As I feared, the lack of Internet access in Sierra Leone severely limited the frequency of my blogs. As it stands, this is getting posted from London Heathrow airport, where I thankfully have wireless. I want to catch up on the last two weeks so that this feels complete, so I’m going to try to get through some stuff pretty quickly.
Our last week of fieldwork was held in Kabala, which is in the Koinadugo district (which is the diamond district) and is about five hours north of Freetown. Everyone had been telling us that Koinadugo is the coldest region of Sierra Leone, and I was really looking forward to some cool air. However, being the coldest region in Sierra Leone is basically like being the tallest dwarf, so it was still pretty hot. It is actually up in the mountains, so it gets nice and cool at night and in the morning, and apparently in January it even gets some snow, so relatively, yes, it is a “cold” place. Either way, it is extremely beautiful and has really awesome mountains jutting out everywhere. Pretty cool. That week’s emphasis was POG readiness assessment, so we went around to different communities assessing who has received their goats, if the goats are surviving and giving birth, and who is ready to pass along the offspring. I continue to love going into the communities; the people are always so warm and welcoming, and we have ended up learning basic conversation in about five or six different tribal languages. It’s always fun to try speaking to people in their native languages, and they always laugh and get pretty tickled about the fact that you’re trying. Koinadugu is Heifer SL’s newest project area, and was only initiated in June, so it was interesting to see a fairly new project get up and running. We especially loved our supervisor for this district, Abdul, who is a tiny little guy who weirdly reminds me of a mix between the Chinese guy from the Hangover and Samwise Gemgy from Lord of the Rings. I’m not quite sure what kind of image that leaves you with, but he is precious and drinks milk out at the bars while bouncing around snapping and clapping and dancing.
The last couple of weekends we spent solely in Freetown. It has been nice staying in Freetown (even though this does mean that we didn’t go to the beach) and going out with all the people and friends we have been meeting. We went to an Afro Beats concert at the National Stadium, which we were really excited about since we have been listening to tons of great music here and some of our newly favorite artists were going to be performing. Of course, this is Sierra Leone, so nothing actually happened as was expected. For one thing, the concert started at 4:00 pm. However, nobody started getting there until at least 10:00 pm. We didn’t get there until around 11:30 or so, and even then, the main performers didn’t even start until around 2 or 3 in the morning, and the main headliner didn’t even go on until 4 in the morning (also, two of the three headliners never even showed up; one was in Germany on a European tour, and I’m fairly certain he didn’t even know he was supposed to be at the concert and that someone just thought it would be a good idea for advertising if they said he was coming). Anyway, Ice Prince was the main headliner, and at 4 in the morning, went on for about thirty or forty minutes, and it was totally worth waiting because he’s pretty awesome and we really like a lot of his songs. The other nights in Freetown were spent going to some of our favorite places and staying up until five or six in the morning (Freetown is very much like Spain in that way, and your nights out don’t really start until two in the morning).
Our last week found us back in Port Loko, the district about two hours away where we spent our very first week in the field. However, we weren’t going for fieldwork; instead, we went with the entire Heifer Sierra Leone staff (which is 25 people, including us) for the yearly country program review. We were actually very fortunate to be included in this, and it was a really great opportunity to see how the staff comes together to evaluate themselves and their work and move forward during the next year. We were encouraged to participate and contribute, and on the second day gave a presentation about our experience as interns, offering our key findings as well as suggestions for Heifer’s future programming. It was really well received and people seemed to really appreciate it. I won’t get into too many details about the inner workings of Heifer, but it was extremely interesting to see how the staff regarded each other and the various dynamics between the different levels of staff. It was a really wonderful time in Port Loko – it actually started out terribly because we were supposed to go to the MJ Hotel (where we stayed the first time we were there), which has air conditioning and wireless, and we hadn’t had Internet in weeks and were anticipating actually getting some work done, but due to a serious of unfortunate events, we ended up staying at a place still in the middle of construction that was more or less terrible. However, a few things really picked us up, and one was that the entire staff stayed there, so we got to spend a lot of time hanging out with people, and we also had a wonderful cook, Mr. Conteh, who made us delicious food that was not cassava leaves and fish. It was a really great way to end the internship experience – on the last night the whole staff went out together and I really enjoyed the company of everyone.
We came back from Port Loko on Wednesday, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t hit me that I was leaving two days later. I can’t even remember what I did those two days. We went out, ate at our favorite places, visited the Heifer office to say goodbye to people, and wrapped up our lives in Freetown. It seems surreal, especially sitting here in London now, that I just spent the last four months in Africa. While I was there, each day felt like 50 hours and weeks felt like months, but now that I’ve left, I feel like it all happened entirely too quickly. Crazy.
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