Getting all sentimental

I suppose we're nearing the point in my contract where it's only natural to reflect on the work I've done and the impact I've had. Last night lent itself especially well to that, as JHR held a small ceremony at the British Council to recognize the work done over the last few months by the three civil society organizations and six journalists to whom we'd given grants.

Truth be told, the event was poorly organized and poorly attended, but it was redeemed by a number of great speeches, predominately from the journalists who had received the investigative journalism grants. And despite the poor attendance, Sheik was well represented, with four of the Kalleone interns in the audience, as well as his girlfriend Mariam and three oldest brothers, Ibrahim, Jamal, and Ishmael (Sheik's the second of six boys, and also has a 10-year-old sister.).



Sheik was to be the first of the journalism fellows to deliver his speech, and Marie-Jo called me up to introduce him. After talking off the cuff and from the heart for a couple minutes about what a pleasure it has been to work with him over the last 6.5 months, I turned the mic over to my main man in SL. (Apologies for the darkness of the photo, but the lighting was abysmal.)



He killed it. I'm genuinely angry with myself for not recording the audio of Sheik's speech. With the Deputy Minister of Presidential Affairs sitting five feet to his right, he delivered a very courageous speech, passionately dispensing pointed criticisms of the government's interaction with the press, emotion cascading from his voice. In lieu of such audio, the words will have to stand in:

Journalists should be seen as a pillar towards development. The term the "fourth estate", coined by Edmund Burke, is widely used in Africa, especially Sierra Leone. Whenever you attend press conferences and workshops, you hear state officials using the term "fourth estate", but it seems that they don't really understand the meaning of this term or phrase. It is high time we register the meaning of this phrase to them.

This is not a game play but I want to inform this body that it took me one month to have an interview with the Director of Prisons and I also took a whole month in trying to have the Deputy Minister of Social Welfare to grant me an interview, which at the end I was unable to get. Sincerely speaking, this is undone [meaning not done] in a democratic society. State officials should be ready to talk to journalists seeking information from them for the national development.

These are just two examples of the roadblocks I encountered in doing my stories. Lest I forget, Mr. Minister, I urge members of parliament to speedily pass the Freedom of Information bill to become law, in order to enhance the work of journalists. If ever Sierra Leone is to develop, the fourth estate should be taken seriously and seen as a major partner towards this drive. And if only the government understand the role and meaning of the fourth estate, then Sierra Leone will definitely move forward.

I'm not sure how the words sound on their own. But I assure you that, coming from the oratorically gifted and impassioned Sheik, they carried a scathing edge, and drew the loudest applause of the evening, mostly from Sheik's journalist colleagues.

As I sat and listened, I exchanged glances with Marie-Jo, whose eyes were wide with wonder at Sheik's blunt indictment of his government. I couldn't tell whether she was impressed, or worried that her guest of honour was about to blow his top. I knew I was feeling only pride, and Marie-Jo later confirmed she felt the same.

Way back in September, I tried to put into words my reasons for wanting to come to Sierra Leone. At the end of that post, I wrote, "... ultimately, I look forward to an opportunity to work with passionate journalists and hopefully help them improve, while simultaneously learning from them."

On this night, and so often throughout my time here, Sheik has been the total embodiment of the passionate journalists I'd hoped to find. I have been inspired by his love of country and belief in the importance of the stories he tells, and I have been humbled by his courage in asking very tough questions of very powerful people in a country that has seen a lot of violence towards journalists. (In another solid speech, Craig's fellow, Amara, boldly said something to the effect of, "And to the police present today, I'd like to ask that you kindly stop beating us.")

In recent weeks, I've started to notice that I have indeed been helping people here improve. It's easy for the progress to become indiscernible when analyzed day-to-day, but looking at it in the full context, Sheik in particular has grown immensely as a journalist.



When proofreading his 21-page intern report for him, I smiled often at references to workshops I've run or stories I helped him with, as he noted the lessons learned from these experiences. And last night, as Sheik drew his remarks to a close, he reserved a special thank you for me ...

