A day on the beach
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So, I arrived in Sierra Leone 2 nights ago, and was a part of a the nation’s most popular radio Show. What a start.
My flight went well, and the entire original GMin Team is now gathered in Freetown. Yesterday we had some meetings concerning another project which David is also working on. So far it has been really interesting. Just walking down the streets of Freetown is an experience in itself. Despite the fact that the city is very poor, people are really friendly and people don’t seem to be out to cheat you when you are shopping as a tourist (unlike many other countries I’ve visited).
We had a small accident last night that made it even clearer why Mosquito nets are so important and essential for Sierra Leone.
Last evening, we went to the beach to chill out and have a nice time. We took a swim in the warm and salty water and everything was perfect. All our of a sudden a big wave caught Mathias by surprise and he was smacked to the ocean floor and had a small concussion as well as a wound in his head. Fortunately, some friendly people helped us, and we got him to the hospital where he got three stitches and a bit of rest. The doctors were very skillful and Mathias was walking again within 2 hours, but the hospital itself was in a terrible condition. Mathias was put in a ward to rest with 8 other people, where 2 suffered from malaria, and 1 from yellow fever. The rest of them I do not know.
The place had no mosquito nets, so mosquitos flew around in the room all the time, transferring malaria from the sick people to the healthy people.
After 5 minutes of rest the room went dark and the nurses lit candles. Initially I thought it was a kind of ritual or something like that - but it turns out that Freetown hasn’t had electricity for 3 months and everybody is therefore highly dependent on private generators, which the hospital, in order to save money, turned off in the evening. They only kept it on for our sake…
Except for that little accident, all is good. Mathias os fine again, and so is his head. So no worries. Elections are coming up in a month’s time, and all over the streets people are campaigning for their respective parties. It seems like it is going to be a close race between All Peoples Congress (APC) and Sierra Leonean People’s Party (SLPP). The parties are each allocated specific days for campaigning, and on those days the streets are filled with the party colours red (APC), green (SLPP) and orange (People’s Movement for Democratic Change).
We expect to see many more parades when we come back from Bo Town later this month.
The mood is very high in our team and we function well together. We are all looking forward to starting the project itself - which will hopefully be on Friday when we go to Sahn Malen via Bo Town.
We are trying to shoot a lot of video and pictures, but uploading them onto the blog is a bit difficult since the internet is very slow and unstable. We will do our best though. Do keep on reading.
-Jacob