So, the house is great, but it’s got…issues. We’re lucky – VERY lucky. We have a home with a roof, and the roof meets the walls all the way round. And under the roof we have our own bedrooms. And not just bedrooms, but a kitchen and a living room and a bathroom. And in the bathroom there is running water and a working toilet. And electricity lights up the whole house (except when it doesn’t). So we’re lucky – VERY lucky. There are so many people here with so much less.
But like I said, there are issues. The roof might meet the walls all the way round. But the walls in the drying room are full of un-meshed gaps, and there are holes in the window meshing in all the other rooms. And through these gaps and holes come mosquitoes and cockroaches and, worst of all, rats. And the electricity that flows into our wires also flows into my arm when I touch the plug-socket switch in my room. And it’s great that we can light the house, but not all the light fittings are working and some of them look downright unsafe. And the water that runs into the bathroom also runs down the bathroom walls whenever the stopcock isn’t turned off at the mains. And although we’re grateful that all our rooms have doors, we would prefer it if all the doors had handles and they all fitted inside their frames. So like a said – there are issues.
So here stands our first dilemma. Given that we’re so lucky to have what we have, do we have the right to complain that what we have is broken? Are we naive to be reaching for the standards we expect at home, or are we foolish if we don’t ask for improvements? If we go to the staff at VSO and ask for better living conditions, are we going to sounds like spoilt and insensitive idiots complaining that some of our hundred dollar bills are dirty and we can’t fit all of them in our purse? I’ve literally no reference points for any of this and I feel hopelessly lost.
Two rat interrupted sleeps and one mild electrical burn later, and my mind is made up – we decide to ask for improvements.
The good news is that almost instantly VSO send round a plumber, a carpenter, a pest controller and an electrician. The bad news is that as far as we can tell, none of these tradesmen have had any training in their respective trades.
The plumber and his apprentice bash around in the bathroom for a few minutes and then call Jo to tell her that they’ve finished.
“But it’s still leaking.” Jo quite rightly points out.
“It will stop in three days.” The plumber assures her, trying to take on the confident air of a man blessed with mystic powers in aquatic prediction.
“Surely it will stop when you actually fix it.” Jo quite rightly insists. The plumber looks slightly put out, but none the less returns to his task of bashing things about. Ten minutes later he calls Jo back.
“The leak has stopped.” He proudly proclaims, giving the worrying impression that this is the first time he’s actually achieved such a feat.
The electrician comes with no fewer than four assistants. They spread out around the house, stare at light fittings, play with switches, poke metal screwdrivers into live electrical sockets, and receive several electric shocks of varying severity. They pull apart the wires in my plug socket (amid actual showers of sparks) and wrap electrical tape around a few loose ends. They tell us they need to buy supplies and will be back tomorrow. They leave with the following reassuring words about my plug socket.
“We’ve made it safe for now. But try not to touch it.”
The following day they’re back as promised and set to work with a flurry of activity. Banke and I can hardly bear to watch, as all five men seem to be competing for the title of ‘most lucky to still be alive’. They lay new cables in my room and fit an entirely new plug socket. They mend the lights on our veranda, and in our hallway, and totally rewire the drying room to install an outrageously and unnecessarily powerful strip light. And for reasons neither Banke or I can quite comprehend, they break the light in our sitting room that didn’t even need mending.
As they leave, one of the younger apprentices whispers to Banke “I’ve left a note on your slipper.” Intriguing stuff. Naturally, as soon as they’ve gone Banke and I head straight to her room to find this fabled note. We look at her shoes expecting to find a folded piece of paper – but there’s nothing there. On closer inspection, Banke discovers the following written in biro, directly onto one of her flip-flops. “U are 2 nice. I really need u 4 friend. This is my line 07x xxxxxx”. We stare at the flip flop for a while and then burst into laughter. If the electrician had been someone that Banke had a blossoming interest in, this would have been quite romantic in an odd sort of way. However, as it stands, it’s just a surprising way to vandalise a stranger’s shoe.
“I can’t believe he wrote on my shoe!” Banke exclaims in amused outrage.
“I guess he wanted to find a direct route to your sole” I reply, feeling very pleased with myself, and relived that all the electric shocks haven’t blunted my quick wit.