Members of this audience, if I end my speech without recognizing one person, then posterity will judge me because this work would not have been successful if not for his guidance, support and courage he instills on me. Thank you very much, Mr. Mike Brown, for your unwavering support you rendered me during this work.

It was the second heart-warming shout-out I'd received in under a week.

Last Friday, I emerged from the sweat-box back production room at the Kalleone studios, where I'd been holed up for eight hours editing and recording scripts. The only other person present two hours before the newscast's 8:00 timeslot was Daphne, one of the senior journalists tasked with editing and presenting the news.

She called the reporters to find out if they were planning to bring stories up to the studio anytime soon. They weren't.

"I guess there will be no news today," she said, as I collapsed exhausted into a chair in the lounge. Daphne stood up and returned to the booth to resume her duties as the evening on-air DJ, just as the song playing came to an end. Then I heard this:

"Here we have Akon's 'I Tried'. I want to dedicate this to Mike Brown, a Canadian for Journalists for Human Rights. He tries so hard. This one goes out to Mike, from the entire Kalleone staff. We love you, Mike."

I just sat there, listening to Akon continually drawing out the phrase, "I tried so hard" in between verses from Bones Thugs-n-Harmony, and smiled at this sweet gesture, happy to know they recognized my efforts and didn't hold me responsible for the station's many outstanding shortcomings.

Moments like these make it a lot easier to give up a few more of my travel ambitions for Sierra Leone. I had wanted to visit Tiwai Island Wildlife Sanctuary and Outamba-Kilimi National Park, but will instead take solace in knowing I'll probably see more wildlife in one day at Rwanda's Akageri National Park than I would've at both Salone destinations combined. I had wanted desperately to climb Mount Bintumani, but the pain of giving that up is eased by knowing I'll climb a peak twice its height in Morocco.

Still, even if I didn't have those impending travels to look forward to, I think I'd still be foregoing the use of my final four days of vacation. I only have seven working days left and I feel I owe it to the passionate journalists of Kalleone to do as much with them as I can in that brief span.

The news programming may very well crumble when I leave. It wouldn't shock me. But that doesn't mean I can't run more workshops before I go. That doesn't mean I can't record more stories with them. And that doesn't mean I can't leave each and every one of them with a binder full of the accrued wisdom I've tried to impart, complete with CDs that will act as a digital portfolio of their best story(ies) to take to another station, should Kalleone unravel.

It also can't undo the knowledge and skills gained by Sheik Daud Fofanah, Mabel Kabba, Princetta Williams and all the other keen young journalists I've had the pleasure to get to know. So even if Kalleone News dies a slow and painful death, I can think of much worse worst-case scenarios.

Fidelity's overrated, apparently

I'm thinking about breaking up with my imaginary girlfriend.

Expats in impoverished societies often claim someone to whom they are betrothed, whether fictitious or not. When in the company of Sierra Leoneans we didn't know, Patrick suddenly morphed from Bryna's boyfriend into her husband.

When my friend Jen lived in Ghana, she wore a ring and carried a photo of me and her, claiming me as her husband. To this day, I have threats on my life from 12-year-old boys, which I'm actually starting to consider more seriously after recently interviewing a 14-year-old named Small who has four months in the Kenema prison under his belt.

As a guy, I didn't give this much thought before coming to SL and so my web of lies is a little less tidy and premeditated. When a girl named Mariam that heads the Smartfarm Women's Business Association presented me with a stuffed heart reading "Be Mine", it became clear that I needed a story.

The bookmark in my book-du-jour (just finished Haruki Murakami's After Dark and now working on Jonathan Goldstein's Lenny Bruce Is Dead) is a photo given to me by the aforementioned Jen just prior to my departure. Thinking on my feet, I let Mariam down easy, citing this photo as evidence of a committed girlfriend back home.



When people at work started inquiring about my relationship status with an obvious eye to badgering me to hook up, I stuck to the story. So, when they asked me if Jen was the girl in the wallpaper on my computer's desktop - a picture of my friend Trish and I from my going away party in which we could easily pass for a couple - I said yes. Trying to explain why I had a photo of another woman on my computer if I was such a committed practitioner of fidelity seemed a daunting prospect.



