skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Ever since learning I would be coming to Freetown, one of the most exciting aspects for me was knowing that I would be in the country during the time of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. In fact, in one of the first postings here on 42.6, I noted that the verdict was expected in the RUF trial shortly after my arrival, in late October.
Needless to say, when a date for the verdict had still not been announced by the end of January, I was growing impatient. I had yet to schedule any vacation time, certain that the minute I made plans to leave Sierra Leone, they'd call everyone together and announce the verdict behind my back. It was becoming all too clear that this was a well-orchestrated scheme to cheat me out of my opportunity to witness history.
But in the midst of my increasing despair, while at the bar a few weeks back, a friend who may or may not work at the Court may or may not have tipped me off that it was coming soon. Like, soon soon. And though another week went by after that assertion, word finally came that the date was set: February 25, 2009, 10:30 a.m. Come hell or high water, I was going to be sitting in that courtroom.
And Wednesday morning, I was doing just that, more than an hour before the summary of the verdict was set to begin at 10:30 a.m. That is, until Binta Mansaray, the Deputy Registrar for the Special Court, arrived to inform us all that there had been a delay.
Yes. More than three months. I was aware. As a journalist, I pride myself on keen observation skills that take note of things like the passage of 100 days.
Water under the bridge, I thought to myself. It was a sore spot for a while, but we're all here now and that's what matters. The apology is appreciated and all, but I'm sure it wasn't your fault anyway, kind lady, and -- What? You mean there's been another delay?
From there on, my thought process deteriorated into a string of profanities not fit to publish. We were told to return at 2 p.m.
Alongside Sheik, Bryna, Kevin and ABJ, I decided not to leave. We instead wandered down to the Special Court restaurant (cleverly and/or lamely named the "Special Forks") to grab some breakfast and indulge in a little unproductive grumbling. I went on record that, if the verdict was again delayed at 2, I was cutting all ties with this thoroughly inconsiderate tribunal and carrying on with my life.
As we waited, I realized that we were sharing a table with the family of Issa Sesay, a senior commander in the RUF and one of the three men waiting an extra agonizing 3.5 hours to learn his fate. This struck me as quite odd.
The man was charged with 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Extermination. Rape. Sexual slavery. Forced marriage. Pillage. Murder. Conscription of child soldiers. Enslavement.... Let's just say he wasn't likely looking at a plea bargain and six months of house arrest. So where did he get off having family that cared whether he ever saw the outside of a cell again?
As we returned to the courtroom and, in a novel turn of events, the proceedings actually got underway sharply at 2:00, this theme would continue to evolve in my mind. The three accused were escorted into the courtroom, each flanked by a guard on either side. Throughout the hour and a half verdict that followed, I was made uncomfortable by the range of emotions I experienced.
Of course, all three were inevitably found guilty of the majority of charges - no surprise there. The good betting is on how much time they'll be sentenced to, with my money saying at least 50 years. It should be more. But therein lies the rub.
Before setting foot in that courtroom Wednesday, the names Issa Sesay, Morris Kallon and Augustine Gbao were empty shells upon which I could transpose the Satantic visages I deemed fitting for the men behind the abhorrent indecencies I've already outlined in quite sufficient detail on this blog.
Studying their faces as the presiding judge - a Canadian, actually, named Justice Pierre G. Boutet - pronounced "Guilty" a whopping 46 times for the collective, I was forced to see them as humans, albeit ones of a tremendously inhumane ilk.
During my post-verdict interview with Gbao's British lawyer, John Cammegh, he said, "My client is an extraordinary character. He's somebody who I have a great deal of respect for ... I think the way in which he's behaved [during the trial] is a credit to him, and it's been a pleasure to represent him."
Come again? I would've preferred, "Sure, he's the sickest motherfucker I've ever had the misfortune to meet, but everyone is entitled to a defence, right?" That would have been more acceptable to me. That would have given me grounds to deny, at least on a subconscious level, the capability for sadism and cruelty among my fellow homo sapiens.
In speaking with Cammegh and Wayne Jordash, Sesay's lead defence counsel, it became abundantly clear that I wasn't the only one miffed by the lengthy delay in the presentation of the verdict. The reasons have been widely speculated over, but I think the simple explanation that the written verdict was expected to be several hundred pages long, owing in part to the fact that the Canadian judge dissented on every conviction against Gbao except for one, is probably the most reasonable.
For more on the verdict, you can check out this piece that I wrote for IRIN. I was very pleased to finally freelance something to someone that might actually pay me, as my previous two efforts have been for The Cord (Don't worry, Heather, I wasn't expecting payment!) and The Record (who has still yet to pay me for my Obama editorial).
More importantly, though, this wasn't an editorial, and I like to think that reporting for an internationally reputable news service on an historic verdict will act as something of a feather in my cap as a journalist. Given the continual cuts to reporting jobs back home, I'll need all the help I can get.
In addition, I now have a foot in the door with IRIN. At the same time I met with the editor who gave me this gig, I pitched two other story ideas that they're interested in.
However, with many competing demands on my time for the duration of my stay, I might end up accepting that this is the last piece I freelance while I'm here. Though the thought of having an open daily schedule that would allow me to freelance at will leaves me salivating, that's simply not my reality or priority, and while many trainers freelance substantially more than I have, many more still don't find time to do it at all.
As for this story, it didn't really turn out quite as I'd hoped. Oddly, IRIN had agreed to have me cover the event, but also have Bryna write something focusing on the charge of forced marriages. In the end, they decided they wanted only one, and so her piece was incorporated as the lead in my piece. (Bryna also submitted a gut-wrenching interview for IRIN's 'Hear our voices' feature, which you can check out here.) The final product is that the first third of the article is Bryna and the remainder is me.
