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!