Though confusing, the ever-evolving tale of this hybrid Jen-Trish girlfriend has admittedly been a convenient fiction, giving me a means of politely refusing the aggressive advances of Sierra Leonean women I've just met, who view me as a de facto wealthy white male and therefore potential saviour (though my friend Bremen says I get propositioned here way more often than her other male friends, so perhaps I should be flattered?). But if I ever live abroad again, I'm going to do away with the facade. I'm an awful liar, and I hate doing it.

Besides, in many ways, it only somewhat lessens the propositions. Turns out fidelity isn't taken as a very legitimate concept in many Salone circles - the Kalleone males, for example.

Save for my station manager, John, the guys seem to take great pleasure in badgering me about hooking up with a Salone woman. Even Mabel one day took the fact that I'd shaved as evidence I had found myself a local lover. But in part by virtue of the fact that I've spent the most time with him, Sheik definitely leads the charge in this respect.

"I think you should enjoy your time here, and therefore you should have at least one Sierra Leonean girl," Sheik reasons. Whether or not I have a girlfriend in Canada is completely immaterial, you see. Fidelity is fluid. When trying to convince me of this, Sheik often remembers fondly his Liberian girlfriend from the three weeks he spent in Monrovia.

"I think some situations permit it," he says. "This is Sierra Leone. That's Canada. It's different." A sort of 'What she doesn't know won't hurt her' mentality prevails. And from what I have gathered of Sheik's personal affairs, an ocean isn't the only exception that allows for sexual dalliance.

A few months back, after Sheik mentioned being at his girlfriend's house the previous night as an excuse for being late to a meeting, I jokingly asked how many girlfriends he currently had. "Six? Seven?" I needled. As if deeply offended, Sheik responded, "No, no ... four." I've since been informed that's the limit to the number of wives a Muslim man can have under Sharia law, and even then only if he can support all four equally.

I know Sheik's 'lead girlfriend', also named Mariam. They've been together 12 years, which is almost half of Sheik's life - he's 25. Shortly after I got here, he was extremely downtrodden for a few days because they'd broken up after he suspected her of infidelity, of all things. They ended up working it out about a week later.

Yet, try as I so often do, I cannot convince him of the blatant hypocrisy in his attitude. On our recent trip to Kenema, he bluntly reasoned, "African women can't be trusted, so you have to have at least one substitute ready." He calls these girls "sidebites".

From my interactions, it seems as though most men are openly unfaithful, but I've yet to hear of a woman who is. Liz, one of the station's senior journalists, is a vocal supporter of my noble choice to do right by my imaginary girlfriend. And yet, Sheik expects me to believe that it's the Sierra Leonean women that can't be trusted? We'll chalk this one up as a cultural difference I'm not likely to understand anytime soon.

For now, I'm just going to worry about my next interaction with the ever-persistent Mariam. Last night, I ran into her on my way to dinner with my friend, Kairie, who happens to be a stunningly gorgeous 23-year-old who had gotten herself all dolled up for the evening in what, in retrospect, may have unwittingly been a date. Something tells me I'm going to have to answer to her about that one.

Revelations of a rogue travel writer, part II

There's a seduction to the expat life, the promise of a world filled with ... close calls with Indonesian rebels, midnight conversations about Vietnam with men who've been there, and a miraculous sense of lone-wolf independence that somehow exists alongside a uniquely intense bond among comrades.

The insider's knowledge of a strange place elevates the man abroad above the hoi polloi of his home country, and particularly above the tourist, whose appearance in his adopted country always comes as an unwelcome shock. The romantic attachment to place, even a difficult place, is almost impossible to break.

All expat life is limbo. Lurking behind every discussion, the Return Home, whether it's one or two or ten years away, provides the fundamental tension to every moment you live abroad. Then, one day, you commit to going back to the States, and you either succeed there or you don't. And if you don't, you leave once again, to roll the dice on some other place that requires of you only a passport and the gambler's faith in long odds.

