The long and bump road

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It’s been another week full of touring around villages and delivering Roadshows, however this week has been full of TIA (This Is Africa) moments so I felt like another blog was needed.



We were originally meant to have Roadshows on Monday, Tuesday and Friday but that changed last week as we found out that Monday was due to be a public holiday - for some reason advanced notice of public holidays is not possible in Sierra Leone and we only ever find out when they will be at the last minute! We also found out that the school who were presenting for us on Friday had exams so we amended everything to make it Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday instead, thankfully there was still time to let the communities know about the changes. Tuesday morning came and I made my way to the office ready to hit the road. We weren’t due to leave until 12.30pm so I had time to do all the last minute preparations and some non Roadshow work. While I was doing this Eddie was preparing the paperwork to get our budget for this week from finance. He normally heads out into the community before us to get everything set up so when I kept checking and he was still buried under paperwork I began to realise today would not go as planned. By 12pm the papers were finally with the finance team but they didn’t have enough money at the office so they had to write a cheque and go to the bank to get it cashed, they told me it would be ready by 1pm and when I asked if it could be ready sooner they said that they would try. It was 1.30pm before they finally left to go to the bank and when they got there they found queues of people all trying to get money after the holiday. After getting the money the team still had to go to the market to buy the food we needed for the week and it wasn’t until nearly 4pm that the car returned to the office with everything that we needed and ready to leave! All of the equipment was already packed onto the roof of the car so as soon as I’d packed up my laptop we finally set of for the first village called Jabwema in Gaura Chiefdom.



On the route to Jabwema you have to take a road nicknamed the Belabu Highway (after a village along the way) which is the worst section of road that I’ve been on. The car seemed to agree with this statement an on one particularly rough and rocky incline the bottom of the vehicle scraped on a rock and started making very unhealthy noises. Apparently we broke a screw that was holding something together (clearly I’m not a car person) and one of the wheels now wasn’t turning. Cars don’t move very well when there wheels don’t turn so we had a problem. We were also in the middle of nowhere and had no phone coverage so in total we had three problems. We couldn’t solve the first problem without a mechanic and we couldn’t find one of those thanks to the second problem, so task number one was to find mobile phone signal to call the office. I headed out along the road (which was only one car wide so we were completely blocking it) with Mohamed one of the guys from my Roadshow team and we walked on until we heard rustling in the trees nearby. Thankfully it wasn’t a forest elephant about to stampede us (although I would love to see one) it was a local villager and when Mohamed asked him about phone signal he lead us down the road, along a path into the bush, up a steep hill to a stone clearing where apparently if you stood at a certain point you could get a weak signal! It was the only chance we had and although my phone picked up nothing thankfully Mohamed’s phone did and we asked the office to send either another mechanic or another vehicle out to help us. At this point we were about 2 hours from the office so help wouldn’t be arriving for a while so we continued along the road and walked to the nearest village to find someone with a motorbike who could go ahead to get a message to Eddie to let him and the community of Jebwema know what had happened. Thankfully (but ironically) we were less than 5 miles from our destination. As the vehicle wasn’t going to be fixed anytime soon we decided to get some guys to transport our gear the rest of the way by motorbike. By the time I reached Jabwema it was dark and I sat in the community barray surrounded by a mass of children while our equipment gradually made its way to us balancing precariously along the bumpy roads. After over an hour of ferrying we finally had everything set up and while we clearly didn’t have time to complete the whole programme we decided to show the films and let the people dance, and then we would continue with the other activities in the morning. Normally that would be enough drama for one day but as I’ve said this has been a week of TIA moments so when we had a barray crowded with people dancing and having fun, our generator decided to cut out plunging everyone into darkness. We managed to get it re-started but it didn’t last long and in the end we had to pack everything away by torch light, thankfully it was almost midnight when is when we normally call ‘one more music’ – last song.