As the night draws in we switch on the lights in our dark hallway. Nothing happens. We look up. The good news is the lights on out veranda now work. The bad news is, the electricians have rewired them to incorporate the bulbs from our hallway. The next morning I enjoy the novelty of being able to turn on my fan and radio using my new and improved socket. As I turn it off before heading to work I receive another (although to be fair, slightly milder) electric shock. Brilliant – back to square one.
The carpenter is a lovely quiet man with very few tools and even less English. He sets to work with minimal fuss and maximum effort. (With four doors to mend, one entire room to screen and the kitchen mesh to replace he’s going to be here for a while.) It all starts quite promisingly as he does an excellent job of fitting a handle to the drying room door. Unfortunately it goes down-hill from there. By the end of his first day’s work, we have two mended doors, one door which is now broken in a slightly different way, and one door that is now so broken it no longer locks or indeed closes. We also have a room with an extremely dodgy looking, half finished screen.
That evening we sit in our slightly darker house, looking at our newly broken living room light, and worrying about our now unlockable door. We try to decide whether we’ve just been unlucky, or whether there really is a total lack of training in the trade industries throughout Sierra Leone. The war brought this country to its knees. For the eleven years that it raged, the education system was destroyed, new skills were not learnt and old skills were lost. When things don’t work in Sierra Leone, the war is often cited as the reason. But the war was eight years ago and the country is still nowhere close to regaining its feet. The war was devastating, but the Sierra Leoneones we talk to say they are tired of it being used as an excuse. Things need to improve.
“The carpenter only had three fingers on one hand. Perhaps he lost the other in the war.” Banke muses, looking for an explanation for his lack of skill. My mind is preoccupied by rats and electric shocks and I’m feeling far less charitable.
“I should think it’s more likely that he accidentally cut it off with his own saw.” I say unkindly.
Whatever the reason, the situation is frustrating. We have all spent days in the house when we should have been at work, and lost weekends when we could have explored the city and gone to the beech, waiting for tradesmen to arrive and finish their work. And four days of hard work by some really lovely men has yielded a net result of very little improvement, a few new problems, and one amusingly graffitied flip flop. This morning we woke up to find water running down the bathroom wall again. It’s lucky in a way – we can ask the plumber to come on Saturday – we’re already waiting in for the carpenter and electrician to come back.
Thursday 26 August 2010
Wednesday 18 August 2010
It’s a bit like shopping – but it’s so much harder…
I guess in many ways the honey moon period is coming to an end now. The real world is starting to encroach. Routines have been formed and have even had time to settle. I’m no longer a visitor in a new and astonishing city - I’m an immigrant trying to find some way of feeling like something close to a resident. Things that were once extraordinary now pass completely unremarked, (though I doubt there are enough months left for any of this to become mundane).
You cannot be a passing observer for ever – you must commit or move on. And if proof of our commitment were needed, it is this: last week we finished stocking up the house. In one final big effort we bought a washing board, a drainer, a clothes hanger, a washing basket, more pegs, more soap, more brushes, more mops, more everything. All things you don’t buy when you’re still trying to find your feet, but all things that become absolute essentials when you’ve found your feet and realised that if you’re going to keep them clean, you’re going to need far more support than the battered and worn out tools you’ve been given by VSO.
The six week delay in shopping activities also stems from the fact that it’s taken us this long to work out where to buy everything. In our first few weeks we were constantly asking people where the best place to buy various items was. The answer we were always given was ‘PZ’. Unfortunately, although everyone was able to tell us that we needed to go to PZ, people seemed far less able to explain exactly where (or indeed what) PZ was.
Between us we have several maps of Freetown of varying quality – none of which shows anything remotely similar to a place called PZ. (To make life slightly more complicated, our best and most beautiful map fell victim to a flood in our first week, and amusingly our two remaining maps have slightly different road layouts and in many cases entirely different road names.) So for the first few weeks PZ assumed a near mystical status in our lives – it seemed to be the answer to all our problems, but remained entirely and bafflingly unreachable.
It was probably about week three that Banke managed to persuade someone to actually take her to PZ. She came back with two umbrellas, the most remarkable portable lamp you’ve ever set your eyes on, and stories of a crowded land full of street sellers, shop owners, black market currency traders, and pretty much everything you could ever need but weren’t sure how to get hold of.
