“Howdi buddi?” - “Small small”

Here I am with an update from Freetown. We’ve accompanied David around the capital to visit a wealth of friends and relatives, and the above greeting has now entered our active vocabulary.

Freetown is a very interesting city, it is dense with houses that descend down green and red slopes to greet the Atlantic ocean. The streets are filled with cars and are lined by pedestrians that often carry large loads on their heads. There is a constant clamor of horns, voices, private power generators and engines. At night, most of the city goes pitch dark as the electrical grid hasn’t been working for more than three months now. Strolling through the city with David is in itself an immense learning experience, and we’ve felt nothing but welcome.

Now, as for a follow-up on my last post: We’ve held four key meetings, and they were all successful. First, we met with the Health Officer at UNICEF, and we agreed on the provision of the nets. Also, we agreed that research should be at the centre of our project. This means that the test of our project will be the results from the District Health Team’s surveys, in relation to the initial survey we will help conduct when we go to Sahn Malen.

Next day, we first met with the Representative for UNICEF in Sierra Leone, Geert Cappaelaere, (see picture below) and he fully endorsed our efforts. Later on that day, we met with the District Medical Officer of the Pujehun district, who welcomed our project warmly, but we didn’t go beyond arranging dates.

The final meeting that day was with the Chief of Sahn Malen village, who is also the chief representing in parliament all the chiefs from the Pujehun district. He also welcomed the project, and this meeting served mainly to square our understandings of the project. All of these meetings were supportive and gave a further boost to our enthusiasm for this project and confirmed it. One thing is to plan a project by making conference calls and sending e-mails, another thing is to be on the ground in a (to me) new country and meet everybody face to face.

Chief

Girl playing at David’s

The venue of the last meeting was David’s family’s house in Freetown. We’ve spent a good deal of time there, and I’ve uploaded a few pictures from the veranda, from a chilled-out afternoon. David’s father and brothers stay in Freetown, but his mother and sister live in Bo Town, where we are going on Tuesday. David’s father and eldest brother have already gone ahead to Sahn Malen via Bo Town to prepare the project and set up the survey. Before we join them, we’ll pick up Jacob Lennheden, possibly do a radio show, and hold a few meetings about possibly bringing Être: The face of human rights, a travelling exhibition, to Sierra Leone (more on that later).

As the pictures indicate, we’ve been doing other things than holding meetings in Freetown. We’ve met up with several graduates and students of United World Colleges, We’ve enjoyed the fresh fruit that is available from every street corner (even though they’re out of season) and we’ve traversed many different parts of Freetown. Additionally, we’ve been to the public Lumbley beach on a day with almost no rain, where the Atlantic Ocean was beating relentlessly upon the shore, the smell of salt was carried by a warm breeze and the soothing, luke warm water of the ocean surrounded our feet.

That was all for now from Freetown where the rain has returned and we expect it to stay along with the blackout, the clamor of noise and the amazing, tropical landscape.

“We go see”

-Mathias

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Eradicate Malaria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.