19 Smartfarm Rd.

For weeks, I've been meaning to welcome you all into my home, by means of a virtual tour. Initially, I had hoped to post a video, but even uploading photos takes an eternity so video is pretty much out of the question.

I live at 19 Smartfarm Rd. in the city's west end, along with my colleague Bryna and her boyfriend Patrick (who has been doing a lot of volunteer work redesigning the website for the absurdly well-funded university radio station, Cotton Tree News). This is a view of our street; if you click to enlarge it, you can probably make out the coastline:


A lot of the expat community lives in the less impoverished west end, but our street is still predominately Sierra Leoneans, which is nice. In addition to Gabrilla and Shaka, our two guards, I often chat with a stall owner named Seri and, on my way home from work tonight, a sweet young lady named Mariam informed me that she's in love with me; I let her down easy, informing her I was married.

Anyway, I'm generally quite pleased with the place, and the convenience of not having to find somewhere to stay more than makes up for the annoyance of a completely arbitrary $50/month increase to our rent. We are the third group of JHR volunteers in Sierra Leone, and the third to live here. Jen Hollett, who some of you may remember from her MuchMusic VJ days, was actually one of its first tenants.

And one of the recent tenants who recently finished up with JHR, Kevin Hill (who is a Resurrection C.S.S. product also from Kitchener, oddly enough), is now living below us, which is convenient for whenever we have questions. He was in no rush to leave SL and is sticking around to work on a documentary about maternal mortality, based around the dubious statistic that 1 in 8 Sierra Leonean women will die giving birth. But I'm getting off topic.

Our flat is a three-bedroom place with a view up into the hills from the balcony, as seen below. The only downside of chilling on the balcony is that you can sort of feel like you're on display, as many people take notice when the white folk are out.


And while the place is by no means luxurious, I do still sometimes feel the guilt associated with knowing that my half of the rent ($200, hopefully dropping to at least $150 if we fill the vacant third room) is more than double the monthly salary of my most well-paid colleague. And that's before the costs of electricity, water, fuel for the generator and the guards' salaries.

I have no doubt that it's worth it, though, as the place seems really safe; I was particularly fond of the inventive local take on barbed wire that surrounds our walled compound - is there anything beer can't do?



Now, let's take a stroll inside, shall we? We have a reasonably well furnished, spacious living room (below). A couple Saturdays ago, the three of us and Kevin downed the better part of a 3 L bottle of wine by candlelight because the electricity was out, which I thought was pretty cool. One of the new President's major platform promises was to bring reliable electricity to Freetown, though, and I'm happy that we seem to have it most nights, making candlelight drinking a rare occurrence thus far.



And then there's my room, which I pretty much only retire to for sleep, though I'm already more unpacked than I ever was at 17 Fir St. in Waterloo.


I sleep under a mosquito net in an attempt to fend off malaria, since it seems pretty common here. Kevin's currently battling his second bout of it and he's only been in the country for eight months, and Shaka had it a few days ago as well. But my bed's kind of short so I'm forced to sleep diagonally, since having my legs hanging over the edge would kind of defeat the purpose of using the net.

All in all, though, 19 Smartfarm is a pretty easy place to live, despite its intermittent electricity, lack of running water, and the occasional cockroach, spider or gecko. Fortunately, they're pretty rare, in part because we're on the second floor, I imagine. I'll leave you with this shot, with my house key providing a measure of scale, of the dead cockroach I found in my bed's headboard upon my arrival a month ago.