As a result of this editing process, I felt as though some of my stronger segments were lost and the ending now makes the Special Court's outreach efforts seem more successful than I think they've actually been. These final two paragraphs were cut completely:
Unfortunately, more than six years after the Court was established, there is still much work to do in combating ignorance about its functioning and, in many cases, its mere existence.
"I don't know about that [the Special Court]," says Abissea Gbessman, emptying her lone cooler of excess water as she packs up from selling cold drinks in one of Freetown's busy downtown markets. "When I wake up in the morning, all I worry about is how I will feed my kids."
One of the reasons I found this story compelling was the stark juxtaposition of the meaning of the Special Court for the Western world vs. Sierra Leone. It has seen landmark verdicts, including the first ever convictions under international law for forced marriage, the intentional targeting of humanitarian and peacekeeping workers, and the conscription of child soldiers.
Such verdicts mark one of the few times people back home would give SL even a cursory glance, yet attitudes among locals towards the Court are more commonly those of mild indifference or outright hostility than of staunch support.
While interviewing for local reaction, more than half of the 30 or so people I spoke to had no idea what the Special Court was. The local newspapers gave the verdicts front-page coverage, but so few people read them that it still wasn't a major point of neighbourhood conversation.
It was interesting to witness this first-hand, after reading a document brought to my attention by my buddy Brandon, which stated the following about a 2007 survey of Sierra Leonean attitudes towards the Court:
79 percent of all respondents indicated that they understood the role of the Court and 91 percent indicated that they strongly agreed that the Court contributed to the building of peace after intense violence. 85 percent of respondents indicated that they can speak adequately on the activities of the Court and 88 percent affirmed that the outreach program was doing its job well.
I'd love to know the methodology that produced those results, as I suspect that either it was a written survey that thereby reflects the views of only the literate, educated minority most likely to know about the Court, or that Sierra Leoneans are simply giving the answers they think those operating the survey want. 'Cause those numbers sure as hell don't reflect the reality.
Even among Sierra Leoneans that know about the Court, many understandably view it as a Western imposition that gives a bunch of foreigners high-paying jobs, but does little for the victims of the war. They view it as money that the international community can afford to spend on their country, yet chooses quizzically to put towards the perpetrators (even if it is their conviction) instead of making a tangible difference in the lives of the war's myriad victims.
All that being said, I'm by no means against the Special Court, or its outreach program. I believe what I've read about outreach efforts here being vastly better than they were in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, and I merely think the task they undertook was immense.
As for the Court more generally, I do think it will have a lasting positive legacy on the judiciary in Sierra Leone. They've initiated a witness protection program in the country and improved the capacity of its lawyers and judges by employing them directly at the Court, as well as more broadly operating as an example of how a fair judicial system should work.
Still, I sympathize with average Sierra Leoneans whose lives are such a struggle in the here and now that taking solace in lasting implications is a hard pill to swallow. It is just another example of how life in Sierra Leone is firmly grounded in shades of gray.
Anyway, this probably won't be my last interaction with the Special Court. Sentencing for Sesay, Kallon and Gbao is expected sometime in March, with the appeals process beginning in April. Given the level of respect for timelines I've seen so far, it seems safe to say the Court's work will continue until well after I've left.
We never burn houses. We never kill anybody.... They kill, they burn houses in this country, the rebels. The government made provisions for them; they even give them money.... They are now self-reliant. What about us?
Those words, uttered by a spokesman for a disability group consisting of both war amputees and polio sufferers, cut to the core of one of post-war Sierra Leone's pervasive conundrums.
In order to maintain peace, Sierra Leone must reintegrate and rehabilitate, often using public funds, the legions of rebels that cannot rightly be held to account for the horrific drug-addled crimes they, generally as children, performed under extreme duress. Yet to then leave any other group behind suddenly feels like so much more of a slap in the face, as though they're being deemed less human than those who committed unthinkable atrocities.
Welcome to Sierra Leone, a land where people share the streets of their cities and villages with the very culprits who raped and mutilated them, or at least those just like them. It boggles the mind.
I'll never understand how flesh being torn apart feels, or how after all the suffering a heart heals, on the rich green fields, where they killed old and young, cold and numb, under the light of a golden sun. It still stuns. Tell me what possesses man to in anger raise his hand. I'll never understand.
The war in Sierra Leone officially ended in 2002, yet seven years later the small country is haunted by it in every facet of its daily functioning.
Infrastructure is non-existent, largely because the entire countryside was raped, pillaged and burned to the ground by the maniacal rebel gangs.
Youth unemployment runs as high as 80% and the country's struggling to attain a 40% literacy rate. In a country where a staggering majority of the population is under the age of 35, the fact that so few in this demographic boast education or marketable skills looms large. But then, keeping at the books is difficult when your school is on fire and your teacher's just been beheaded.
The streets of Freetown are lined with beggars, some of the 'run of the mill' variety seen in every large city, but a disproportionate number of them showing the obvious signs of war trauma, bandaged stumps where arms and legs ought to be.
The double-arm "short sleeve" amputees (meaning both arms were severed above the elbow) are probably the most tragic; they have difficulty even begging, nodding to a breast pocket in lieu of any other means of accepting the petty cash of those more fortunate.
And just for good measure, all those people whose lot is so pitiable undoubtedly knew and loved someone that received even less humane treatment at rebel hands.