It wasn’t until week five that we had finally worked out a plan for getting to PZ, getting everything we needed, and getting it back to the house. Unfortunately the plan involved two essential ingredients that we just didn’t have - a car and a reliable and patient guide. By the end of week six we had found both through our friend Natalie. Natalie is doing what most sensible people seem to do, and is escaping the country for the worst month of the rainy season. Before she left she lent us her car, and introduced us to her house keeper – the fantastically named Messy.
Messy is brilliant. A very likeable, and extremely humours young woman with a steely determination and a powerful brand of sarcasm that I had been led to believe could only be found at home. She agreed to accompany us to PZ to ensure we bought what we needed and at a price that wasn’t ridiculously inflated. And so, last Thursday, after a long day at work, Messy, Jo, Banke and myself all piled into Natalie’s Land Rover Defender (aka Brutus the Beast), and headed into the land of PZ.
PZ is like every film set you haven’t quite believed. Walking around you feel as if you’ve stumbled into the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and they’ve laid it on a bit too thick with all the ‘Crowded African City Scene’ clichés. It’s truly insane. Every inch of floor space is covered with stalls selling second hand or imported goods. Those traders who don’t have a ‘stall’ have just laid a sheet on the floor and spread out their wares; others have a basket full of goods and have just set it down in the middle of the road. Literally thousands of people are crammed into narrow streets, made narrower still by the traders lining the edge. Occasionally cars, podas and even large lorries try and force their way through the crowd, who have to squeeze together even tighter or jump across the large open ditches that line the roads and allow the rainy season downpours to bypass the stalls.
The noise is incredible. Thousands of people trying to make themselves heard above thousands more. Sound systems and megaphones attached to radios blare out music and evangelical preaching at a speed and volume that makes it more or less unfathomable and very close to unbearable. Despite the chaos it’s all surprisingly well ordered: This street is all electrical, the next just sells plastic goods, the street that links them only has shoes, the one over there is where you can by food, the one next door has all the toiletries. It feels like an endless labyrinth but Messy navigates us through expertly. She has happily accepted the role of chief negotiator and drives a hard bargain. The theatrics of the haggle are fascinating to watch but almost impossible to copy.
Up ahead there’s a sudden commotion. “It’s a clearance.” Messy explains. “What? Like a clearance sale?” I ask naively, thinking that cheap goods going even cheaper might well explain the sudden rush of people. “No – a street clearance. The police are clearing the street.” Although PZ is a well established market, the vast majority of the stalls are illegal and the police sweep through randomly clearing stalls with no permission to trade. Life around the clearance carries on as if nothing is happening.
A few minutes later a boy bumps heavily into Jo. As he stumbles he expertly (although not that expertly because I saw him do it) unzips Jo’s bag with lightening speed and pushes his hand inside. Thankfully the outside pocket is empty and he comes away with nothing. It’s a horrible situation. Rough justice is a big problem in Sierra Leone and people tend to take the law into their own hands. I’m not sure how true it is, but we’ve been warned that if you accuse someone of stealing there’s a chance you’ll then have to watch them beaten to death in front of you. Jo and I look at each other and agree to say absolutely nothing.
We’re in PZ for less than an hour, but it feels like a lifetime. We emerge, hot and bothered but heavily laden with everything we went in for. As we leave the crowded streets behind us we agree that PZ is amazing, and definitely the best place to shop for things. We also agree that perhaps we should try to go there are little as possible.
You cannot be a passing observer for ever – you must commit or move on. And if proof of our commitment were needed, it is this: last week we finished stocking up the house. In one final big effort we bought a washing board, a drainer, a clothes hanger, a washing basket, more pegs, more soap, more brushes, more mops, more everything. All things you don’t buy when you’re still trying to find your feet, but all things that become absolute essentials when you’ve found your feet and realised that if you’re going to keep them clean, you’re going to need far more support than the battered and worn out tools you’ve been given by VSO.
The six week delay in shopping activities also stems from the fact that it’s taken us this long to work out where to buy everything. In our first few weeks we were constantly asking people where the best place to buy various items was. The answer we were always given was ‘PZ’. Unfortunately, although everyone was able to tell us that we needed to go to PZ, people seemed far less able to explain exactly where (or indeed what) PZ was.
