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.
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