I'll never understand how it felt when my mom lost her dad, her sister and the only brother that she ever had, and I'll never know what's more sad - the fact they could have been spared, or the fact that to this day nobody cares for the innocent victims of a full-fledged holocaust, 'cause folks only holler if the cost of dollars lost is high, so regardless of the number of lives, when poor blacks die, they always turn a blind eye, and I'll never understand why.
Even when I'm battling my way into a poda-poda where elbows are thrown viciously just to get a seat, or my taxi driver wants me to pay 10 times the regular fee because the pigment of my skin says I can, I can't help but wonder how Sierra Leoneans remain, by and large, so friendly and accommodating to a Westerner.
How are they not teeming with rage and rendered paralyzed by bitterness? How do they not harbour greater resentment towards an international community that let this war go on for nearly 11 years? And how does life here continue, but for necessity?
I'll never understand how people can go on and live, the miracle of finding the strength to forgive. To resurrect peace, to close up wounds so deep that they pierce souls beneath heartbeats. To be a willful slave to a loving God's command's the key to a freedom that I'll never understand.
The thing about wars where large segments of the population take up illegal arms and perpetuate heinous crimes is that you can't possibly hold everyone to account. To attempt to apply a Western system of retributive justice where all accused of wrongdoing stand trial would take generations to even process, and morph the prison system into the largest, if not the only, industry in the country.
Instead, in cases like Sierra Leone, a more restorative justice process tends to be favoured, by which it is hoped the country can move beyond a period of intensely tragic history in order to salvage a people and a society. Only those deemed most culpable, the leaders of the conflict, face the international tribunals for war crimes.
To date, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) has convicted leaders of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Civil Defence Forces (CDF), two of the three militias at the heart of the country's confusing civil war.
Foday Sankoh, leader of the third, the Revolutionary United Front, died in custody in 2003. Sam Bockarie, the RUF's battlefield commander, was killed in neighbouring Liberia, also in 2003. Johnny Paul Koroma, leader of the AFRC, fled to Liberia and is widely thought to be dead, though it's never been confirmed and the SCSL has never dropped their indictment against him.
The trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was initially indicted on 654 counts of war crimes for his role in backing the Sierra Leone war, is currently on trial in The Hague.
And tomorrow, the Special Court will deliver its verdict in the trial of three RUF leaders, the last trial still being carried out in Sierra Leone. Once the inevitable appeal process ends, the Court will close down and the already small expat community will shrink a good deal more.
It's a long list and there have certainly been many historic rulings in international law as a result of this country's civil war. But you'll have to excuse most Sierra Leoneans if they haven't rejoiced over every conviction; after all, they were kind of busy trying to eke out a dignified existence, still waiting on those reparations they were promised in the wake of the war.
The National Commission for Social Action has finally begun to process reparations, years after so many rebels were given the means to support themselves. My roommate Bryna freelanced a tremendous piece about the multi-faceted issue to IRIN News, a reputable UN-backed news service that functions throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East, which you can read here.
As with so many other things in Sierra Leone, the delay comes down to cash money, of which there is tragically little to go around, meaning tough decisions must be made. Do you help those most adversely affected by the war and risk the trained killers going on another rampage, or put immediate stability ahead of what's necessarily most 'fair'?
While we're on the topic of tough questions, do you prioritize electricity to court investors, agriculture to feed the masses, health care to keep people alive, or roads to make tourism a viable industry? Of course, the answer has to be 'all of the above', but how do you find a way to do it all at once?
Some days, it really feels as though there's so much working against politicians in Sierra Leone that they're pretty much bound to fail. There are no easy answers in post-war Sierra Leone, turns out.
Editor's note: The italicized portions of the above posting are lyrics from a chillingly good song called "I'll Never Understand" by Shad, one of my all-time favourite artists and a Laurier grad. It can be found on his debut album, entitled When This Is Over.
Though the song was written about the Rwandan genocide, which saw between 800,000 and 1 million people killed in a span of about 100 days in 1994, the lyrics are applicable to the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone as well. Shad's parents are from Rwanda, and recently returned there, where his father is a minister and his mother opened a Montessori school. Evidently, the whole Kabanga family's pretty awesome.
Late last week, I learned that one of my colleagues, Fatima, had barely eaten in two weeks. She was exhausted, and it was impacting her ability to get her stories done on a daily basis.
When I asked her why she hadn't eaten, Fatima said she just wasn't hungry and the doctors couldn't seem to figure out why. Today, much to her displeasure, one of her colleagues filled me in on the real reason: Her boyfriend "doesn't like women who eat too much." He's allegedly broken up with her twice over the matter, and taken her back only after much begging and pleading.
If Fatima weighs more than 100 lbs., I'd be shocked.
She's a smart, beautiful girl, who is well-respected by her colleagues for her integrity and devotion to the Muslim faith - or "prayerfulness", as Sheik calls it, usually while trying to steal a kiss on the cheek.
In between her work as a journalist and passionate advocate of child and maternal health issues, she has also found time to write a film addressing many of the social concerns facing Sierra Leoneans.
And yet she's dating a guy whose conception of love involves asking her to starve?
I can deal with a newsroom bereft of equipment even bordering on modern, and I can deal with reporters who are essentially without training of any kind. I can even deal with ministries and government officials that deem it acceptable to daily dodge the interviews they've scheduled with my reporters, in a transparent attempt to sidestep accountability.
But this ... this absolutely breaks my heart.
Editor's note: For another good example of some of the challenges typically faced by JHR trainers, check out this excellent blog reflection by my roommate and colleague, Bryna. Our placements are pretty different and this particular issue hasn't been one that's really surfaced for me, as Kalleone reporters are paid the same in a given month regardless of output. But February was more than half over before they were paid for January at all, so the system clearly has its flaws as well.
