Latest from Freetown - Week 3
Greetings from a humid and troublesome Sierra Leone with car problems, garden wildlife and a palaver in Bo.
A very rough drive to Baw Baw through red, mud torrents and across places where the road used to be. Sadly the village suffered two deaths the previous week, one natural, the other not quite, so as we pass through we pay our respects to bereaving relatives and leave a small gift.
On arrival at the cottage garden is now full of flowers and between showers a succession of tiny, turquoise butterflies hover over the blooms. A very shy family of small monkeys feeds on the trees but are soon gone.
Returning to Goderich the following day, a puncture. The spare was illegal and flat so we had to send a local lad on an ocado (motorbike), with wheel on his lap to get repaired. A big snag was that we couldn’t find the key to the locking wheelnut so could not remove the punctured wheel. A big hammer and chisel from a passing friend solved the problem. Sadly the new tyre bought to replace the illegal one deflated overnight so its back to the dealer!
Have a fantastic week and best wishes from Sierra Leone.
Mike.
Latest from Freetown - Week 2
This week in glorious Goderich, with terrific thunderstorms, final round-up at university and an ‘outbreak’ of seaweed on the beaches.
Not unusual throughout the wet season but pretty spectacular ear-splitting explosions sparking the night sky over a sleeping village. Windows blown open to drench whole rooms in minutes, zinc rooves shed serrated jets from every house scouring the foundations of roads and walls for miles. The dawn shows the cruel damage of a two hour storm from which no one escapes. For the main universities now is the time for their annual purge of ‘fake’ students. In their final few months students are finally ‘exposed’, already having been allowed to join classes as well as paying their fees (non-refundable!) for the previous years and now are finally brought to justice. A kind of justice maybe!!
In the last few weeks many of Sierra Leone’s beautiful beaches have been covered with thick, brown seaweed, allegedly due to some form of eutrophication from mining effluent brought to the coast. After three weeks of complete indecision and a lot of…. ”Who did this?”, it seems that some beach communities have used it as a blessing, raking it all together and putting it onto their farms to promote better yields of cassava.
Have a wonderful week wherever you are, Mike.
