Cape Verde

I just got back from Cape Verde. It was one of the most spectacular trips of my life. I'll be posting photos soon, but for now, two quick anecdotes.

On my first day of hiking, I decided to go against the advice of the professional guide at the residencial, Casa Cavoquinho, that I stayed at. He said the path was extremely hard to follow and very difficult and dangerous. He was right. When I told one of the villagers near the top of the mountain what I intended to do, he looked at me like I was insane. A couple of kids followed me most of the way pointing the way down... down a practically vertical drop, with barely visible switchbacks cutting back and forth, several hundred meter drops on either side. After I made it past the most difficult section, I met a kid, probably no more than 10, carry a bag of rice and a knife. He seemed as if he were waiting for me to come down. He began to lead me through the rest of the trail, waiting for me whenever I paused to take a picture. Whenever we got to a difficult section, he would wait at the bottom to make sure I made it down ok. After we finished the last hard part, I thanked him and we parted ways. I never had a better guide in my life.

On the way back from Lungi International Airport, I decided against the overcrowded and lumberous Kissy Ferry. Instead, I made my way through the ramshackle village port of Tagrin and found some of the boats that head over to Freetown, across the mouth of Sierra Leone river that spills out into the Atlantic. You often see them, overcrowded and making their journey across the water. The boats are broken down messes, made of wood and leaks. The seats amount to either standing against the side or balancing on the edge, gripping the sides to prevent yourself from falling over the side as the boat rocked about in the waves. After enough people boarded, the boat set off. Mid-way across the water, another boat approached on the return trip from Freetown, and my boat began to veer directly towards it. The boats nearly crashed head on, the sides grating together, and people sitting on the sides of the other boat diving toward the center to avoid the colliding wood. At the last second, one passenger from the other boat dived on. Apparently that's how transfers in Sierra Leone take place.

An Eostre Thought and Easter Confession

(I wrote this the night before Easter while sitting on my balcony overlooking a city stuck in a pre-electricity era. I had just been reading the Bhavagad Gita, and trying unsuccessfully to drown out the preaching of a Sierra Leonean version of Rev. Wright with Ali Farka Toure’s Malian jazz. I post it now as a belated and bit convoluted Eostre/Easter reflection.)

Easter - the most sacred Christian holiday - was named after a German fertility goddess, Eostre. It's a relic of a conversion effort by Christians who realized that - like Joe’s Nye soft power - they could make conversion more palatable by masking it in the pagan holiday’s garbs of bunnies and eggs and Eostre. Soft power in conversion: the compliment to the traditional hard power of coercion through threats of hellfire and bribes of eternal reward and drinking wells - luring the Dogon people from their cliffside homes at the Bandiagara escarpment to the stretching plains of Mali...

Both Good Friday and Easter are about suffering and death, and about God's answer to suffering and death. I have written of suffering before regarding the girl from Moyamba. From Plantinga to Swinburne, the Free Will Defense (FWD) and almost every explanation of problem of evil casts all evil, in every detail, as necessary and essential for some higher good (in turn transforming God into Raymond Sullivan's ironic utilitarian deity rather than typical Kantian, commandment-based moralist he's portrayed as). For if some evil is truly unnecessarily, people fear Archibald MacLeish's refrain would hold true, "I heard it called out in the yellow wood, if god is good, god is not god. If god is god, god is not good." So as a result, they try to answer pointless suffering by denying it altogether. But no Free Will Defense of Plantinga or Swinburne has been able to weave an argument to justify or excuse the ingenious savagery, the brilliant detail and artistry of cruelty... from a 14-year old girl forced to go through FGM by the Bondo secret society in Sierra Leone; to a 12-year old being raped and dying of her injuries in Bo district; to a girl from Moyamba bleeding from menstruation through her nipples.

But just like the traditional answer to the problem of evil, the traditional take on Easter tries to make sense of suffering, death, and evil by turning that them into something good, the Sad Friday into a Good Friday, a theological "switch in time" to rewrite history. Jesus’ death becomes some form of divine human sacrifice (i.e. the lamb of God as in the tradition to slaughter a lamb as a sacrifice for sins); blood ransom to Satan or Ancient Law (that god crafted himself, as in C.S. Lewis’s depiction); substitutionary atonement with innocent blood appeasing God; or, in the Jack Miles’ creative literary portrayal, divine suicide. In each depiction, Jesus’ death then becomes part of his plan, his goal and purpose, and his cry on the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani? (My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?),” becomes either a mistake or an act of sophistry.

