Sierra Leone has been left with as a post-colonial state is a hybrid of cultures. Things like its political system and educational system have been shaped by its formerly (presently?) subservient relationship to the “West” (at that time Britain). The culturally vital area of language is in Sierra Leone a study of this hybridity. English is the language of education but throughout the country various other tribal languages are spoken, the two most common being Timne and Mende. The “fear” should not be that as education increases English becomes more widely spoken for surely that ability is vital in today’s world, but rather that those other languages could be allowed to die out. For now though we can only dream of an education system of such impact. But what is really interesting in this regard is Krio – a language created by the ex-slaves whose arrival (or placement) in the 19th Century marked the birth of the modern Sierra Leone, a language which evolved out of these people’s knowledge of English with influences from Spanish, Portuguese and various African languages. In Krio we perhaps have an analogy through which to see today’s Sierra Leone. A society unmistakably branded by the transatlantic slave trade, the years of colonialism which followed and evolving in the atmosphere of what many see as American cultural imperialism but one which is still unmistakably “African” – although that concept is surely as thin as “Western”.

If you listen to the radio you hear Akon and Nelly and, I’m as surprised as you are, Westlife, but you also have the, as popular, Brick and Lace, Al Haji, Pupa Banja, Emmerson and so on whose music is utterly influenced by the brand of hip hop which has come out of black America but who have created their own sounds. And, just as such a conversation on culture should do, we see the influences working both ways, with black American hip hop originally finding its beating heart in Africa. People here, like the Sherpa brothers and sisters they have never heard of, love to watch “Schwarzen” movies and other Hollwood delights (Particular love is held for Hollywood’s depiction of Asian culture and the Kung Fu fests that they are), and surely film is the most “American” of all mediums, but they will regularly tell you that they prefer the movies that flood out of Nigeria. When I watch these Nollywood productions I see bad acting, bad lighting, bad editing and worse stories. People here see, “the kind of things that are happening all around us right now!”

But if Arlene’s model is to be followed then the issue is not that the wearing of the clothes will affect the culture but that rather what is worn represents a value that was already there. Could this be about how people see themselves, their community, their relationship with the rest of the world and their aspirations? In the words of one of the security guards COTN employs, “Sierra Leone is hell. America is heaven.” Reaching America or the UK is deemed tantamount to success. Just get there and everything will be okay is the belief and such is the hardship seen all around here that the stories that filter back which would suggest that maybe that idea needs to be measured slightly are all but ignored. In terms of education the dream is closer to reality. Come back to Sierra Leone, a place with a desperately poor education system made worse by the reality of corrupt lecturers and examiners, with a degree from overseas, somewhere like the US, the UK or Russia and your chance of getting a good job sky rocket – or perhaps that too is just what people think. Robert Gates, the US Secretary of Defence and former head of the CIA recently commented, “Even those who hate us the most wear American college sweatshirts and want to go to American colleges and universities.”

The main problem that all of this stuff draws out is perhaps a lot more simple than the ramble I have embarked on here. It is this – Sierra Leoneans want to leave in their droves. And once they leave they rarely come back and indeed, as I have heard a number of grumbles suggest, nor do they send much back either. The prevalence of American fashion, food and especially media, advertises what people aspire to, what they consider “the good life” to be and where they consider it to be found. A lot of the problem is that America is quite simply THERE. The only way that the effect that this has on people’s aspirations can be affected is by providing people with the opportunity of enjoying “the good life” right where they are. Wearing a country cloth shirt on Fridays ain’t gonna do it. Mr Koroma can try and shift the blame on to the t-shirts as much as he likes but, as attractive and reasonably priced as they may be, I’m still looking at him.

Jon Krakaeur...he can get a guy thinking...

A Dusting

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the dust. It rose in great clouds as excited feet kicked it up into the darkness. And as the evening joyously wore on it was given less and less chance to settle back to earth. It would make more sense really if my less rhythmic feet had joined the visceral movement of the night a little later, when their clumsiness would be missed amidst the frenzy of the dance. But in fact my own were amongst the first to stamp in the dirt, when young, songful voices surrounded me and pleaded for movement, their innocent enthusiasm and irrepressible sense of fun too much for any of the inhibitions I might have tried to muster. Games and songs and much more impressive dance followed as I enjoyed being immersed in this experience of a village coming together to enjoy itself.

And enjoy itself it did. The music was provided by its own mouths, its own instruments, its own hands. The laughter was provided by its own exuberance, the songs and games from its own collective memory. And the dance was also provided from within itself...it’s children, it’s young people, it’s elders, each taking their turn in the clapping and singing circle that was the limelight. There is something exceptionally special about the older people in a family delighting in the antics of its children and the children in a family delighting in the clowning around of its elders. At a moment when some of the teenage boys showed signs of shyness, a village elder demanded their participation with a few stern words and looks before practising what he preached with a manic chicken-style dance that was greeted with general hilarity. This was an evening when the village would enjoy itself; it would be itself that it would enjoy and it would enjoy every last part, not a single morsel of movement should go to waste.