I have less than three months left in Sierra Leone, a thought that, notwithstanding the legions of loved ones I miss, is rather terrifying. There are still so many things that I want to accomplish here, from my work at Kalleone, to freelancing, to simply seeing the country.
One lesson I've learned about life abroad is that it's remarkably easy to become complacent when you know you'll be somewhere for a while. Prior to this weekend, I haven't even left Freetown since my five-day excursion out east at the end of '08.
And once I did get out of the city, I felt a pang of regret about that. Sierra Leone really is an astonishingly beautiful country, and there are few places that more aptly recall that fact than our destination on Friday evening, River No. 2.
At the invite of our Canadian soldier friend Denis, Bryna, Patrick and I joined an excursion with the stated aim of simply chilling on sand for a night. I was feeling up to the task.
As has probably been evident from past posts, Denis is one of my favourite people in Sierra Leone. As we drove along the abysmal roads that lead to River No. 2, we discussed the training he's been doing with the RSLAF (Republic of Sierra Leone Armed Forces) as they prepare to send a peacekeeping delegation to Sudan, which in itself is a somewhat stupefying thought given the ragtag nature of the Salone forces.
Denis mentioned that he had actually hoped his current tour would be in Darfur had the Salone posting not come up first, but when I asked if he could go with the RSLAF contingent in some kind of training capacity, he seemed wary of entering such an unstable situation without a more proven force to watch his back. Since his last stop prior to SL was Afghanistan, I'm going to go ahead and assume this reasoning was more parts wisdom than cowardice.
Still, despite his reluctance to put his life in the RSLAF's hands, Denis was in no way unsympathetic to the obstacles they face. Citing Maslow's hierarchy of needs, he reasoned that Sierra Leonean soldiers are generally too busy focusing on the basics of survival to worry about self-actualization; they are going to Sudan because they need money to live, he said, not out of ideological support for the mission.
My cousin Jason will soon wrap up his third tour of duty in Afghanistan, a point of pride on my dad's side of the family. But I see him less than annually, and have never really spoken with him about the mission in Afghanistan. As such, Denis is the first soldier I've engaged in dialogue about much of anything, but certainly about the military.
If he is anything resembling the norm in the Canadian forces, then I am confident our ranks are not populated by the 'shoot first, ask questions later' cowboy types that soldiers are oft cast as in Hollywood, but rather an intelligent and noble lot who grasp far better than the average civilian the nuanced shades of gray that colour most modern conflict zones.
Our conversation also touched on the need to rework the UN power structure, removing the veto power from the permanent Security Council members, as well as an interesting psychological discussion that has inspired me to add Dave Grossman's On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society to my reading list.
But the night was by no means all intellectual debate. After we'd arrived at the beach and the tents were pitched, Denis whipped out a stereo and we began playing frisbee and even - gasp! - baseball along the white sands, Kanye West and Green Day forming the soundtrack for the surreal.
As night set in, our Sierra Leonean hosts served up a delicious dinner of fresh fish, and dug a bonfire pit at least three feet deep (making the fire in the photo at the start of this post look deceptively smaller than it actually was).
With the flowing of $1.50 imported beers and a $6 bottle of Canadian Gold whiskey, it wasn't long before Denis had the acoustic guitar unsheathed and I was joyously butchering versions of The Eagles' "Hotel California" and Tom Petty's "Learning to Fly" with a trio of twenty-something Brits and four fellow Canucks.
Outside Bryna, Patrick and Denis, the Canadian contingent was bolstered by a middle-aged foreign affairs official named Dave, who has seen all but seven countries on earth (North Korea and Somalia are among them, but I don't recall the other five).
Making the nigh unprecedented choice of coming to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone for strictly tourist motives, he invited suspicion, as both Bryna and British Joe confided to me almost immediately upon meeting him that they thought he was a spy. Admittedly, he would be the first person I've come across that was in the region for no reason other than vacationing, but he seemed like a solid guy to me and I spent a good deal of time chatting with my fellow Ontarian.
The expat life can have a pretty strange impact on one's social circle that way. In K-W, I probably wouldn't spend a Friday night talking to a war-tested father of three whose kids I don't know, or a possible spy that's set foot on almost every country on earth. And I probably wouldn't be shirtless on a beach at 2 in the morning in mid-February - at least not without getting some strange looks.
But I think it was as I stared back at my new friends encircling the fire pit, having wandered 20 metres down the beach, through military-issue night-vision goggles, that the absurdity of my current situation really set in.
I'm in Sierra Leone.
And while I'll be just another debt-laden university arts grad when I get off a plane at Pearson come June, right now, I'm the benefactor of some pretty cool opportunities simply by virtue of being a North American. For the remainder of my stay, I'm going to do my best to remember that simple truth and fully embrace the opportunities as they come.
Last Tuesday, I very nearly tripped over a corpse.
As I finished up my dinner at Delightful Fast Food, I took a phone call from Bryna and chatted briefly before beginning the 10-minute walk home. Had I not, I might've witnessed a murder first-hand.
About five minutes from my house, I encountered a small crowd and, in the dark of night, took a second to notice the lifeless body at their feet - just off the roadside, arms splayed, eyes closed. Though it was too dark to make out any blood, it seemed immediately clear that I was staring at a dead man. No one in the crowd stooped over him searching for signs of life. There were none.
After pausing for a split second, I overrode my inquisitive journalistic instincts and kept walking, passing by a larger, agitated crowd as it huddled around a man I suspect was the killer. This didn't seem like a situation I'd be wise to linger in.