But to take away Jesus’ abandonment by God is to take away his humanity. To make it part of some divine plan is to make it inapplicable to the horrible, meaningless, and absurd suffering around us. Jesus becomes the austere image in the cathedral halls, the serene face on the stained glass instead of the startling image in Hans Holbein’s painting, “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb,” which so shook Dostoyevsky it haunted him his whole life. As Prince Myshkin exclaimed, “Why some people might lose their faith by looking at such a picture!”

It is that suffering and abandoned Jesus that appeals to me, because it is that Jesus that you see, to borrow from him, in the “least of these.” It is that Jesus reflected in every child recruited into the Small Boys Unit (SBU) of Charles Taylor, in the rank and file of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone. It is that Jesus reflected in every prisoner languishing in the cells of Evin in Tehran, in the dungeons of China, and the modern day gulag of Russia. It is that Jesus reflected in the children dying of disease or families wiped out by natural catastrophes. But too often, Easter tries to transform this senselessness into God’s divine plan, his divine instrument of justice. All evil, all suffering becomes a necessary part of God's plan, and God becomes a monster, Christopher Hitchen's dictator-in-the-sky.

Too often, Easter - instead of offering meaning - denies the real horror of the cross altogether, denying reality and offering insult to injury by undermining Jesus' death. And in doing so, it turns the God it is meant to praise into a monster, justifying evils that can never be explained or justified.

For me, the Easter moment, the Easter story is about the struggle to find the hope in the face of pointless, meaningless suffering. It is not about denying the meaningless suffering altogether. It is the paradox G.K. Chesterton described as where "God seemed himself for an instant to be an atheist." It is the question that made Kant back away from his deontological framework, forcing him to adopt a teleos based on God’s divine justice. It is the question that caused the disciples to abandon Jesus, to only return and found the world’s largest religion in his name. But Christianity perhaps more than any other religion, should enable its believers to face meaningless, awful, heart-rending suffering. Not because that evil doesn't exist, for it undeniable does. But because hopefully it is not the end of the story, but only part of it.

I confess I hope there is a heaven, a resurrection to provide some semblance of justice in the end; that all the dying children may have a chance to know some of the wonder and joy and beauty of life. But I also know even if death has been defeated, as in that famous verse of 1 Corinthians 15:55, suffering hasn’t. No power in the world can take away the suffering those innocent children felt. No God is powerful enough to pull off that "switch in time".

I also hope that if our abandonment is as final, as agonizing as Jesus may have come to believe on the cross; if that abandonment - that “final disappointment” as PJ Harvey would say - is really the final answer, I hope we can still discover magic in this world. For if this is all there is, then everything we do today, in the here-and-now, is all that matters, and that will ever matter.

Adam Smith, free markets, and horror

Free markets are thriving in Freetown and throughout Sierra Leone. You see the competition all around you.

Except the capital is war and poverty. The clients are expats. And the merchants are anyone with a story of suffering and hardship to tell. And the product is horror.

All along the streets and beaches, Sierra Leoneans compete with each other over finding and often contriving the right story to tell of war, poverty, and loss. Sometimes the pitch is simply nudging you with the remaining stumps on their arms (or “residuals” as prosthetic limb designers call them) or asking for money to watch the African cup. Some are prepared with letters and documents of their hardship and needs. Some just follow you for miles on the beaches, requesting aid as your new found Padi (Friend) or Brother. Some tell of their families being killed in the war; some tell of their hungry children at home; some simply tap on the window as your car drives by; some stick their deformed arms in your face or grab your hand pleading for money and food to eat.

It’s a skill, honed by years of sales to expats, discerning what the NGO or UN agency or individual needs to hear to open up the pocketbook and dole out some money. It’s a talent finding the right pitch to reach into the deep pockets of white man, sympathetic and naïve. And so hardships and difficulties are invented, and Sierra Leoneans become fierce advocates for their own impotence so the white man can come and rescue them.

