Jessie:
factfile of our three weeks in Freetown:
number of deepfried sauasages eaten: 2
number of times we have been
reminded of our racial origin in a way
which would make Nick Griffin blush: 3740 (approx)
number of sewers fallen down: 1
number of people in our house who have had Malaria in the past week: 4
number of taxi drivers Christophan has told to 'fok ohf' on the way to school: 6
number of children I have considered doing a Madonna on and abducting: 76
(all the students at Planting Promise, minus one toddler who screamed like a cold turkey crack fiend when I tried to stop him playing with a huge saw and a staple gun. The teachers gave me a look which read 'let the poor child be')
number of times we have been asked 'you like to soak?' after getting unexpectedly caught in the rain: 54
number of screaming domestics in our house at 2am: 1 (perhaps they've got used to us?)
Our time in the school is now over. The rains are drenching people on the streets of Freetown with fever, Class one now know the whole alphabet (up to e), and the amount of rice I ingest on a daily basis has now probably reached critical mass. A little girl followed us from the school the whole way across town after we said goodbye this morning to ask for our address. This caused some jealousy in the crowds around the atm as several middleaged men asked if they could also be our students.
Though we are sad to leave the school, the last few days have felt like an ending: summer school finishes today, and the students have two weeks holiday before term begins, Rocco is arriving tomorrow to continue his work developing Plantig Promise, and next week a group of girls from the London Business school will be starting work with the Adult Education Project.
I would love more than anything to be able to follow one our students through the next few years of his life, to see how he navigates the wheel of fortune that is life in Freetown: disease, the smart uniforms of Brass Bands proclaiming funerals, success, the raise nod of praise from a teacher, or smile of recognition from an older brother or sister, scrubbing up for church on sunday, playing football with a plastic bottle on the street, the battle to eat twice a day, get into secondary school and stay out of trouble...
We have a few ideas of ways we can continue to work with Planting Promise from the UK, so we'll keep you posted. We are off on a quest for the beach where they filmed the Bounty bar advert on monday!
Lots of love xxxxx
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
he don chack
Sarah: 3 weeks in and we decided it was time to sample the delights of the infamous Freetown nightlife. "He don chack" (He's drunk!) was the order of the evening as Jessie militant partying streak re-emerged and we dragged the 3 boys (in their 20s..no underage business here) from our house out for the night. Oseh, who doesn't drink, Victor, who's never been to a nightclub and Christopher, the family driver with a cheeky streak, had a couple of beers each and after some gentle persuasion were busting their moves on the dancefloor of Aces (For The Ladies, apparently). Our carefully planned night of heading to the famous Paddy's bar were scuppered when our taxi driver decided to use his initiative and delivered us to a place that, we later found out, the guidebook described as a 'desultory hooker-fest'. Thankfully, I think that side of things passed the church-going boys by and we all enjoyed our night of good clean fun. It certainly beat another evening on the sofa with a pirate copy of the bbc Merlin series.
We're already into our last week of teaching, and aiming to cover HIV with all the classes. Considering the blank looks on 9 year-olds faces when they're repeating "Sex without a condom", I reckon that part is a little bit over their heads, but they're definitely getting the hang of the rest of the routes of transmission. Cue Jessie and I acting out sharing razors to shave our rasta beards (YES!), using the same toilet (NO!) and kissing on the cheek (NO! plus plenty of sniggering).
We've also tried to cover Malaria, Respect, Aspirations with all the children and Puberty with the older class. The success has been variable, with moments of stunned silence, embarrassed giggling, real understanding (our favourite) and downright hilarity following my artistic representation of grown ups sans clothing, all of their anatomy accurately represented.
The adult education class has been more consistently rewarding, with even the teachers and Alfred the front-door man marvelling at the wonders of the female reproductive system and asking plenty of questions.