When I was almost home, I stopped to ask what had happened, and was told the deceased had been stabbed to death over a disagreement of some sort. To date, that's the most reliable information I've received, thanks to the unfortunate yet predictable reality that no media reported on the incident.
It sounds like the type of thing I should have found traumatizing, does it not? And yet, while on the phone with my folks for nearly an hour last night, I didn't even mention the incident - not because I was gallantly protecting their peace of mind (they're among this blog's most committed readers, after all), but because it didn't occur to me as one of the week's noteworthy happenings. That's more than a little unsettling, I assure you.
Perverse desensitization is one thing, and perhaps understandable in my current living situation. Here, death is not the shocking and unwelcome intrusion it is back home. It's commonplace, though usually brought about by less violent means.
About a month into my stay in Sierra Leone, my colleague Mabel was telling me about a cool project she'd been working on with a couple other journalists. As I delved further, she noted that it probably wouldn't be finished, as the girl who had been taking the lead wasn't working with them anymore.
"Oh ... did she switch stations or something?" I inquired harmlessly.
"She died," Mabel responded.
But her words carried neither the profound sadness of one who has recently lost someone they held dear, nor the jarring awkwardness they would have if uttered from the lips of a Westerner that empathized as I tried to dislodge my foot from my throat. Mabel's voice was not without emotion, but it was clear that her and death were old acquaintances.
Just recently, the banality of death was again on full display as I sat at my computer in stunned silence after reading an email from my buddy Trevor about the murder of Nadia Gehl. Though I didn't especially know her, I've known the family since I was 7, having played ball with both her brothers in various seasons spanning the past 15 years.
The two Kalleone employees in the newsroom at the time, Princetta and Muctar, showed interest, but the office was by no means overcome by an air of solemnity. Minutes later, they were joking and asking to see pictures of my girlfriend. It seems at least part of death's meaning is culturally derived.
However, the disconcerting aspect of all this is not merely that I'm desensitized to death. It goes well beyond that.
The very night I told my roommates of my brush with another man's mortality, it was already fodder for the pervasive black humour of 19 Smartfarm Rd.
As Patrick fantasized about murdering our landlady on account of her insatiable greed, he joked that he'd throw her down the stairs just as I was walking by, causing me to remark, "Damn, that's the second corpse I've seen in 12 hours."
Such remarks are quite at home in our humble abode. A couple months back, Patrick read a particularly bone-chilling excerpt of Ambushed, in which Ian Stewart describes rebels forcing a young teenager to rape his own mother before they cut off his head. Looking up from the book, he remarked sardonically, "Great work! Satan himself would probably pat you on the back."
Later, commenting on the somewhat troubling policy of rehabilitating rebels by covering the start-up costs to let them become motortaxis, Patrick imagined a government official stumbling upon the scene of a just-committed atrocity: "Wow. That's possibly the most perverse thing any human being could ever think up ... Get this man a motorcycle!"
The list goes on.
And I don't want to paint Patrick as some sort of callous monster. His dark musings are generally set against a backdrop of my hysteric laughter, while Kevin shakes his head in stunned silence and Bryna begs him to stop. But I'm most certainly complicit.
And to my Cord colleagues, I'm sure this comes as no shock. In my year as News Editor, my co-editor Tonezone and I often elicited looks of astonishment from our young and innocent crop of first-time journalists, as we casually made light of headline-grabbing calamities.
That is, until most of them quickly followed suit, as journalists almost invariably do. I'm convinced the profession uses black humour more than any other, with foreign correspondents as a subsection employing it most readily.
Last week, my roommates and I were discussing a fire at Freetown's most impoverished slum, Kroo Bay, where the ramshackle dwellings will be flooded by Atlantic Ocean tides when the rainy season hits in three months.
Talk turned to the global recession, as we pondered how we'd pay the bills back home, and I joked that I ought to use my time here as a bargaining tactic in signing a lease: "You want how much?! I'll have you know that oceanfront properties in the last city I lived were going for $8/year."
But most of the 'gems' do come from Patrick. He's simply better at black humour than I, through no lack of callousness on my part.
On Sierra Leonean youth unemployment: "Send them to Iraq and let them out-terrorize al-Qaeda: 'Just do what you did back home, boys'."
On the percentage of those standing around us at the Inauguration Night concert who were affected by the war : "Let's hear from all the R.U.F. rebels in the crowd! Can I get a 'what, what' from the amputees?"
Apparently, squalor, homicide and crimes against humanity are funny to me now. In a way, they have to be, or I'd just be constantly depressed given that pretty much everything in Sierra Leone can be traced to one of the three. Dark humour is a coping mechanism. You grow weary of tragedy and try to turn it into something less negative in any way you can.
Still, I can only imagine how appallingly insensitive it must all sound to most of my readers. Without understanding the genuine goodness of the people uttering these jokes and removed from context, I'd like to think I'd find it abhorrent too.
The scary part is that I'm no longer sure I would.
Coming to Sierra Leone, I was acutely aware of the fact I was entering a society vastly different from the only one I'd ever known. I was determined not to invoke paternalistic rhetoric or seek to evaluate Sierra Leone through a Western lens.
Given my youth, I was even a little troubled at the prospect of teaching journalism to people who would probably be my seniors, maybe even 20-year veterans of Salone's journalism industry.
In many ways, I've found this healthy skepticism beneficial. My staunch insistence that I needed to learn the nuances of media in Sierra Leone before I started running seminars has allowed me to get a good grasp on the issues journalists face here and tailor my efforts accordingly.