But the pitch becomes so good, comes so often, it becomes harder to discern truth from lie, genuine hardship from contrived. But then, in a country like Sierra Leone, with a life expectancy around 40, with 75% of the population under $2 a day, with over a quarter of the children dying before the age of 5, what hardship isn’t genuine here?

George Packer wrote of war amputees who were brought to Long Island, New York, to be fitted with expensive prosthetic limbs and then returned to their homes in Sierra Leone. He discovered that many of the prosthetic limbs were left gathering dust in some corner of their shack or tin hut. It was so much harder to get sympathy with a nice prosthetic limb on your residual… victimhood was so much easier without a visible sign of the aid you’ve already received.

Maybe this isn’t the capitalism, the free market Adam Smith had in mind. Maybe this is an example where individual self-interest is counter-productive, causing people – like me, with deep pockets and sympathy – to no longer know who to believe and then turn away by default, even from the genuinely needy and genuinely honest. Maybe this is part of the irrationality of man, Kahneman’s psychology of decision-making, injecting itself into the rational calculation of economics. Maybe this is a downside Smith or Milton didn’t consider… Milton, the economist, but I suppose John Milton pertains as well.

For truly, a country sitting on billions in diamonds, with rutile, bauxite, petroleum and now even uranium; a country with arable land and vast fisheries; a country with miles of stretching beaches for the European tourist; a country with all that relying on free market victimhood and horror, isn’t that truly a paradise lost?

White Man in Africa

Several months ago I was working in my office and one of the local cleaning girls came in. She had been cleaning my office for the last couple days. I like to talk with most of the cleaning and security staff, so I asked what her name was and how she was doing, briefly chatting about a local Sierra Leonean band, Jungle Leaders, and their popular album Pak En Go. Within moments of becoming friendly, the whole dynamic changed and I began to feel uncomfortable, both with her and the other cleaning staff. Like many before me, I had become another rich white man about to rescue some cleaning girl from poverty.

I decided I shouldn’t be as friendly in the future.

Walking to work on a weekend, I stopped and chatted with some kids, saying “hi” or “kushe.” As I was walking away, a couple girls in the group approached and threw their arms around me. I kept walking and shrugged them off as they began offering me prices.

Taking the back road to my apartment, Fatima, a pretty Sierra Leonean girl I met a couple times near my apartment, waved me over to her place, where another girl was doing her hair. Both were probably no more than 14 or 15. She smiled at me and asked how was work, and said she'd see me tomorrow.

In bars and nightclubs in Mali, in restaurants in Senegal and Guinea, on the streets in Sierra Leone, being a white man in Africa… It's almost disturbing to see how easily one could be seduced by the power at your fingertips.
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On the way back from work, I took a poda-poda (shared mini-bus) to Congo Cross on the way up to Wilberforce. The poda-poda stopped to drop someone off, and a man standing by the road offered the normal greeting, “Hey White man.” And added, “You come here and fuck our sisters.”

It was rude. It was offensive. And too often, it was right.

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Note:
After posting On Prostitutes and Whores, the topic emerged in the national news in the US with the Spitzer prostitution ring scandal. This led to several interesting articles on the various approaches regarding various legal approaches to prostitution. Most notably, Sweden has legalized prostitution but, in contrast to Amsterdam for instance, focuses on arresting and prosecuting the clients. Initial evidence suggests that clamping down on the demand and treating prostitutes as victims has been the most effective. The Spitzer scandal is also ironic because Spitzer had taken the lead in reforming New York State law by signing, only last month, a bill strengthening the law against clients (such as himself). New York Times also carried a recent op-ed arguing that the theory women choose prostitution is generally a "myth" propagated by the clients.

On Prostitutes and Whores

Walking back from work at our temporary headquarters in Kimbima Hotel, I spotted a common sight in Sierra Leone and the developing world – a young relatively well-dressed girl escorting an elderly white male around. I ended up sharing a taxi with them part of the way up Lumley beach – the girl informing the clueless gentleman of the taxi-fare (three times the normal going rate) before they headed off to the open embrace of Bunker Beach Bar.