I had arrived in this village, Senahum in the late afternoon, joining my friend Andy who was staying there with his adopted African family for a few days. We had been served up steaming bowls of groundnut soup with the rice which we had helped cultivate about six months before (we had spent a morning weeding on the farm...I am confident that without my deft touch the crop would have failed), unashamedly giggled like school girls as we washed with scalding hot water by torchlight in the rather open open-air shower facility (nipple high sticks weaved together in a c shape) and the next morning would give ourselves blisters wielding (not carrying, not using, wielding) cutlasses (machetes) as we helped one of the village elders fell trees to make space for a farm in the bush. The memory of my short time there simply drips with delight though the harsh character of the life endured by those who were caring for me also comes in to focus.

Throughout our time the eight month old baby who brought us all together, Baby Andy, sat and sucked on the little toy his American older brother had brought for him or curled himself up in the arms of one of his large family, oblivious to the wonder of what he is responsible for. Dust. That was how my night in the village of Senahum would end. In a cloud of dust. Dust which rose up and swirled amidst a village full of songs and laughter and love.

Reunion

“Have you heard of the Beatles?” My mother’s question was met by silence as an illustration for her Junior Secondary School Technology class proved to require a little more explanation than she had first thought. Both my parents and two good friends visited Ngolala recently for about two weeks. It was a great time for me to share with them and I thoroughly enjoyed watching them be put to work, aiding various parts of our ministry in different ways. I often wonder what our kids really think of all these visitors that come and go. Is it unsettling or simply exciting fun? Does it leave them feeling special and loved or do broken promises of “I’ll be back!” leave a bitterness and cynicism about those who claim to love? I hope it is a positive experience on the whole. For me this latest visit was a special time to share loved ones with loved ones and also offered important perspective on my life here. In Sierra Leone people joke that when you see your mother for the first time in a while, “U de go suck bobby”, that is, “You are going to breastfeed”. So my family’s arrival also saw me in the strange position of being the subject of countless breast feeding comments.

The very first thing that I discovered when my family arrived at Lungi airport was that I am tanned. Always looking pasty and white beside my African friends and family, the Irish contingent proved that everything is relative and I looked positively brown beside those so recently shovelling their way through snow. Also, as we travelled to beautiful Banta and the conversation in the back seat of our vehicle saw repeated expressions of fascination at the sights and sounds around us I was struck by how normal such things have become for me. I live in Africa and while I have not allowed myself to forget the wonder of that fact it does feel, however ridiculous this may be, kind of normal.

Today I walked for an hour with two teachers from our school and the older boys from our children’s home to fish in a large river. We fished for an hour or two in the sunshine before rods were left on the river bank and bodies were thrown into the cool water. I gave some impromptu swimming lessons, practised paddling a dugout canoe and rather recklessly toyed with sunburn (but emerged unscathed). Before we had begun we went to greet the local town chief to make sure our day out had his blessing and I put a group of women gathering for polio vaccinations in to stitches by joining in with the cultural dance they were welcoming the medical team with. When bellies started to feel a little empty we returned to this village to fill them up (not with fish mind you). I dozed in a string hammock and before we left five of the boys would be stung with four cuts of a cane across the butt for sneaking back to the water for unsupervised swimming time. As we trekked through the bush on the way home the boys bundled up wood to give to their aunties and as I reached my front door Massah arrived with the fresh smelling laundry she had asked if she could wash that morning. On the one hand these are quite remarkable things to make up your day. On the other it was really rather normal.

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As the four wheel drive that would carry my parents to the airport pulled away from the COTN childrens’ home and headed off in to darkness just before dawn, lots of our home aunties waved them off with me. They had already started provoking and teasing me, in an affectionate way, about how I was going to cry now that my parents were leaving. Mummy Josephine, the home mother (in charge of all our carers), pulled her bottom eyelid down with her finger and said, “Oh, Mummy don go!” (“Mummy has gone”) and then laughed at me. They were as bad as the children who had been at it for a few days and would continue for a few more. In one moment of somewhat black humour one of the girls, Hawa, commented, “Ha, your parents are going, so we will all be the same soup. We don’t have parents and neither will you, so we will be the same soup again.” So the aunties followed their children’s lead and teased me before heading back to their houses to make the children their breakfast. Just before that though Mummy Elizabeth put her arm around my shoulders and said “Don’t worry Uncle Mark, you have lot’s of mothers here”, a comment which was greeted with loud agreement from the others. It was all just what I needed.