And while the majority of my colleagues ended up being just as young as me and even less experienced, there's definitely no one at Kalleone casting resentful sidelong glances in my direction or saddling me with accusations of the cocky 'father knows best' attitude of the West. If anything, my colleagues wish I would more readily accept a larger role in the Kalleone hierarchy.
For the most part, I have been successful in not superimposing cultural constructs of my native land upon this sub-Saharan setting. But it's becoming increasingly clear that a moral relativist I am not.
The dominant view that fidelity to a single partner is laughable (more on this in a future post) is one example of a difference in societal mindsets that I can accept as at least relatively harmless. There are others that I have a more conflicted relationship with, such as the nation-wide trend of Black Man Time.
When someone shows up an hour and a half late for every engagement they're supposed to attend, it's really hard for me not to label that behaviour inconsiderate, regardless of whether an entire country's population does it or not. Calling it 'cultural' merely serves to justify a problem that has profoundly negative impacts on the efficiency with which the country can move forward and build itself up.
But today, any lingering doubts about where I stood on the issue of moral relativism were blown apart with all the force of the Hiroshima blasts.
Tomorrow is the International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation. In a previous post, I mentioned that "many in Freetown mirror the moral objections of the West" on the matter of FGM/C. Today, I learned just how far off base that claim was.
When one of the reporters, Bakarr, brought in a press release about an event coinciding with the day's international observance and suggested we cover it, I agreed that it was a worthwhile story. When asked my views on FGM/C, I tactfully stated my disagreement with the practice. The response was stupefying.
Muktar, Kalleone's web and IT expert, likened it to male circumcision of Jews and noted his distaste for the term "mutilation", decrying it as a sensationalist label. "I'm sure if it was a tradition from the Western world, there wouldn't be this much of a campaign against it," he said. "But unfortunately it's a tradition from the third world."
I tried to reason that the comparison was a tough one to make, given that the health implications of FGM/C are vastly more problematic than male circumcision. We're talking about the removal of a woman's clitoris, with at least a partial removal of the labia minora, often done under less-than-hygienic circumstances.
The procedure is traditionally carried out by an older woman with no medical training. Anesthetics and antiseptic treatment are not generally used and the practice is usually carried out using basic tools such as knives, scissors, scalpels, pieces of glass and razor blades. Often iodine or a mixture of herbs is placed on the wound to tighten the vagina and stop the bleeding.
The laundry list of negative health implications range from chronic urinary tract infections to severe hemorrhaging causing death, to say nothing of the psychological implications. FGM/C is also a contributing factor to the country's astronomical infant mortality rate, as "resistant scar tissue can prevent dilation of the birth channel and cause an obstructed labo[u]r."
As I tried to state my case on what I deemed strong health-related grounds, Sheik jumped in with a common defence, in his typically impassioned style: "It is our tradition. It is our past. You can't run from your past."
Fuck that, I thought. Run. Sprint. Channel the goddamn spirit of Usain Bolt, if you have to. Maybe even knock over some chairs and tables as you go, obstructing the path behind you to ensure that shit never catches up with you again. This was what I wanted to say.
Instead, I took a (slightly) toned-down approach: "It was once the tradition of white people to enslave blacks, but that doesn't make it right, man."
No dice. Muktar redoubled his efforts to sway me, as I tried to regain my mental balance from this unexpected tag-team effort.
Muktar's defence of FGM/C was particularly disorienting. This was one of the most enlightened people I knew in Sierra Leone, an intelligent university graduate who just minutes earlier had been giving a couple of the interns a very accurate historical analysis of the views held by recent American presidents towards abortion, as he explained precisely what Obama had done by opening funding to organizations that don't condemn abortion.
"It's not just the circumcision, you know?" explained Muktar, betraying a tendency to assume I've done absolutely no research about Sierra Leone's customs and history. "It's part of a larger initiation process that teaches women the skills that will serve them in life: cooking, cleaning, how to treat their husband -"
"- and how many times to give him [sex] each day," added Sheik helpfully.
Oh, thank God. As long as the practice serves a higher purpose like ensuring female subservience and further entrenching stereotypical gender roles. I could almost feel feminists the world over breathing a collective sigh of relief.
Searching the room for anyone who might be friendly towards my concerns about the practice, I asked Fatima her thoughts. She looked directly at me and stated defiantly, "I am in favour. I am one of them."
So there I sat in a room of 8 colleagues - 4 male, 4 female, and all staunchly pro-FGM/C. With a prevalence rate in Sierra Leone of 80-90%, chances are all four women had undergone the rite of passage. This didn't seem like a battle I was going to win.
Earlier in the day, we'd been discussing a high-profile murder case, in which a student named Mohammed Juana was beaten to death in December as part of an initiation ceremony for one of the social clubs tied to Fourah Bay College. Ulaba, the intern covering the case, seemed to share my difficulty to understand why anyone would knowingly seek entrance into these societies. Someone in the room derisively likened them to cults.
Yet no one had a problem with FGM/C? Really?
Turns out I subscribe to the belief that the right not to have one's genitals shredded with a piece of glass ought to be universal, regardless of where one's born. If that somehow makes me unsympathetic to Africans, I think I'd rather come to terms with that criticism than with a complicity that says such actions are okay.
This year, my Christmas gift to myself was a package of three CDs and three books sent via Amazon to a house in Florida owned by a woman I don't know. Fortunately, that woman happened to be the mother of one of my JHR colleagues, Kari, who then delivered said package to my house in Freetown after her holiday back home. Pretty convenient, no?
Thus far, though Jurassic 5, The Hold Steady and Bloc Party have dominated my playlist in '09, I've read only one of the books: Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer by Chuck Thompson.