It’s an obvious guess that she was a prostitute. You see them all the time here – whether at Paddy’s – the notorious bar where UN staff such as myself are banned, Atlantic, or in the lobby of almost any hotel frequented by expats. Some are young; some are tall and skinny; some are short; and some are missing both hands.

Sometimes you just meet the pimps, like the teenage boys I met while wandering around the streets of Mopti and Bamako in Mali, eagerly offering up their “sisters” as “babies” where I could get “good sleep, no pay.”

They say wherever an army goes, prostitution follows. Perhaps, more accurately wherever humanity goes, prostitution follows. And in a country as impoverished as Sierra Leone, it’s easy to see why young girls and women capitalize on their comparative advantage in providing cheap sex to a mostly expat clientele… For a girl surviving a war without hands, why shouldn’t she, why wouldn’t she be willing to sell the rest of her body in order to survive?

As the taxi continued its way towards Lumley junction, it occurred to me that maybe the word prostitute or whore doesn’t even fit in many cases, at least not when one considers the origins of the words. The notion of sex for hire is actually not inherent in the etymology of prostitution; rather, “prostitution” has its roots in “sex indiscriminately offered” (fem. of prostitutus, pp. of prostituere, 1530). The dirtier and more offensive of the terms, “whore”, is derived from the Old English word hōra, which in term is from the Indo-European root kā meaning “desire” or “lust”, and the Proto-Germanic word khoraz (fem. khoron-) “one who desires.”

But many ‘prostitutes’ aren’t necessarily indiscriminate or lustful or desiring of sex. After all, they’re selling something – their body or sex – for something else. It’s anything but indiscriminate, and it’s not sex they’re after. Plenty of women and men in the US and worldwide give that away for free. We look down on prostitution because they’re exchanging something we believe shouldn’t be exchanged (sex and by implication self-respect, dignity) for money. Except in places like Sierra Leone, they may be exchanging sex for survival or some chance, no matter how slim, to escape from the grind of every day life, and that is something harder to ask someone to give up. Especially when all we have to offer is some esoteric ideal of human dignity and self-respect – a Kantian Kingdom of Ends far removed from the biting poverty of the here-and-now… And it is far removed from how the “civilized” world has functioned and continues to function. After all the exchange of sex/mating for stability (measured generally in terms of material comforts) has been a central feature of marriage and courtship and dating for time memorial.

But of course all this leaves out half of the picture, namely the elderly chap being led off to Bunker Beach bar – the clients or the “Johns”. The Johns are also exchanging something for sex but not nearly as much stigma is attached to the male clients that feed the industry. Because of the ingrained sexism of our language and culture, the names for Johns are not nearly as varied or colorful or insulting as those for whores, hookers, sluts, and strumpets. After all the clients don’t live in shanty towns and slums or learn to deftly manipulate clothing with the remaining stumps on their arms; instead, they return to their civilized professional careers as UN employees, NGOs workers, businessmen, lawyers, and politicians. But more than any prostitute, these men are exchanging money in order to be able to carry out their lust and fantasies. And they’re the ones continuing to feed a multi-billion dollar industry often based on the rape of children and modern day “comfort women”; a multi-billion dollar industry based on people choosing to turn themselves into an object to be sold on the market.

In the end, I don’t know if she was a prostitute… but I’m fairly certain he was a whore.

Random Stories

My office on Jomo Kenyatta road is undergoing renovations so we moved “temporarily” (i.e. 3-4 months) to Kimbima Hotel at Man of War Bay in Aberdeen. My “office” is now a former hotel room with a balcony that overlooks the Atlantic. You can walk out to the balcony and watch dolphins in the Atlantic.
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On the way back from work, I pass Lumley beach. Some days you can see the amputee soccer game around dusk. The ones who lost a leg play as strikers and defenders, moving around deftly on crutches and carrying out vicious take-downs by using their crutches to rip the other players’ crutches away. The ones who lost hands or arms play as goalkeepers.
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Sample songs written by children in two villages of Kenema District, Sierra Leone, as part of the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) project.