Comedy gold moments include small boy wandering out of nursery class, looking pained, clutching his jeans and saying "Me wan piss!", and the obssession with hairstyles and hairpieces on even the youngest of children- today one of the three-year old girls came in with a full, shiny, fake-hair, ear-length 80s style bob carefully woven into the little tufty beginnings of an afro. On the other hand...it is difficult to understand how such fashion-obssessed consumerism can exist side-by-side with poverty of a level where the standpipe water makes people sick, the rainy season means adding extra bin-liners to cover the holes in your corrugated iron roof and the local family planning and maternity clinic has 'run out' of free, government issue condoms that probably never even existed.
We're already into our last week of teaching, and aiming to cover HIV with all the classes. Considering the blank looks on 9 year-olds faces when they're repeating "Sex without a condom", I reckon that part is a little bit over their heads, but they're definitely getting the hang of the rest of the routes of transmission. Cue Jessie and I acting out sharing razors to shave our rasta beards (YES!), using the same toilet (NO!) and kissing on the cheek (NO! plus plenty of sniggering).
We've also tried to cover Malaria, Respect, Aspirations with all the children and Puberty with the older class. The success has been variable, with moments of stunned silence, embarrassed giggling, real understanding (our favourite) and downright hilarity following my artistic representation of grown ups sans clothing, all of their anatomy accurately represented.
The adult education class has been more consistently rewarding, with even the teachers and Alfred the front-door man marvelling at the wonders of the female reproductive system and asking plenty of questions.
Comedy gold moments include small boy wandering out of nursery class, looking pained, clutching his jeans and saying "Me wan piss!", and the obssession with hairstyles and hairpieces on even the youngest of children- today one of the three-year old girls came in with a full, shiny, fake-hair, ear-length 80s style bob carefully woven into the little tufty beginnings of an afro. On the other hand...it is difficult to understand how such fashion-obssessed consumerism can exist side-by-side with poverty of a level where the standpipe water makes people sick, the rainy season means adding extra bin-liners to cover the holes in your corrugated iron roof and the local family planning and maternity clinic has 'run out' of free, government issue condoms that probably never even existed.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
water snakes and condoms
Sarah
So the rainy season has kicked in good and proper now, and for the first time we are feeling cold! Having been soaked through on our way back from school, we've ended up in the only internet cafe in Freetown with air-conditioning (and working internet).
It's been a wet week...on Saturday we took a trip out to 'the provinces' to visit one of the Planting Promise farms, where rice is being grown and where Eddie is hoping to plant the first crop of 'Teff' in Sierra Leone. (It's a cereal, like millet, which Planting Promise are hoping can eventually be exported to the UK market. Currently, the profits from the rice and cassava grown in the farms in the provinces are used to fund the Planting Promise schools, like the one that we are teaching in.) The trip began with grey drizzle, so that the beautiful countryside was obscured with cloud and we could only just make out the shadows of palm forests and silvery rivers snaking towards the sea.
At the farm, we went for a walk through lush green jungle, alongside the field intended for Teff and then towards the rice plantation. Reaching it involved wading through a stream where the heavy rains had flooded it to about bum-level..but atleast the water was kind of warm and I hadn't even thought about the possibility of snakes until Jessie mentioned it afterwards! The rice crop takes three months to mature and this was quite a young one, so it was initially a little difficult to distinguish the bright green grass-like shoots from the other weeds and plants growing on the hillside. African farming clearly doesn't follow the same idea of ruler-straight lines of rice like in the terraces of Asia...
Eddie and Siray discovered from the lady owner of the farm that they've been having some trouble with the farm workers- casual labourers who are paid 5000Le (about 85pence) per day and have been knocking off at about 2pm, instead of working until 4 or 5 as required. As a result, some of the rice plantation hasn't been planted and fertile ground is going to waste. We discussed the idea of employing workers for a whole season, and paying them a regular salary rather than a casual daily rate, which would hopefully provide more stability for both the farms and the workers and their families.