Between us we have several maps of Freetown of varying quality – none of which shows anything remotely similar to a place called PZ. (To make life slightly more complicated, our best and most beautiful map fell victim to a flood in our first week, and amusingly our two remaining maps have slightly different road layouts and in many cases entirely different road names.) So for the first few weeks PZ assumed a near mystical status in our lives – it seemed to be the answer to all our problems, but remained entirely and bafflingly unreachable.
It was probably about week three that Banke managed to persuade someone to actually take her to PZ. She came back with two umbrellas, the most remarkable portable lamp you’ve ever set your eyes on, and stories of a crowded land full of street sellers, shop owners, black market currency traders, and pretty much everything you could ever need but weren’t sure how to get hold of.
It wasn’t until week five that we had finally worked out a plan for getting to PZ, getting everything we needed, and getting it back to the house. Unfortunately the plan involved two essential ingredients that we just didn’t have - a car and a reliable and patient guide. By the end of week six we had found both through our friend Natalie. Natalie is doing what most sensible people seem to do, and is escaping the country for the worst month of the rainy season. Before she left she lent us her car, and introduced us to her house keeper – the fantastically named Messy.
Messy is brilliant. A very likeable, and extremely humours young woman with a steely determination and a powerful brand of sarcasm that I had been led to believe could only be found at home. She agreed to accompany us to PZ to ensure we bought what we needed and at a price that wasn’t ridiculously inflated. And so, last Thursday, after a long day at work, Messy, Jo, Banke and myself all piled into Natalie’s Land Rover Defender (aka Brutus the Beast), and headed into the land of PZ.
PZ is like every film set you haven’t quite believed. Walking around you feel as if you’ve stumbled into the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and they’ve laid it on a bit too thick with all the ‘Crowded African City Scene’ clichés. It’s truly insane. Every inch of floor space is covered with stalls selling second hand or imported goods. Those traders who don’t have a ‘stall’ have just laid a sheet on the floor and spread out their wares; others have a basket full of goods and have just set it down in the middle of the road. Literally thousands of people are crammed into narrow streets, made narrower still by the traders lining the edge. Occasionally cars, podas and even large lorries try and force their way through the crowd, who have to squeeze together even tighter or jump across the large open ditches that line the roads and allow the rainy season downpours to bypass the stalls.
The noise is incredible. Thousands of people trying to make themselves heard above thousands more. Sound systems and megaphones attached to radios blare out music and evangelical preaching at a speed and volume that makes it more or less unfathomable and very close to unbearable. Despite the chaos it’s all surprisingly well ordered: This street is all electrical, the next just sells plastic goods, the street that links them only has shoes, the one over there is where you can by food, the one next door has all the toiletries. It feels like an endless labyrinth but Messy navigates us through expertly. She has happily accepted the role of chief negotiator and drives a hard bargain. The theatrics of the haggle are fascinating to watch but almost impossible to copy.
Up ahead there’s a sudden commotion. “It’s a clearance.” Messy explains. “What? Like a clearance sale?” I ask naively, thinking that cheap goods going even cheaper might well explain the sudden rush of people. “No – a street clearance. The police are clearing the street.” Although PZ is a well established market, the vast majority of the stalls are illegal and the police sweep through randomly clearing stalls with no permission to trade. Life around the clearance carries on as if nothing is happening.
A few minutes later a boy bumps heavily into Jo. As he stumbles he expertly (although not that expertly because I saw him do it) unzips Jo’s bag with lightening speed and pushes his hand inside. Thankfully the outside pocket is empty and he comes away with nothing. It’s a horrible situation. Rough justice is a big problem in Sierra Leone and people tend to take the law into their own hands. I’m not sure how true it is, but we’ve been warned that if you accuse someone of stealing there’s a chance you’ll then have to watch them beaten to death in front of you. Jo and I look at each other and agree to say absolutely nothing.
We’re in PZ for less than an hour, but it feels like a lifetime. We emerge, hot and bothered but heavily laden with everything we went in for. As we leave the crowded streets behind us we agree that PZ is amazing, and definitely the best place to shop for things. We also agree that perhaps we should try to go there are little as possible.