After a short nights sleep in a tent in the barray I woke myself up with a refreshing bucket shower in an outdoor ‘cubicle’ with thatch grass walls on three sides. We then gathered the community people together again and completed the rest of the Roadshow programme. This week I took the video camera out with me so I collected some footage of the Nature Club students parading into the barray and then performing the drama and music they prepared to teach the community about the forest. While this was going on one of the guys from the office arrived on a bike to pick up our driver, Sunny, apparently the broken vehicle couldn’t be fixed straight away so they needed him to go back to Kenema and drive another car out for us, I estimated he should be back at around 2pm. 2pm came and went with myself and Mohamed still sitting in Jabwema surrounded by our equipment and no vehicle in sight. Finally at about 4pm I heard the rumble of the vehicle and Sonny arrived and quickly explained that a truck had got stuck in the giant potholes on the road which he was travelling blocking the route. In order to reach us he had to go back on himself and take a massive 2 hour detour!



As we finally neared our second village, Baoma in Nomo Chiefdom, we heard loud rumbles of thunder and the sky started to go black. We just made it to the community barray as the first drops started to fall and rushed underneath the shelter with the children who had come to greet us. Moments later the heavens opened releasing a torrential downpour which hammered on the old tin roof so that we had to shout to be heard. Thankfully the rain only lasted about 30 minutes but by this point it was almost 6pm and again there was not enough time to complete the Roadshow programme so we decided to do like we did yesterday and just showed the film and let the community people dance. Thankfully we had been able to fix the generator by changing the oil so there were no more problems that evening.



The morning all went to plan with a really good reception from the people of Baoma Nomo (there are lots of Baoma’s) so we though today might actually go to plan. However this was not to be, as soon as we had finished the activities we should have had a break to have our ‘breakfast’ of rice and African sauce but the people that we gave the food to cook last night made a mistake and cooked everything so there was nothing left for today. In these villages it is impossible to get food unless you take it and get someone to cook it so we had no way of getting anything to eat and wouldn’t be able to ‘pick something up on the way’ either as there wasn’t exactly a fast food drive through on our route. We set off as soon as we’d packed up to try to get to the next destination early to get them to cook for us.



For some reason I don’t really understand the new vehicle that was sent out for us didn’t have enough fuel for the journeys that we needed to make. The office had asked Sunny to take the fuel from the broken vehicle and use this but we weren’t able to do that so as we headed off to the third village, Baoma in Koya Chiefdom, we knew that we didn’t have enough fuel to get all the way there. We stopped at the point where there was phone signal to call the office again to ask for someone to come out to meet us at a junction close to Kenema with the diesel that we needed but no one was available. We drove as far as we could without running the tank completely empty and then Sunny had to hitch a lift to Kenema to get our re-fill. While he was away we were sat at the roadside getting a local ‘garage’ shack to fix a punctured tire that we’d had to stop and change earlier in the day. We were sat waiting for over 2 hours during which time the friendly mechanic gave us some mangoes from his tree, not enough to stop us feeling hungry but pretty tasty all the same. Eventually we were back on the road again and we finally made to Baoma Koya at about 5pm. Amazingly the whole community had waited patiently at the arrival point and they were still ready to begin the parade; devils, instruments, singing children and all. I hopped out of the car and joined the dancing throng of people to weave our way down the path to the barray. Despite the delays we still managed to complete the full programme this time and the community were having such fun that we had a hard time persuading them we had to turn off the music at the end of the night to get a few hours sleep!



The brief sleep that I did get was broken by the sounds of women singing, lots of women. There were also instruments and it sounded like they were parading right outside my tent. Early though it was there was no way I would get back to sleep so I dragged myself up and sure enough on the path going past the barray must have been over 50 women walking and singing. There is a culture of ‘secret societies’ here in Sierra Leone which I don’t know much about but it has to do with the passage from boy/girl to man/woman and apparently these ladies were something to do with that. After packing up the car we were then ready to head back to Kenema, once again with empty bellies due to more food problems. Thankfully we arrived back safely with no more dramas and I was grateful to once again be in a place with shops and a comfy bed. My final TIA moment of the week was a phone call to a friend who had been rafting down the river between Sierra Leone and Liberia, I knew that he’d had to cut his journey short but I didn’t know why....turns out he’d caught malaria and had an abscess on his finger which when they removed the took off the tip of his finger! I think it’s time for a relaxing weekend to prepare for more fun and games next week.

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