On the way home from our trip, the heavens opened. The water was running in mud-red rivers down either side of the road, hurtling onto the road from impromptu waterfalls over road-side cliffs and swilling over the road almost bumper-deep in places. Wet wet wet.
Jessie
Teaching in the Planting Promise school has been one of them most rewarding, but also one of the most frustrating things I have ever done. An example of one our less successful lessons, Class one today:
Me: The cat sat on the mat
Boy: The cat sat on the mat
Me: Cat sounds like mat
Boy: Cat sounds like mat
Me: What does cat sound like?
Boy: Cat.
One the other hand I have to admit I was slightly dreading our lesson on contraception with the adult education group, but Sarah and I got on just fine with our mini cucumber. We bought so many condoms that the man in the pharmacy probably thought we were off to have an orgy rivalling in size and ecstatic noise with the Sunday congregation of the Flaming Church down the road from where we live. As we began the lesson, the old man who is responsible for the security of the school peered curiously over the wall as Sarah demonstrated her (frighteningly quick but brutal) condom-donning expertise. Soon we were happily dealing out condoms to eager hands.The teacher even bought in a couple of female condoms for us show the class.
the following day.
lots of love from your frizzy-haired dirty-footed carb-filled Jessie and Sarah xxxxxxxxxxx
So the rainy season has kicked in good and proper now, and for the first time we are feeling cold! Having been soaked through on our way back from school, we've ended up in the only internet cafe in Freetown with air-conditioning (and working internet).
It's been a wet week...on Saturday we took a trip out to 'the provinces' to visit one of the Planting Promise farms, where rice is being grown and where Eddie is hoping to plant the first crop of 'Teff' in Sierra Leone. (It's a cereal, like millet, which Planting Promise are hoping can eventually be exported to the UK market. Currently, the profits from the rice and cassava grown in the farms in the provinces are used to fund the Planting Promise schools, like the one that we are teaching in.) The trip began with grey drizzle, so that the beautiful countryside was obscured with cloud and we could only just make out the shadows of palm forests and silvery rivers snaking towards the sea.
At the farm, we went for a walk through lush green jungle, alongside the field intended for Teff and then towards the rice plantation. Reaching it involved wading through a stream where the heavy rains had flooded it to about bum-level..but atleast the water was kind of warm and I hadn't even thought about the possibility of snakes until Jessie mentioned it afterwards! The rice crop takes three months to mature and this was quite a young one, so it was initially a little difficult to distinguish the bright green grass-like shoots from the other weeds and plants growing on the hillside. African farming clearly doesn't follow the same idea of ruler-straight lines of rice like in the terraces of Asia...
Eddie and Siray discovered from the lady owner of the farm that they've been having some trouble with the farm workers- casual labourers who are paid 5000Le (about 85pence) per day and have been knocking off at about 2pm, instead of working until 4 or 5 as required. As a result, some of the rice plantation hasn't been planted and fertile ground is going to waste. We discussed the idea of employing workers for a whole season, and paying them a regular salary rather than a casual daily rate, which would hopefully provide more stability for both the farms and the workers and their families.
On the way home from our trip, the heavens opened. The water was running in mud-red rivers down either side of the road, hurtling onto the road from impromptu waterfalls over road-side cliffs and swilling over the road almost bumper-deep in places. Wet wet wet.
Jessie
Teaching in the Planting Promise school has been one of them most rewarding, but also one of the most frustrating things I have ever done. An example of one our less successful lessons, Class one today:
Me: The cat sat on the mat
Boy: The cat sat on the mat
Me: Cat sounds like mat
Boy: Cat sounds like mat
Me: What does cat sound like?
Boy: Cat.