Wednesday 4 August 2010
Ministry meetings
It had already been an eventful morning. Starting with a long queue at the bank, several unsuccessful phone calls to my manager, and a strange experience in a poda. (Strange experiences in podas are a daily happening, but this was the first time that a poda decided to change its final destination half way to work). I finally made it to the office at 11:00.
Alhassan looked up as I pushed open our shared office door. Alhassan is my line manager - a quiet man, with a slight build and a constantly amused expression. (I like to believe that the constant look of amusement has been a feature of his since birth, but I’m increasingly concerned it may just be a look he saves for me and my odd Western ways. He looks even more amused whenever I try to talk to him in Krio, or I ask him if he knows the exact time, or even date, something might happen.)
“How de bodi?” Alhassan greeted me.
“De bodi well. How yu sleep?” I responded.
“A tell God tenki.” Krio small talk over, Alhassan moved on to the day ahead. “We need to go to the steering group meeting at the Ministry.” I narrowed my eyes and thought back to the unsuccessful phone calls I’d had with him earlier that morning. The phone calls about whether or not we needed to go to the steering group meeting at the Ministry. The phone calls I made from the bank practically next-door to the Ministry building. The phone calls I made one hour, one poda ride, and one long walk in a rain shower ago – practically next-door to the Ministry.
I could have turned this situation into a long conversation about communication, and how we both needed to get better at it. But I knew from experience that this conversation takes a lot of time and has relatively little impact, and besides – we were about to be late for a meeting at the Ministry.
“We really need to go?” I asked. “Because this morning you said we didn’t”.
“We need to go.”
“But I thought it starts at 11:00?” Alhassan and I both glanced at the clock – it was now 11:05. Alhassan shrugged.
“It starts between 11:00 and 11:30.” This isn’t true. The meeting starts at 11:00. It only starts between 11:00 and 11:30 because people like me and Alhassan never arrive on time. In the end we arrived at about 11:45 because the traffic was bad and we stopped to look at a couple of tellies on the drive over (don’t ask – I didn’t).
The Ministry of Health and Sanitation is housed on the fourth and fifth floors of the impressive nine story Youyi Building - a 1970’s, white concrete gift from the Chinese Government to the Government of Sierra Leone. Each floor houses a different government department; making its complete lack of security all the more surprising. To say that the Youyi building has seen better days is a bit of an understatement. When I first arrived I wrongly assumed that the building had been caught up in the crossfire of the civil war. Once it must have been bright, grand and imposing. But now its crumbling façade of mildew green and concrete grey is a sad shadow of the architect’s original dream.
We were dropped off at the entrance by Ibrahem, the Health for All Coalition driver. (A young smiling man with little English, an encyclopaedic knowledge of Freetown, and friends on practically every street.) We walked into the ground floor lobby which presents the visitor with two options – the lift, or the stairs.
“Lets take the stairs.” I said, at the same time as Alhassan said,
“We’ll take the lift.” My heart sank, the Youiy Building lift is more packed than a northern line tube in rush hour. Not only is it unbearably crowded, it also comes with the added excitement of breaking down every time there’s a power cut – and there are lots of power cuts.
We stepped out of the lift onto the fifth floor, a little more squashed and a little more grateful to be alive. We negotiated our way past ‘security’ (a group of friendly guys sitting at a reception desk who occasionally stop people for a chat, but never actually stop people walking into the Ministry). And slid quietly into the Free Health Care Steering Group meeting taking place in the conference room.
The meeting is held every other Tuesday and brings together all the Government officials, Donor Organisations, NGOs and Civil Societies involved in the Free Health Care Initiative. The Initiative was launched in April with the promise of free health care for all pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five. It’s an ambitious project, made all the more ambitious by the fact that, at launch, the Government had neither the money nor the infrastructure to enable them to fully support it. Health for All Coalition (the civil society organisation I’m working for) has been awarded the contract for the independent monitoring of the free health care delivery. (This in itself is another ambitious project, given that the coalition was only founded in 2008 and the monitoring programme is only one sting of its over-stretched bow.)