Mende:
“A’ mu heimie yeh seseh -
Kekeh latrine bur mu weh
Mu gbe a li la dogbui hur
Nao mia wah a hegbei”

English:
“Keep our environment clean
Father dig us some toilet
So we can stop going into
The bush to shit
Because this will cause illness”

Krio:
“A luk titi na wati dan di
Na kaka, kaka di gei gei oh, oh….
Na sei oh, kaka di gei korela, oh…
Na korela, kaka di gei, belerun, oh….
Na belerun”

English:
“I look over there what did
I see is shit, shit can cause
Sickness oh, oh… sickness, shit
Can cause cholera, oh… cholera,
Shit can cause dysentery, oh… dysentery”

Sierra Leone has the highest child and maternal mortality rate in the world.

A girl from Moyamba

Several months ago a colleague of mine told me about a case he was working on. Four years ago a 14 year old orphan girl in Moyamba district, Sierra Leone, was offered “love” by a young man. She rejected him. Later when she was going to collect palm wine, he ambushed her, attacked her with a cutlass, and raped her. As a result of her injuries, she started bleeding through her nose and nipples during menstruation. She has to be hospitalized every month, and recently has been going into a severe fit every time.

After the initial attack, the man said he’d take medical responsibility for her. No surprise he didn’t. Instead, a year ago he attacked and assaulted her again. She’s now confined to a safehouse and a hospital every month when she menstruates. He’s living in his town, out on bail.

Since I heard about this girl in Moyamba, I haven’t gone a day without thinking about her. It’s with me wherever I go.

As someone focused on human rights issues, it’s not as if I haven’t read or seen my share of horrors. And like many people here, I almost believed, in a twisted way, optimistically and naively that I couldn’t be shocked anymore. But this was new. A way of suffering I never even knew or could have imagined possible.

Dostoyevsky commented, “We talk of bestial cruelty. But that is a cruel insult to the beasts. A beast can never be so artistically cruel as a man.” We can and should admire the amazing artistry of beauty in this world, but the darkness is just as artistic, just as creative, just as inventive.

I thought then, and I think now of Ivan Karamazov querying his brother Alyosha in the smoky tavern. He tells Alyosha about a “poor child of five.”

"(She) was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?"

And he asks Alyosha, if Alyosha could create a world to guarantee man’s future happiness, where he could transform all suffering into joy and comfort, but only on the condition that “it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature - that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance - and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”

When Dostoyevsky left the Siberia prison camp where he was exiled for six years, he commented, “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” Like Kierkegaard, the despair of a godless world, where “everything would be permitted,” terrified him too much. So even if it meant rejecting truth, they decided to take the leap of faith, accept Pascal’s wager, and simply embrace god as a divine placebo to the hopelessness they saw facing them otherwise. There would be none of Feuerbach’s ability to find hope in the rejection of god and embrace of “the anthropological essence of religion” - god as merely a projection of man. Nor would they be able to find comfort in the Nietzschean “will to power” after the declaration of the death of god. Rather faith in god grew partially from the fertile soil of fear, fear that if they “gazed into the abyss the abyss would gaze also into them,” fear that a life without god could only be sustained by Schopenhauer’s irrational “will to live,” fear that the world may really be as dark as it often appears, and only some otherworldly power and faith could salvage the wreck.

But I’m not concerned with whether god exists or not. Stuck with my Euclidean mind, it’s an answer beyond my ability to discern. Perhaps I prefer to take the folk singer Iris Dement’s refrain and “let the mystery be,” or bear homage to Kierkegaard’s concession that he is too stupid to understand philosophy, and philosophy is too clever to understand his stupidity. I just can’t help but wonder: Dostoyevsky argued that without god, all things are permitted. But if god does exist, if god can and does act in this world, and if a girl will bleed every month through her nose and nipples, what things aren’t permitted, even with god?

My question is then like Ivan’s. If you could create an architecture guaranteeing man’s future happiness, divine justice, the conversion of all pain to joy, but one girl must be raped and have to bleed every month through her nose and nipples… would you consent? And perhaps more importantly, could you praise such an architect?

On the road to freetown...