The praise on the back cover invokes comparisons to another Thompson and another Chuck, namely Hunter S. and Klosterman, who himself has to be the writer most commonly compared to the late, great Gonzo king.
In fact, if the book shelf at 19 Smartfarm Rd. is any indication, anyone who dares to write in a blunt, truthful yet entertaining matter can pretty much bank on comparisons to the man who made the phrase "Fear and Loathing" famous.
This Thompson's searing indictment of the travel industry, and the drones that typically spew uninspired prose about it, is a quick and enjoyable read, and I breezed through it. But I have since returned to portions frequently, especially in the highly relatable fourth chapter, entitled "Lost Among Expats: The Shiftless, Debauched, Tedious, and Necessary Existence of Americans Abroad."
Consider this the first of many posts inspired by the writing of a man whose insights into life abroad are far more prescient than anything original at ol' fortytwopointsix. And so it begins ...
Like most institutionalized instruction, teaching English in a foreign country is "easy" because by and large the requirements and expectations are so low, but it's also "hard" because it's nearly impossible to remain interested in the task. It's like trying to stay intellectually engaged for an entire afternoon with someone else's six-year-old. Then going home to a dingy apartment and wondering what the hell you're doing wasting your life in a country where no one will ever really know you. Then popping a beer at four even though you promised yourself that today you were going to wait until four thirty.
Glasser and Shanghai Bob were good to have around because they'd usually start drinking by three thirty, which took a little of the sting out of my descent into a primary form of recreation that traced its roots to a distillery somewhere outside London. (Pg. 100-101)
It's not important that you know who Glasser and Shanghai Bob are - only that you know my roommates Kevin and Patrick are my equivalents, although we start drinking closer to 8 or 9 and consume significantly less. But I can nonetheless relate to my boy Chuck's sentiment.
Today was "one of those days", to employ hideously non-descript yet somehow common parlance. The expat life has a knack for bringing the highs and lows of one's existence into even sharper focus, and it's always nice to read paragraphs like the ones excerpted above, to recall that trials of sanity are endemic to my current lifestyle and not a unique character flaw.
I left the house at 8:15 this morning, my eyelids still lethargic after a short night's sleep. When I arrived home 12.5 hours later, my eyelids were doing fine, but the rest of my being was sapped.
In between, I endured seven losses of power at the office, almost all of them occurring amidst unsaved script-writing, and watched a very promising broadcast deteriorate into one that was simply miraculous to have been completed at all. I think I ground three years worth of enamel from my teeth in a single day.
Then, of course, whereas catching a poda-poda at 7:30 p.m. is usually as difficult as standing out as the only cracker on a street rammed full of Sierra Leoneans, it seemed there wasn't an empty seat in the city on this night. My frustration must've been palpable, as when I finally did catch a taxi (willing at this point to shell out the extra $0.40), the driver took me right to my street without an extra charge, saving me a half-hour walk.
Though I don't often drink here, I knew long before I got home that I'd be indulging in a couple Beck's tonight to unwind. Just minutes ago, Kevin pushed back his chair and headed for the fridge, saying "I shouldn't have another beer, but I want to." Without thinking, I heard myself say, "Can you grab me one too?" It was my third, and last, of the night, so I think Mr. Thompson had me beat, but I could certainly relate to the urgency he intimates.
Actually, more than a lot of the excerpts I imagine I'll draw out in the future, this one is simultaneously stupidly accurate and rather far off base in summing up my experience. Perhaps that's because he's describing teaching ESL and not teaching journalism, and most ESL teachers probably aren't as passionate about the language as I am about journalism.
Either way, I find his constant derision of ESL teachers hilarious, in part because I know and love so many people that have taught or are currently teaching ESL. I suspect they'd all chuckle at his observations too.
But while I do not find it impossible to stay interested in the task at Kalleone, I completely relate to what he says about expectations being so low they could stultify the ambitions of even the most enthusiastic trainer.
For example, I've uploaded only one story to the JHR site since New Year's even though my job requires me to do one a week, and I haven't once been questioned about this fact.
Of course, at least in my case, that's more a function of working too hard than of slacking; I've been very busy and haven't found time to upload the many stories I have been working on. But while I appreciate JHR's understanding and realistic expectations, I nonetheless wonder if 'realistic' is merely a more pleasant way of saying 'non-existent'.
Lastly, while I've never felt like I was "wasting" my life, I also don't feel as though many people 'get' me here. And I don't mean that in an emo way.
Rather, I mean it in the completely understandable way that living in a place where no one knows my personal history, which is immensely instructive to who I am, necessarily means I'm not surrounded by a social circle that can toss off stunningly on-point insights about me with the casual efficacy of Jeff Hornacek at the free throw stripe circa 1999.
Hell, most people I encounter don't even have a working knowledge of the immense land of my birth, let alone understanding anything about my specific place in it.
Anyway, my meandering observations notwithstanding, the main point of this post is that, if you've ever lived abroad, I highly recommend checking out Smile When You're Lying - not because it will necessarily teach you a whole lot, but because it will make you think, "Oh, man. Totally. TOTALLY!" way more often than most books. And I'm seeing the value in that more and more with each passing day.
Editor's note: Please don't misinterpret this post as me being anything less than ecstatic to be where I am right now, doing precisely what I'm doing. It's all part of the experience, and it merely came to my attention recently that I had a tendency not to blog about the low points as much. I want to remember them too. But I've already moved beyond the long day and will readily embrace the challenges waiting to greet me on the morrow.
I've come to the conclusion that Canada has one of the worst bar scenes in the world.