Both fascinating and frustrating, the meetings are great opportunity to find out more about the health service in Sierra Leone, and the politics of international funding from giants such as UNICEF, DIFID and the World Bank. Dangerously dependent on international aide the Free Health Care Initiative is vital, but worryingly fragile. Progress is made, but so much progress is needed.
Alhassan looked up as I pushed open our shared office door. Alhassan is my line manager - a quiet man, with a slight build and a constantly amused expression. (I like to believe that the constant look of amusement has been a feature of his since birth, but I’m increasingly concerned it may just be a look he saves for me and my odd Western ways. He looks even more amused whenever I try to talk to him in Krio, or I ask him if he knows the exact time, or even date, something might happen.)
“How de bodi?” Alhassan greeted me.
“De bodi well. How yu sleep?” I responded.
“A tell God tenki.” Krio small talk over, Alhassan moved on to the day ahead. “We need to go to the steering group meeting at the Ministry.” I narrowed my eyes and thought back to the unsuccessful phone calls I’d had with him earlier that morning. The phone calls about whether or not we needed to go to the steering group meeting at the Ministry. The phone calls I made from the bank practically next-door to the Ministry building. The phone calls I made one hour, one poda ride, and one long walk in a rain shower ago – practically next-door to the Ministry.
I could have turned this situation into a long conversation about communication, and how we both needed to get better at it. But I knew from experience that this conversation takes a lot of time and has relatively little impact, and besides – we were about to be late for a meeting at the Ministry.
“We really need to go?” I asked. “Because this morning you said we didn’t”.
“We need to go.”
“But I thought it starts at 11:00?” Alhassan and I both glanced at the clock – it was now 11:05. Alhassan shrugged.
“It starts between 11:00 and 11:30.” This isn’t true. The meeting starts at 11:00. It only starts between 11:00 and 11:30 because people like me and Alhassan never arrive on time. In the end we arrived at about 11:45 because the traffic was bad and we stopped to look at a couple of tellies on the drive over (don’t ask – I didn’t).
The Ministry of Health and Sanitation is housed on the fourth and fifth floors of the impressive nine story Youyi Building - a 1970’s, white concrete gift from the Chinese Government to the Government of Sierra Leone. Each floor houses a different government department; making its complete lack of security all the more surprising. To say that the Youyi building has seen better days is a bit of an understatement. When I first arrived I wrongly assumed that the building had been caught up in the crossfire of the civil war. Once it must have been bright, grand and imposing. But now its crumbling façade of mildew green and concrete grey is a sad shadow of the architect’s original dream.
We were dropped off at the entrance by Ibrahem, the Health for All Coalition driver. (A young smiling man with little English, an encyclopaedic knowledge of Freetown, and friends on practically every street.) We walked into the ground floor lobby which presents the visitor with two options – the lift, or the stairs.
“Lets take the stairs.” I said, at the same time as Alhassan said,
“We’ll take the lift.” My heart sank, the Youiy Building lift is more packed than a northern line tube in rush hour. Not only is it unbearably crowded, it also comes with the added excitement of breaking down every time there’s a power cut – and there are lots of power cuts.
We stepped out of the lift onto the fifth floor, a little more squashed and a little more grateful to be alive. We negotiated our way past ‘security’ (a group of friendly guys sitting at a reception desk who occasionally stop people for a chat, but never actually stop people walking into the Ministry). And slid quietly into the Free Health Care Steering Group meeting taking place in the conference room.
The meeting is held every other Tuesday and brings together all the Government officials, Donor Organisations, NGOs and Civil Societies involved in the Free Health Care Initiative. The Initiative was launched in April with the promise of free health care for all pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five. It’s an ambitious project, made all the more ambitious by the fact that, at launch, the Government had neither the money nor the infrastructure to enable them to fully support it. Health for All Coalition (the civil society organisation I’m working for) has been awarded the contract for the independent monitoring of the free health care delivery. (This in itself is another ambitious project, given that the coalition was only founded in 2008 and the monitoring programme is only one sting of its over-stretched bow.)
Both fascinating and frustrating, the meetings are great opportunity to find out more about the health service in Sierra Leone, and the politics of international funding from giants such as UNICEF, DIFID and the World Bank. Dangerously dependent on international aide the Free Health Care Initiative is vital, but worryingly fragile. Progress is made, but so much progress is needed.
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