On Tuesday, I made my way back from Kabala in the Koinadugu District of Sierra Leone. We rolled down the windows of the 4WD, offering some relief from the heat by letting the dry, dusty, hot air rush into the car. As we pulled into Makeni for a brief stop to buy some vegetables, a woman came over. Her right arm was marred by severe burns from her hand to shoulder. The scars covered her flesh like a thick bacteria slowly crawling its way up and around her body. Her left hand was even worse. A mangled mess, her fingers wrapped around themselves and splayed off in different directions. You could only imagine what caused the injuries. Perhaps in the war she was caught in a Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attack; or perhaps the Civil Defence Force (CDF) or Kamajors suspected her of RUF complicity; or perhaps it was just a cooking or work accident. There are so many potential sources of pain and injury. It need not be as "glamorous" as civil war, genocide, slaughter, or torture. Torture comes in too many forms to narrow it down in such a way...

The woman approached our car, and shoved her disfigured hand in through the window into our faces, asking for money. Like anyone else, we recoiled, said no, and rolled up our windows. We finished our shopping and continued on our way back to Freetown.

I suppose I should try to say something profound now. But these things happen all the time here.

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For reasons I may explain later, I came back from Kabala with a new sense of purpose in the choices I have made. Or at least I tell myself. I've always been good with words, laying out philosophy and principles with rhetorical and poetic flourish, but words without actions are dead, as James 2:20 reflected about faith. There's no need to write about all the new things I've learned or decided. If I really learned them, the only words that matter will be carried out through my actions, in the kingdom of the here-and-now, and anyone with eyes to see will be able to judge what really lies in my heart and in my head. For now, I depart with just one last reflection.

While climbing one of the many hills in Kabala, I thought about the great commission - the moment in the Christian story when Jesus tells the disciples to go out into the world and spread his word. Jack Miles argued in God: A Biography how, in the Jewish canon, God had been moved to silence after his argument with Job, how God never spoke again but became the silent, reclusive, tired Ancient of Days described in Daniel. What if the central narrative of the Bible is less about how God acts in the world, but how He's decided not to? Maybe the Great Commission is also a hand-off of responsibility to us, to take on the burden of the world and heal it, to become "world saviors," as the Gnostics would put it? Christian or not, maybe there will be great strength and power and compassion and love available to us if we seek it ("seek and you shall find") - whether from man's natural goodness, his ability to reason, or from the "divine spark" in each of our hearts, or whatever term of art we may use - but perhaps, at the end of the day, the only God to help us is the God within us. The responsibility is ours. And it's terrible and terrifying, and liberating...

We need not fly to Sierra Leone to find injustice and suffering. It can be found anywhere - in our cities, in our towns, in our neighborhoods, and in our day-to-day relationships, and it's just as real there as anywhere else. For human rights doesn't begin in some remote corner of the Congo, or some impoverished slum in Freetown. It begins at home - with how we treat everyone we profess to hold dear in our heart. If we can't do even that right... how can we ever talk about human rights and respect for man?

Saving the world

The last village we visited today was Serabu in Kenema District of Sierra Leone. Our CLTS team, Kamboi, was already there implementing the strategy. While walking towards the meeting area, Kamal Kar - the pioneer of CLTS - noticed a young boy lying on the steps of a building. He asked the surrounding members of the community about the kid. The kid was clearly severely dehydrated in the dry, dusty 40 degree heat; his frail arms seeming as if they would break when we touched them. We got a water bottle from our vehicle, and gave him some salt and sugar water to rehydrate him. Our Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) escort took him to the local health center. As the kid began to vomit, the nurse reported that the village had a very high rate of diarrhea and dehydration but most didn’t come to the health center because of a local witch doctor.

While all this happened, our team worked diligently to carry out our strategy to get the community to clean up the village, unaware of the tragedy slowly unfolding steps away. How easy it is to become so focused on saving the world that you lose sight of saving one person.


(Children in the village of Serabu after they wrote and sang a song telling their community to clean up the village so they don't get sick and die)


(Children continuing through the village singing)

The many faces of Sierra Leone

I just spent a week working on a Community Led Total Sanitation project. I head up to Kenema for a week tomorrow to continue the project. During this week, I caught a glimpse of the many faces of Sierra Leone.