Dearly beloved,
The ‘tour’ as the lads of the house have come to call it continues
at full pelt. Will has been working very hard and successfully at putting
together a weeklong programme of educational seminars for the launch of an
expanded Women’s Football League. The programme will reach its zenith tomorrow
with a parade, speeches and an inaugural match between two of the girls teams.
It promises to be a great day and I may or not be found trying to blend in with
some trumpet fanfares! We will also be meeting our new volunteer, Ben, who is
starting a placement with CBF tomorrow, before heading to the beach for a few
days of relaxation!
Johnny, meanwhile, has been delivering a project management
programme to the CBF managers as well as developing a future partnership with
the Salone Micro-finance Trust and reviewing the team managers’ reporting
structures. Joe (who never gives too much away) has just told me that one
parent of a player has donated footballs and drinks whilst another has offered
to be the chairman of a parents committee. This is all after Joe successfully
trialled pilot schemes aimed at improving parent participation in the League.
My work with Street Child was punctuated last week by visits
from the founder of the charity, Tom Dannat as well as from the race director
of the marathon that Street Child is holding on June 9th (the very first in Sierra
Leone - a good time to visit!). Both trips have given me opportunities to lay some groundwork for
future Collective volunteers. One idea is to use land that is already owned by
Street Child to provide parents or guardians of our beneficiaries with
agricultural opportunities. The produce could, in turn, be bought by our
commercial units, providing us with ingredients that are either expensive to purchase
or import whilst delivering a livelihood for the beneficiaries of the scheme. It
would create a virtuous circle whereby two branches of the charity, commercial
and altruistic, would feed into each other and benefit both parties. This could
be a great project for another Collective volunteer and I’ve started work on a
feasibility proposal.
Meanwhile I have followed up a meeting of all the managers
of the commercial units with a raft of documentation from new stock sheets to
cleaning rotas, staff appraisals and loan agreements in an effort to increase
efficiency, accountability and quality. Today the manager of the Clubhouse
(Samson) and I held a staff training session (based on appraisals that we’d
carried out), had a meeting for a potential fashion show to take place at The
Clubhouse and procured some paint for our painter who won’t buy it himself!
It’s definitely a good sign that we don’t spend too much
time discussing all this work when we get back home as it proves how
well we are all getting on and that there is a lot more to a placement in
Sierra Leone than the work done with our organisations.
With that in mind and after 2 months here I
thought it would be nice to give an appraisal (they seem to be in vogue for me
at the moment!) of the country from the point of view of the tourist. We have now
visited the Tribewanted eco-tourism resort at John Obey beach, surfed and slept
at Burey beach, travelled to the National Park at Outamba-Kilimi, relaxed at
the Rogbonko Retreat, set up by the family of the renowned Anglo-Sierra Leonean
author, Aminata Forna, and imbibed the madness of Freetown. There are countless
other beaches to visit, as well as two more major towns (Bo and Kenema) a
chimpanzee sanctuary (which features dramatically in Tim Butcher’s Chasing the Devil) and many more gems
that I’m sure I’ll never find.
Visiting all of these places has been fantastic. Some of the
journeys have been adventurous and others accessible to virtually all. The
National Park took a 6-hour ordeal in a van loaded with 28 people, followed by
motorbike journeys that included both a river crossing on a raft and two flat
tyres. But the result was well worth the journey! We stayed in wooden huts and (having arrived in the
dark) woke up to an amazing setting of verdant mountains and magnificent river.
After a short morning trek we took a canoe down the river passing monkeys and
then settling nearby a herd (?) (my friend Scott will definitely know the
collective noun - mate?) of bathing hippos before heading back up stream. The
place was very remote, we passed through a number of villages that seemed to be
almost solely self-subsistent and it was very much Bring Your Own. We provided
spaghetti and baked beans to be cooked and luckily remembered to bring a bundle
of drinking water too. Cards by the
light of a lantern had a certain romance to it, tempered by constantly swatting
away insects. A few warm beers tasted better than expected! The return
journey is a vague memory following a sleepless night and 5a.m departure time…
Rogbonko Retreat was more accessible. From Makeni it was a
matter of a short taxi journey replete with 8 passengers (including the
obligatory 2 in the drivers seat) followed by a scenic motorcycle ride through
a Chinese run sugar cane plantation and into a community owned cashew
plantation. We had brought our own water but could have got some in Rogbonko
Village, a sign that there was a lot more development here than in Outamba-Kilimi.
The retreat is thoughtfully cut away in the woods providing shade and comfort
for its visitors and we ate a delicious groundnut (basically the same as
peanut) chicken stew and drank freshly tapped poyo (‘palm wine’ a milky liquid
that comes directly from the palm tree and can vary widely in its alcohol
content). A short walk took us to a stream
for swimming and on the return journey we collected, with the help of the
managers’ two sons, cashew nuts to be roasted on our return. The retreat is indeed is the perfect refuge
from the noisy and hectic cities of Salone and is my top weekend tip!
The beaches are far beyond what I had expected. The sand at
both John Obey and Burey is fine and golden and both beaches back onto
impressive mountain ranges (one of which we trekked from John Obey on day 3).
The accommodation at both resorts was tents only because we turned down the
option of cabins, which are slightly more expensive. The beaches are the
predominant weekend destination for the thousands of ex-pat NGO workers and
mostly Lebanese businessman working in Freetown, so it is possible to stay in
air-conditioned luxury as well as in basic good value quarters. Weeks could be
spent beach-hopping down the Freetown peninsula and it would make a great
holiday too.
The trips we’ve taken so far give me confidence in recommending
Sierra Leone as a tourist destination to one and all. The people and the land have
a huge amount to offer and there is an undeniable sense of adventure in travelling through a
country that still only receives international tourists in hundreds rather than
thousands every year. Book your trip soon though, that sense of adventure won’t feel quite so immediate once the Hilton has arrived in 2013, and a Radisson is
coming soon after!