We chartered a taxi from Wilkinson Rd. to IMATT headquarters, a well-equipped compound atop Hill Station near the US Embassy's immense tract of land - which is nicknamed "Mordor" by locals and Embassy staff alike, and seems unnecessarily large to me given that there are only 25 Americans working there. It is pictured below, part of the IMATT compound in the foreground - though I'm technically not allowed to take pictures of the Embassy, so please disregard seeing this.
Amusingly, on our way up the hill, we passed a white girl on the side of the road, and Patrick, reasoning that any white person awake and about that early on a Saturday morning must be bound for the IMATT hike, leaned out the window to inquire. She was.
Once at IMATT, one of the first people we met was a Newfie who would be shipping back to Canada before month's end. Though he was as friendly as my trio of beloved Newfs back home (shout outs to Bill Dier, McNiven, and Dwyer), the fabled Newfie sense of humour seemed to have dissipated over his decades of military service.
Shortly after 9, a group of just under 20 of us began what ended up being a nearly four-hour hike that made me grateful that it happened to be the coolest day since I've been in the country, though the haze around the city did nothing to improve the quality of my photographs.
The IMATT hikers change their route every week, but on this particular morning we hiked out of town and up a relatively steep slope to the large resevoir pictured below.
The walk afforded yet another chance to engage with a thoroughly interesting expat community and I spent much of my time speaking with Juliane, a German student interning at the Campaign for Good Governance while she works on her Master's in Global Studies. This is her second stay in Africa, having worked in Botswana during her undergraduate days.
Patrick and I also spoke fairly extensively - both during the walk and back at IMATT headquarters, where we had lunch and took a dip in their pool - with Denis, a Quebec City native turned Ottawa resident who had been in SL for only a week.
A reservist with the Canadian armed forces, he's spent time in Cyprus and Germany, as well as most recently completing a tour of duty in Afghanistan. During his time here, Denis is teaching the RSLAF about jungle warfare, though I'm not exactly sure how a Canadian came to be an expert in that field.
Denis is one of the smartest people I've met in SL. A chiropractor by trade, he also owns two farms back home - a small hobby farm at his place in Ottawa, as well as a 300-acre heritage farm along the St. Lawrence that has been in his family since the seigneurial system days of the 1630s.
His place in Ottawa has been off the national power grid for six years, powered by wind and solar energy, and he's blunt in his appraisal that the only thing preventing such a lifestyle from widespread adoption in Canada is sheer laziness.
He hasn't drank milk for 14 years because he thinks it's "asinine" that humans are the only species alive that drink another species' milk well into adulthood. In short, he's the type of fascinating person that would make for a very interesting profile piece, though he seems unfortunately uninterested in such attention.
He did seem interested, however, to hear about my life here with JHR, and was shocked at how little ($1100/month) I was making to be here. (VSO volunteers, at $300/month plus a living allowance, are the only ones I've come across making less.)
Denis gets $10,000/month in disposable income, as both his housing and his IMATT-issued land rover are part of the package. He wouldn't be able to do this if it weren't for the enormous salary, he says, as he has to pay for someone to cover his chiropractic practice back home, as well as for the upkeep of both farms. But for soldiers with fewer Canadian ties, it makes for a pretty lucrative professional choice, he readily admits.
In a way, though, I do somewhat pity the soldiers, Embassy workers, and other lucratively paid people I've met in Freetown, as they don't seem to get to interact with the country very much at all.
IMATT personnel are not allowed to take their vehicles off the compound after 7 p.m. Embassy personnel are forbidden from attending certain bars. Neither group is allowed to even charter a taxi, much less ride a poda-poda - rules intended for their safety, but prohibitive in terms of their experience nonetheless.
They spend their days in little enclaves of wealth and privilege, always detached from the country's poverty by the panes of glass in the windows of their air-conditioned vehicles.
Nonetheless, it was a thoroughly interesting morning and I certainly hope to do more IMATT hikes, though the 9 a.m. start time is a rather strong deterrent. One thing I will not do again, however, is eat lunch at the IMATT restaurant.
Amusingly, though I've eaten at local hole-in-the-wall restaurants almost daily without so much as a stomach ache, the beef fried rice I had at IMATT gave me food poisoning. I found out too late that many soldiers had similar problems with the fried rice, which begs the question of why it's still on the menu.
Stubbornly refusing to allow a mild case of food poisoning to ruin my day, I still went out for Kevin's birthday at Atlantic, and attempted to drink the sharp stomach pains into submission. Foolish, you say? Yes, probably, but also not likely an action that surprises anyone who knows me well.
I took this nifty photo of the beach from our table at Atlantic, where we were treated to the open mic music of the awesomely-named Hank Slaughter.
Alas, my self-medicating approach did not work, and I was unable to get to bed until almost 5 a.m. last night. It felt kind of like I'd swallowed a dozen small razorblades and they were shredding my insides as they slowly worked their way through my system. I was also having cold sweats and threw on a sweater for the first time since my arrival.
I awoke feeling dehydrated and weak, my mild essential tremors acting up a little more than usual. Still, I think it is a relatively mild case and I've felt significantly better today.
More than anything, I was annoyed by the hit to my invincibility complex the virus brought with it. While my colleagues have been felled by illness all around me, my health had heretofore remained unblemished, leaving me eulogizing the wonders of youth.
A couple weeks ago, all three of the other people living at 19 Smartfarm went en masse to the doctor, to get tested for malaria, typhoid and, in Patrick's case, a strange infection caused by a Champion fly. I went to work, almost feeling guilty for not being sick myself. Though this has been a pretty mild case - at least according to my self-diagnosis - I no longer feel guilty.
Still, I made it almost two months without any illnesses. Not a bad run, all things considered.
6 comments:
i wouldn't rule out the possibility that somebody has played a cruel trick on you - while you weren't looking, somebody may have actually placed 12 small razor blades into your beef fried rice!... also, you really should ask your employer for a pay raise, or at the very least some poda-poda chits
Although I'm sorry to hear you had a blow to your invincibility complex, and not surprised to hear you tried to heal yourself with alcohol, I'm at least comforted that you're sharing news of your less than stellar health. They guy who neglected to mention to anyone he knew was having morbid hallucinations in Ghana was the guy who shouldn’t have been there with us. Okay, maybe not exactly the same thing, but still.
Keep an eye on that health of yours. Don't think I wouldn't find a way to get you to the doctor just because you’re on a different continent...
I'm not so much concerned for your health as your former lack of mentioning the seigneurial system. Exploitative nature of New France what!
PS - My intelligence (nerdiness?) is also insulted by the hyperlinking of Mordor
I'm hurt to think you would assume I'd learned nothing in Grade 7 Canadian history. I just don't like to flaunt it. Though, come to think of it, I am probably being optimistic to assume more people needed a hyperlink for Mordor than the seigneurial system. But I do have friends that aren't LOTR fans and, as one who generally doesn't feel an affinity for the fantasy genre, I respect and cater to that.
that beach photo is phenomenal...
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