One the other hand I have to admit I was slightly dreading our lesson on contraception with the adult education group, but Sarah and I got on just fine with our mini cucumber. We bought so many condoms that the man in the pharmacy probably thought we were off to have an orgy rivalling in size and ecstatic noise with the Sunday congregation of the Flaming Church down the road from where we live. As we began the lesson, the old man who is responsible for the security of the school peered curiously over the wall as Sarah demonstrated her (frighteningly quick but brutal) condom-donning expertise. Soon we were happily dealing out condoms to eager hands.The teacher even bought in a couple of female condoms for us show the class.
the following day.
lots of love from your frizzy-haired dirty-footed carb-filled Jessie and Sarah xxxxxxxxxxx
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Week One: fish bones and mobile phones
Sarah: We've been in Freetown, Sierra Leone for a few days now and, after much searching, have fiiiinally found fully-functioning internet! So, welcome to our weekly updates from West Africa...
So we flew to Dakar, Senegal, on Tuesday last week. Having trawled the internet for the cheapest flights to West Africa, we plumped for Royal Air Maroc, and during our transfer in Casablanca, Morocco, we found out why they were such value for money...a 5 hour wait became a 7 hour wait for no apparent reason. We finally boarded at 3am and arrived bleary eyed in Dakar at 6am.
Our plan for Dakar was to find flights to Sierra Leone, but we did a little sight-seeing whilst we were there too. Getting to grips with the brightly painted car rapide minibuses that weave in and out of the traffic made us feel immediately part of the bustling, dusty city- rattling along, enjoying the natural air-conditioning (windows? what windows?) and listening to some classic hip hop beats on the radio, it really felt like we'd arrived in Africa!
We found our flights but those couple of days weren't without their challenges... directions were easily lost in translation and taxi drivers, no matter how certain they seem to know exactly where you want to go, really don't have a clue. So 10pm on our first evening we found ourselves stranded in the dark streets of the suburb where our hostel was, but with no idea where we were and in a taxi whose engine had just cut out. Luckily, we had our first experience of the kindness of strangers. With a little french, even less English and the phone number of the hostel taxi driver, some Senegalese guys who stopped to help us managed to work out where we wanted to go and walked us right back to our door!
Jessie: Freetown gained its name when slaves who had been working in England and the Carribean were set free and packed back off to Africa at the end of the 18th Century. It is not your typical African town: for one thing, the language they speak here is Krio, which sounds a bit like Jamaican creole or some of the gangsta dialects you find around London. So trying to learn some of the local greetings feels a bit like when people told you to say 'beer can' at school so that you could sound like a Jamaican who loves bacon.
We arrived from the airport by ferry, and our initial impression of the buzzing friday night streets was that it reminded us of one of the ports in Pirates of the Carribean: people marauding around, pretty girls chatting to guys in the street, open bars pumping out African r n b, men drinking, women selling food on little roadside stalls, kids shaking their bodies to speakers on the pavement.
We were a bit shell shocked, and I want to blame the culture shock on my decision at our first breakfast in the house of Pastor Seray and her husband, to for the first time in 13 years, eat the sausages that we were given. We did eventually explain that we are vegetarian, and have since been plied with so much fish and eggs that our protein levels have sky rocked.
Pastor Seray is a very impressive lady. As well as a born again Pastor, she is also headmistress of the Planting Promise school in which we have just started teaching health education. Although her school run chat about the devil doesn't go down all that well with us, she is completely supporting our frank discussion of sex, puberty and contraception with the kids. Set up three years ago, the school is an insparation to teaching in Africa, adovocating quality of education over quantity, and working with some of the poorest families in Freetown. Our aim is to work in the summer school, teaching some lessons, but more importantly designing a programme which can be taught throughout the school year once we have left. We started teaching yesterday. So far, mine and Sarah's graphic miming of diarrhoea and vomiting provoked the best reaction from the students.
So far we have made a few faux pas. One of which was accidently requesting forty quid of phone credit to be transferred to our phones. We were then forced to explain that we did not have the money. Not even at home. The poor man nearly cried when we explained: he obviously thought our confusion over adding 'units' of top up was just a display of rich white woman wealth. Making 100 times his normal profit flew out of the window as in the pouring rain he painstakingly retracted the credit from our phones...
lots of love to you all, stay in touch! xxxxx.
