We’ve just added a few pictures of Bomai to Sam’s blogpost of the same title.

You can see the images and read the blogpost here: www.gmin.org/blog/bomai

There’s also a picture of Kroobay at the very end.

Enjoy!

If you're new here, you may want to read about the project this blog is about. Thanks for visiting!

Click on a thumbnail below to see bigger version.

- The GMin team

Balancing a bucket of water on my head I tried to make my way back to the Chief’s guest house. I sidestepped the recently created puddle of mud, but I was defenseless when drops of water kept falling on the tip of my nose. I could hear our neighbors cheer at the sight of a 6’ 3” Poomuin attempting to help out with one tiny part of the housekeeping, and after two perilous minutes I had made it back.

After doing my one chore of the day, I chased out 3 baby geckos from under our couch to the great amusement of the constant crowd of 10 tupui (kids) who look through the windows of our veranda.

Everyone called out “Jacob” when I toured the village last night with Clement Wright. I tried to explain to every one that “Nja biye mia a Mathias”, but today I am still addressed as either “Jacob” or “Poomuin”. Others ask “When will Jacob come?”

GMin is back in Sahn Malen! (or at least “Jacob” is ). Jacob Lennheden is a GMin member who won popularity and fame on the soccer field during GMin’s first distribution of mosquito nets in 2007. Let’s see if the guys from the Harvard club soccer team can knock him off his throne.

We are to meet the paramount chief here in Sahn to discuss exactly which villages will receive nets, and we also plan to meet the local Red Cross unit and the District Health Medical Team in Pujehun. We are not doing another distribution in Sahn, rather we are targeting the surrounding villages who have not yet received nets.

Carlos and Faaez have met the 30 children who received XO computers in December. They have met with the principals of the two primary schools in town and are preparing the distribution of 100 more XOs. You can read much more about their project on their blog.

Things are peaceful here in Sahn, but there are also tragic moments. Three children passed away on the very day we arrived. One had gotten a fever the night before, and the next day he was no longer with us. We don’t know what happened to the other two.

In another event, one of our most important contacts here in Sahn, David’s cousin Ibrahim, was feeling feverish yesterday. We used one our rapid diagnostic test for malaria, and, to our consternation, it was positive. We went to the health clinic and Ibrahim got 24 arteminisin amodiaquine tablets to be taken 8 a day.

Malaria and other illnesses are very real here in Sahn Malen, and we are happy that our nets might protect the people of the Malen chiefdom who have welcomed us so warmly.

David and I will return to Freetown next week to receive Lauge and Justin, to buy supplies and to make sure that the nets arrive to the chiefdom on time. We’ve created a distribution plan to cover all the villages, and now we need to set up town meetings, organize the soccer tournament and, well, go house to house and distribute all the nets. Things are coming together, and we are very excited for the coming month where more than a year’s worth of hard work will be implemented.

- Mathias

A few things I thought would be fun:

• I’m known by—and now introduce myself as—“Chake.”
• My favorite billboard thus far: “Light skin? The latest cream for body success.”
• In case you were wondering: A cab ride costs Le800 = ¢25; a Star Beer costs Le1000 = ¢30; our guesthouse, the lovely Maria Nella, costs Le35,000 per night = $10.
• Sam, on his first night in town, was complimented on his fine “structure.”
• Many young people here go by rapping names, or at least many of those who hang out at David’s do. There’s Cisco, T-Max, Tatt, and Nelly, and Mathias has been dubbed—inexplicably—Akon. My efforts for Tupac fell through pretty quickly, I’m sorry to say.
• Clem and Mathias are doing pretty well in Krio; Sam and I can count to ten in Mende. Just ask me. I can also say “This food is delicious. Thanks.”
• If you were wondering how long it would take my shoes to turn from their gleaming, schoolboy white to a clay-colored brown, your answer is: one day.

- Jake

Now that much of the crew is assembled, it’s time to meet with the main government entities overseeing our distribution campaign. First was the National Malaria Control Program, under the leadership of the affable Dr. Baker and his lieutenant Dr. Bangura. Mathias had explained our project to Dr. Baker, but our morning meeting introduced the entire upper-level staff of the NMCP to our small campaign. They promised us 5000 sets of rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for malaria, and brought in the head of microscopy in Freetown’s major hospital to teach us how to use them. After a detailed presentation, we practiced using lancets—essentially sharp, metal toothpicks—to give each other finger pricks. We left with sore fingers but a whole lot of malaria tests.

Next, we met with the head of the national center for disease prevention (an analog to America’s CDC). He explained that in 2006, there had been a national distribution of 800,000 nets, but with a relatively low usage rate. After we explained our project, he expressed his hopes that our methods would prove effective.
Another day, and another big meeting. Thursday morning, we met with the head of logistics and the point person for malaria control at the national Red Cross branch. The Red Cross, being the group that had graciously allowed us to piggyback on their cargo container to get our nets across the Atlantic, also gave us permission to borrow their motorbikes to transport nets across villages in Malen. A major success for us, and another much-appreciated assist from the Red Cross. By Thursday, Carlos and Faaez got in from their OLPC Corp training in Rwanda, so they scheduled a meeting at the Ministry of Education. On Monday, we have our last meeting, at the Ministry of Health. It’s been a busy week.

- Jake

On my second full day in Freetown, the GMin team was introduced to what the city councilor called the poorest slum in the world. We met with two of David’s friends, Maada and T-Max, who intended to start an aid project for the slum. Together we walked down the hill towards an area of rising smoke. At the beginning of an alleyway, we met the councilor, who led us to an imposing wall of trash. Skirting the wall, we passed hogs and stepped over a lean goat before reaching the entrance to a city’s largest garbage dump, home to about 2000 men, women, and children.

