So, this is a blog post. I said I would do these before I left for Salone, but have I been doing them? No. Di internet no de. Or in English, the severe lack of internet in this country greatly limits my ability to tell you about the thrilling life of a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone. But, as it turns out, when it comes to writing about the glamorous life of a Peace Corps volunteer I just find it hard to put it all into words.
So here are my daily activities:
1. Running in the morning with everyone in town yelling at me in Temne and asking me if I am running. Apparently the white sweaty man puts on a good show.
2. School: The place where I teach teenagers how to read, write, and speak English. I spend a lot of time sitting around with the other teachers and talking about America, religion, and the frustrations of life in Salone.
3. After school: The period of the day where I spend time reading on my verandah, sitting and staring on my verandah, sitting and staring on my neighbors verandah, and then the occasional walk to my site mate’s school which has a library with solar power and satellite television. Pawn Stars and Storage Wars still manage to captivate me here in Sierra Leone. I also sometimes go on walks around town which includes people yelling at me in Themne, people offering me their baby as a wife, children grabbing my hands to walk with me, and then more people yelling at me in Themne.
4. Night: Once the sun goes down I go and after listening to the BBC to feel like I know what’s going in the world, I go into my tiny house and call it a day.
All in all, life is good here. My neighbors make sure I am well fed and healthy. There are days where they keep on giving me food that I cannot possibly eat so I end up feeding all the children in the area. They also help me wash my clothes and get water. In other words, they are some of my best friends here.
Occasionally students from my school come to visit me and ask me questions about English, but most of the time I hang out with my friend Obay, a female chief that lives across the highway from me. She lives in a house with a number of other women and they all spend their day making Kill Drayvas (a sort of African sugar cookie) to sell to people that pass by their house. If I ever want to get away from all the craziness that can happen during a day, I go to hang out with Obay because I know the same will always be happening there. She tells me a lot of stories about her life as a chief and life during the war, but most of the time we entertain her five-month-old grandson Kasim while she teaches me Themne.
I don’t know what else to write about but I’ll end it by telling you a short story about Pizza making and then possibly angering my whole town.
One Friday afternoon my site mate and I decided to make a Pizza in his amazing clay oven. While we were gathering the ingredients for this Pizza around town, one of the bobos (small boy) that frequents my house for food spotted us and followed us back to my site mate’s house. The bobo then joined us and helped us to prepare the pizza. By the time our pizza was cooking, it was about 8 o’clock and the sun was down so the bobo (Ibrihim) thought it was best to lie down and fall asleep by the oven. My site mate didn’t want the Ibrihim to die from smoke inhalation, so he moved him onto a yoga mat in another room. When the pizza was finally finished, Ibrihim was out cold. We attempted to wake him up but he just refused to wake up. So we ate without him and then I finally decided that I need to take Ibrihim home. We once again attempted to wake him up, but he kept his eyes closed. My site mate decided that carrying the bobo on his shoulders would be the best idea… but it turned out to be the worst. While my site mate and I were walking back to my house everyone so my site mate with this small child around his shoulders almost looking like a corpse. By the time we were halfway there people were freaking out and wanted to know what the two Opotos (What they call a white person in the northern part of the country; for a small history lesson the word refers to the Portuguese who were the first Europeans in Sierra Leone) did to the small child. We were then confronted by a group of young men who started accusing us of drugging the child or getting the child drunk. By this point I was furious and was not happy that I was receiving these accusations. It then lead to an argument in krio and then finally the waking of the child who managed to state that the two Opotos indeed did nothing to the him, he was just tired and did not want to wake up. The whole crowd then left us and Ibrihim made it home okay. So the lesson we learned was that you must never carry a sleeping bobo unless you want to anger your town and have them think you do terrible things to children.
Alright, well na in dat. I hope you find this blog post satisfying to the recent drought my blog has been experiencing.