* translation of our blog name= that girl is as good looking as my girlfriend.
ps. Sarah has already had a firm offer of marriage from a nice Christian boy who extols the virtues of 'faithful white women'. I am negotiating bride price.
So we flew to Dakar, Senegal, on Tuesday last week. Having trawled the internet for the cheapest flights to West Africa, we plumped for Royal Air Maroc, and during our transfer in Casablanca, Morocco, we found out why they were such value for money...a 5 hour wait became a 7 hour wait for no apparent reason. We finally boarded at 3am and arrived bleary eyed in Dakar at 6am.
Our plan for Dakar was to find flights to Sierra Leone, but we did a little sight-seeing whilst we were there too. Getting to grips with the brightly painted car rapide minibuses that weave in and out of the traffic made us feel immediately part of the bustling, dusty city- rattling along, enjoying the natural air-conditioning (windows? what windows?) and listening to some classic hip hop beats on the radio, it really felt like we'd arrived in Africa!
We found our flights but those couple of days weren't without their challenges... directions were easily lost in translation and taxi drivers, no matter how certain they seem to know exactly where you want to go, really don't have a clue. So 10pm on our first evening we found ourselves stranded in the dark streets of the suburb where our hostel was, but with no idea where we were and in a taxi whose engine had just cut out. Luckily, we had our first experience of the kindness of strangers. With a little french, even less English and the phone number of the hostel taxi driver, some Senegalese guys who stopped to help us managed to work out where we wanted to go and walked us right back to our door!
Jessie: Freetown gained its name when slaves who had been working in England and the Carribean were set free and packed back off to Africa at the end of the 18th Century. It is not your typical African town: for one thing, the language they speak here is Krio, which sounds a bit like Jamaican creole or some of the gangsta dialects you find around London. So trying to learn some of the local greetings feels a bit like when people told you to say 'beer can' at school so that you could sound like a Jamaican who loves bacon.
We arrived from the airport by ferry, and our initial impression of the buzzing friday night streets was that it reminded us of one of the ports in Pirates of the Carribean: people marauding around, pretty girls chatting to guys in the street, open bars pumping out African r n b, men drinking, women selling food on little roadside stalls, kids shaking their bodies to speakers on the pavement.
We were a bit shell shocked, and I want to blame the culture shock on my decision at our first breakfast in the house of Pastor Seray and her husband, to for the first time in 13 years, eat the sausages that we were given. We did eventually explain that we are vegetarian, and have since been plied with so much fish and eggs that our protein levels have sky rocked.
Pastor Seray is a very impressive lady. As well as a born again Pastor, she is also headmistress of the Planting Promise school in which we have just started teaching health education. Although her school run chat about the devil doesn't go down all that well with us, she is completely supporting our frank discussion of sex, puberty and contraception with the kids. Set up three years ago, the school is an insparation to teaching in Africa, adovocating quality of education over quantity, and working with some of the poorest families in Freetown. Our aim is to work in the summer school, teaching some lessons, but more importantly designing a programme which can be taught throughout the school year once we have left. We started teaching yesterday. So far, mine and Sarah's graphic miming of diarrhoea and vomiting provoked the best reaction from the students.
So far we have made a few faux pas. One of which was accidently requesting forty quid of phone credit to be transferred to our phones. We were then forced to explain that we did not have the money. Not even at home. The poor man nearly cried when we explained: he obviously thought our confusion over adding 'units' of top up was just a display of rich white woman wealth. Making 100 times his normal profit flew out of the window as in the pouring rain he painstakingly retracted the credit from our phones...
lots of love to you all, stay in touch! xxxxx.
* translation of our blog name= that girl is as good looking as my girlfriend.
ps. Sarah has already had a firm offer of marriage from a nice Christian boy who extols the virtues of 'faithful white women'. I am negotiating bride price.
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