Cabin Time

It's youth camp and I am sitting down with my group of older boys talking to them about their day and seeing what they thought of some of the lessons taught. This room is usually used to house our primary school's Class One but we have converted it to a camp dorm by putting palm frond thatch and old mosquito nets over the windows. My group is sitting on a thin foam mattress which will later be used by at least three of them to sleep on. Some of the others have just a cotton lappa spread on the concrete floor which won't do anything to make them more comfortable but will keep the floor's dust off them as they sleep. Another lappa, shared of course, will help their snuggled bodies keep warm during the cold rainy season night. We are talking about peer pressure and nature, a strange combination guided by a little piece of paper of scribbled questions someone placed in my hand. My boys are tired after a day of games and songs and rice dinners but they are interested in the conversation. One of them translates in Mende for another struggling to understand my Krio.

Suddenly we hear a loud crash and we exchange brief puzzled glances. Something must have been dropped or have fallen in one of the other primary school classrooms. There is a beat of what would pass at camp for quietness and I am about to continue with a question when the sound of a host of people shrieking together rises up from somewhere else in the building. The sound increases in intensity, is accompanied by the sound of feet pounding on concrete and seems to be rushing in our direction. For a second panic stretches time out between its white knuckled fists and my head spins with unanswered questions. What is happening? Is someone hurt? Is there fear amidst these cries? What is being run from? What can I do?

Suddenly a huge rat bursts through the door to our room and relief washes over me as the pandemonium intensifies. Memory always balloons the size of animals in these kinds of stories but this was a big brown beast of a thing and it was darting around the room desperately searching for a way out that ceased to exist the moment one of the boys slammed the door shut behind it. The hunt was on.

Our neat little groups of boys burst apart as some people dived out of the way of our furry intruder while others dived after it. Chaos soared around the room as frenetically as the rat scuttled and the boys kicked, stamped and tried to catch. One of my interns hurdled the animal as it made its way to a corner where about four boys threw themselves down on it only to see it slip through their frantic fingers. Adrenaline was pumping through everyone but none more so surely then our prey who was now making his way in my direction. Stepping back I aimed a toe poke to the face in his direction which knocked his solid body off course but did little to halt his determined but panicked progress. Another kick sent him amongst the mattresses and a boy threw a bundled sheet on him which a third stamped on. The rodent warrior kept going and sprinted around the corners of the room until finally, finally, he felt a jerk from behind. One of the boys had thrown himself to the ground and come up with a tail in his upper hand. With a yank and a swing of his shoulder, Gogra windmilled his terrified target face first in to the floor. Once. Twice.

This was the peak of the action and details were confused by the amount of sweaty bodies that were jumping and running and throwing and the amount of dust and noise that was kicked up. Samuel, with a piece of lumber in his right hand (pulled from who knows where), would also claim the kill but it was Gogra who held the brute aloft to the roar of the crowd and marched it out of the room. It would be handed over to a security guard and eventually find its way in to a cooking pot somewhere. The laughter, shouting and retelling of the story lasted for a few more moments and then the boys reformed themselves in to their groups. Bedlam disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived and we settled back down on our mattresses.

“So, where were we?”

Old Watering Holes

Return to old watering holes for more than water – friends and dreams are there to meet you.

African Proverb

I wish I could have met Hilary Lyons. She was born in Mayo, in the west of Ireland, but she lived a large part of her life serving as a doctor and a nun in a place called Serabu in Sierra Leone. It just so happens that this is down the road from my home in Ngolala and the hospital which Sister Hilary helped build up between the 1950s and the 1990s is where we take our kids when they get sick. Her book, “Old Watering Holes” paints a great picture of a life's journey I connect with deeply. Sister Hilary even contributed to the training of our own head nurse in Ngolala, one of my African mothers, Mummy Jombla.

One of the things Sister Hilary's story leaves you with is an expanded idea of the destruction the war brought to Sierra Leone. So much of what could be said to be Sister Hilary's life's work was destroyed when the convent and hospital were burned to the ground in 1995 by, in the words of Mummy Jombla, “those stupid boys.” The destruction was far wider than this however as the barbaric violence of those years would also have disastrous consequences for so many of the people Sister Hilary had trained in her hospital and partnered with to create community health committees. You are left with a deep sadness for a place so brutally dragged back to a kind of square one, a sadness intensified by the knowledge of how long lasting and painful the consequences of that have been for this part of this country.

When in Serabu with one of our children recently I took some time away from her sick bed to walk around the grounds. The burned ruins of Sister Hilary's convent and some of the other buildings around it are still there and I stood amongst them for moments which felt edged with a kind of holiness. The utter peace of what was a natural memorial garden stood in sharp contrast to the violent way in which it was created. Small, swallow-like birds were sailing through the air and I tried to imagine the place as Sister Hilary would have seen it. She describes with great affection this part of her world, its flowers and its soul soothing serenity. I wondered about how God feels when he looks at what we do to one another and to the artistry of his creation. It is strange to feel such sadness and such beauty so palpably in the same place and at the same moment but, as Sister Hilary would have known better than me, Sierra Leone has a way of bringing those feelings together.