A road had been cleared for dump trucks. Children scavenged through the piles looking for spare rubber, usable wood, toys. The smoke emanated from a number of trash fires—our guide told us that they were spontaneous, coming from large deposits of natural gas underneath the site, but my intuition told me that, as in many such locations around the world, the garbage was being burned for the simpler reason of disposal. This was all the more essential because on top of the piles—amazingly, insanely—women were planting potato leaves and harvesting cassava.

Our guide told us the road we were walking on, along with a few brick lots that had been cleared, were part of a £150-million project run by a large aid organization—another testament to the inefficiencies of high-overhead NGOs. [Author pats GMin on its metaphorical back.] In the meantime, the government had given up on the area. The pipes that were supposed to move stagnant liquid waste to the ocean had been clogged, and they pooled in deep, mud-colored puddles, only weeks before the heavy rains and their resultant floods.

As we walked, we were introduced to many of the men in the area. I was struck by both their desperation and their clarity of purpose. Of the dozen or so people I spoke with, I heard the same needs repeated, and they weren’t what I expected. “Public toilets and a community center,” one man in a Burger King t-shirt with bloodshot malarial eyes told me. “We need help.” Many asked us exactly what we could do, when we could come back, tactfully but forcefully willing us to take on the tragic poignancy of their lives. It was a difficult and moving experience.

After two hours, and after meeting with garbage farmers, fishermen, the harbormaster, and being touched and high-fived inquisitively by a huge number of children, we walked up a hill towards the road. We met later with Maada and T-Max, along with the district councilor, to discuss project ideas. The Sierra Leonean students had settled on the ambitious, much-needed community health center, and we developed a work plan for how to go about researching the costs, preparing a proposal, and raising money for the project, pledging to help in what ways we could.

Bomai was an eye opener. We’re leaving Monday to help a region plagued by malaria, but we’re leaving a city dogged with so many problems that malaria hardly rates. It’s a frightening thought.

The nearby Kroo Bay where living conditions are equally horrendous.

- Sam

I had already made a mistake. Less than twelve hours after I arrived in the airport across the bay from Freetown, I’d let down my guard. The old traveler’s wisdom about the third world is that food poisoning comes in hamburgers and pizza, and rarely in local cuisine, but the breakfast menu at our guesthouse and an ambitious appetite sold me on the sausage and baked beans. I didn’t realize until later the irony of the thing—that I had come these few thousands miles to eat Bangers n’ Beans in a section of the city called New England—but I realized quickly that here, sausages mean hotdogs sliced along their equator and baked beans come straight from a refreshingly cool can.

I had flown into Freetown via London the night before. Clem met me in Heathrow after his more circuitous DC-Chicago route, and Sam and Mathias collected us at Lungi. After getting our bags, we were thrown into a white van with a spare tire as a seat, hazard lights blinking in the place of break lights, and an interior lamp that flicked on and off like a strobe light as we rushed to catch the 9pm ferry. We arrived at 10:15, which it seems was twenty minutes early for the trip across the bay, and by a little after midnight we were tucked into our mosquito net on the western side of town.
Freetown is built on a peninsula on the Atlantic on the underside of Africa’s bulge. It’s ringed by short, steep hills—some of the only mountains to reach the coast of West Africa—and the city center is a large cotton tree. To a newbie it is utterly confusing. Cabs honk incessantly in an effort to procure passengers, or else to warn other drivers of their whereabouts, or maybe for the thrill and joy of the horn itself—some short and shrill, others mellow, a few fancy ones that sound like sirens or army bugle tunes. The sidewalks, such as they are, are built next to and on top of deep, stagnant gutters, and the walkways have an alarming number of holes and missing sections which make the black, nighttime walks a long series of leaps into the unknown. Vendors hawk grilled meat, candy, soap, calculators, and plastic bags filled with water on every street side. Orange-and-black iguanas and lean dogs make up the majority street fauna, along with cats and the occasional goat. Everywhere—fascinatingly—are advertisements for cell phones and plan upgrades.

Most of us in the group are a people apart on the streets of Freetown; our white skin makes us the object of every hawker’s marketing pitch, the hope of every begging child and opportunistic cabbie, and that strange mix of dignitary and lab specimen that everyone wants to meet and children want to giggle at. Even with all of that, though, I feel a strange comfort on the streets of the city. I have yet to feel unsafe, even coming home on the streets at 4am. When I turn down the latest sales pitch, sellers don’t, for the most part, persist to the point of frustration. Though most cab drivers initially quadruple the set fare prices, nearly all allow me to bargain down to the conventional price. There’s a sense of fairness here, a willingness to accept the presence of strangers and a remarkable hopefulness in the karma of friendship that’s been something of a shock to me.

I didn’t get sick that first day—Mathias took that honor—and I haven’t yet. Our experiences have been so varied and so jumbled in my still-reeling head that it wouldn’t do to list them here. Let me say instead that I’m in love with Maltina, the local malty soft drink, and I’m becoming arch-enemies with Star, the local malty beer. I’ve eaten potato leaf and groundnut stew and krein krein and three whole spicy peppers on a bet. Thankfully, after a week, the adrenaline-fueled need to swallow every detail of this city of 1.2 million is finally—though just—beginning to wear off. But the awe of Freetown’s chaotic roadways, its citizen’s alternate humor and desperation, the town’s unique charm and annoyances, and the nightly lightening storms over the bay that never quite make it into the city—these are things that don’t wear off, these are the things that stick.

- Jake