Admittedly, I haven't been out as much in Sierra Leone as I tended to be back home. This likely stems from a combination of my frequent exhaustion and the natural shyness that I often lay claim to (though my friends never seem to buy it). But this weekend nicely hammered home the point that SL's bar scene trumps that of my native land.
On Friday, we went to one of the city's ritziest restaurants, a place called Mamba Point, for a surprise birthday shindig ABJ had organized for his girlfriend, Jane. When talk turned to going out, I bowed out due to the above-mentioned exhaustion and was asleep before midnight. But I told ABJane (an affectionate hybrid name coined for the couple) that I would celebrate with them the following night.
It was with this in mind that I swung into Freetown Supermarket yesterday and picked up the kitschiest alcoholic concoction I could find: Safari.
An "exotic fruit flavoured liquer" that blends mango, papaya, maracuya and wild lime, Safari bills itself as "The Taste of Adventure." Hilarious and chock full of African cliche, it was impossible to pass up (though I was tempted to indulge in the upper-crust cognacs, Courvoisier and Hennessey).
I mixed it with an orange-lemon-pineapple fruit blend, joking that these drinks would be enough to cover my fruit intake for the remainder of my time abroad, and was ready for a night on the town.
For me, the first endearing feature of the Salone bar scene is that it caters to a nighthawk crowd, a fact I couldn't possibly be more comfortable with. The second is that beers cost $2, though the JD and Coke I started the night with carried a heftier $5 price tag.
Yesterday, knowing ABJ wouldn't leave home until at least midnight, Kevin and I arrived at The Atlantic, a bar along Lumley Beach, around 10:45. It was still pretty dead.
The first time I went to China House, one of the few places in town where you can see live music (though the performers are cordoned off in a small secondary room of the bar for no apparent reason), we drank on a nearby sidewalk for an hour beforehand because Elvis, the JHR country director, assured us it was too early to make an appearance.
But Sierra Leoneans make up for their late starts to the evening with even later finishes. Kevin and I migrated to Paddy's, the country's most famous bar and the one featured in Blood Diamond, around 2:00.
Kevin left at 3:15, an early finish for him after lasting until 5:30 last weekend. ABJ and Jane departed about an hour later. I finally tapped out just before 6 a.m. with my friend Britel, the DJ I met at my beloved Senegalese restaurant. By that point, the crowd had started to thin out but the club was by no means empty.
You see, Paddy's doesn't close. There is no last call. And I think North American bars ought to be taking notes.
The fact of the matter is that people who want to drink past 2 a.m. are going to find a way. Trying to regulate the acceptable times for drinking only encourages more excessive consumption.
I can't count the number of times I've bolted to the bar at Phil's Grandson's in Waterloo to get two more drinks at last call, hoping they'd be enough to shake off the stubborn inhibitions that so often keep me off the dance floor. And when we're ultimately herded out of that dingy basement or one of Waterloo's other fine establishments, my Cord friends and I generally just wandered to Joe's apartment or Carlson's house, where alcohol was never in short supply.
With friends like these, I can drink just as late at home; the only difference is that there's a spike in the rate of consumption around that 2 a.m. last call that wreaks havoc on a man's efficacy on the day of the Sabbath. Though I wouldn't classify today as a paragon of productivity, owing largely to the volume of Star beer Britel was directing my way last night, I got considerably more done than many a Sunday back home.
Canada and the States are among the few countries I've heard of where cities like Halifax and NYC that have after-hours clubs are the exception to the rule. Here, Europeans and Sierra Leoneans alike look at me with a mix of pity and confusion when I speak of the 2 a.m. closing times back home. By all accounts, most parts of Asia possess similarly free-wheelin' bar scenes. I imagine Australia is the same.
I think our status as the outlier on this issue is merely a manifestation of the hyper-rigidity that characterizes North America in general. Regulation is our saviour.
People are suffering debilitating head injuries in cycling accidents? No problem. Just pass a law to protect the minds that are functioning so poorly as to make no effort at protecting themselves, to borrow an example from Jerry Seinfeld's hilarious "I'm Telling You For The Last Time" routine.
Overall, my Salone experience has been a refreshing immersion in a culture of people that don't spend the majority of their waking hours in paranoid contemplation of their own impending doom. They don't allow worries about death to get in the way of actually living.
This is a land where, if you want to spend every day of your life hurdling down the Makeni-Freetown highway at 80 km/hr on the roof of rickety poda-poda, you just go right ahead. You'll probably die in a horrific accident before your 40th birthday, but there's something appealing about having the freedom to take that risk. It's as if you're treated as an intelligent human being, capable of making decisions about your own safety. A novel concept, to be sure.
Of course, I'm not advocating a complete abandonment of rules and enforcement of the law. There's a reason - many, actually - Canadians enjoy a life expectancy nearly twice that of Sierra Leoneans. But I do think a healthier middle ground could be struck. In fact, I think it's called Europe.
That said, the Salone nightlife is hardly perfect. Clubs like Paddy's are literally teeming with prostitutes and, in an unexpected development, I'm finding it wearisome to have legions of gorgeous young women fix their eyes firmly on mine and assert bluntly, "I want you." Presumably only because I know the phrase "for your money" is the implied ending to the statement, though.
Salone's club scene has also been unable to find a solution to that tedious global blight of awkward white guys that can't dance. Although reviews of my dancing were uniformly positive the one time I hit the dance floor since I've been here, my hope that anonymity in a foreign land would shed my dance floor inhibitions has proven to be wishful thinking. Much like my tendency towards lengthy work days, I think I'll have to file this one under the heading of 'Things I can't change by simply crossing the Atlantic'.