- Pg. 112, Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer,
by Chuck Thompson

People at the station are starting to bring up the fact that I'm leaving soon. Actually, let me rephrase that: I'm no longer laughing dismissively when people at the station mention that I'm leaving soon. The Kalleone reporters have been spouting off about this for months, which I suppose speaks to the truth of Mr. Thompson's claim that all expat life is limbo, just a hiatus away from one's real home.

And home really does inform a great deal of your thinking while abroad, from daydreaming about events upon your return, to conversations with expats about the things you miss most. I'm trying very hard, with minimal success, not to romanticize Kitchener-Waterloo beyond anything it could reasonably live up to, so as to avoid crushing disappointment.

For me, all these thoughts of home have existed parallel to the fact I had no strong desire to actually go home; it's only been in the last week or so that I've started to feel ready to return to Canada. It has always been a return, however, that I viewed as an inevitable and pleasant experience, and it was accorded the appropriate level of thought as such.

I remember one conversation that I think illustrates nicely the bizarre intrusion of home in the midst of a very different living situation. A couple months back, sitting in our living room, Bryna, Patrick and I had a very important, hour-long discussion. About hamburgers.

Merits of the Wendy's Spicy Baconator were weighed against the entire Harvey's fleet. It was generally agreed that A&W makes a damn fine burger, albeit at the highest cost in the fast-food business of dead cow. Talking to West Coasters brought with it fond remembrances of my January '07 dalliances with Vancouver's Fatburger. And I ultimately concluded that I still won't eat ground chuck from McDonald's.

Indeed, this was a conversation of near critical importance. Three of my top aspirations for my return to Canada remain simply the consumption of an A&W mozza burger, a Harvey's double original bacon-cheeseburger and, alongside a cold pitcher on the Ethel's patio, the 16-oz. delight that is the Big Ethel.

And while I'm sure the joy of my 'return firsts' - from my first trip back to the WLUSP office, to my first game back in a Selects' uniform, to my first time seeing all my friends' lovely faces - will likely regain the familiar sheen of the commonplace remarkably quickly, that doesn't mean I look forward to them any less. Or that my colleagues and I don't talk about them often.

For, as Mr. Thompson astutely observes, ours is a strange existence. There's something peculiar about living somewhere for seven months and knowing before you even arrive that you will never truly define it as home. And yet simultaneously taking it as an affront when someone assumes you don't know anything about this temporal stopover on your life's road-map.

Back in December, I encountered a Jamaican-American from New York who was hopelessly lost in downtown Freetown. He noted his strong distaste for all things Sierra Leone, complaining of unfriendly people (whom I've yet to meet) and the stifling heat. I responded with profound smugness that he was here during the two coolest weeks of the year.

It was an exchange that left me at once outraged at his nerve in decrying a country he didn't even know and delighted at not feeling like a tourist, that most unfortunate of descriptors. Nevermind the unpleasant reality that I am, in fact, little more than a tourist.

I've certainly been seduced by the allure of life abroad which Thompson speaks of. I've always wanted to travel, but viewed myself as more the type to see a place for a couple weeks and return to my charmed life in Canada. This experience has exposed the folly in that approach, as you obviously gain a much deeper appreciation for a place when you put down some roots, however tenuous. Necessity will dictate that most of my travel continues to be of the extremely brief variety, but I certainly wouldn't rule out more time spent living abroad.

About two months ago, I was offered another seven-month JHR contract, in Sierra Leone, Liberia or the Democratic Republic of Congo. From the sounds of the email, I would've even been able to skirt the application process completely. Given the uncertainty of the job market back home and the enjoyment of my time thus far, reason would dictate that I should have been mighty tempted by such an offer.

Still, I never really considered it. I responded to the email the next day, respectfully declining and promising to pass the posting on to any friends I thought might be interested. Mostly because the less talked about yet equally real rejoinder to the seduction of the expat life simply scares me too much: rootlessness.

I've come across many an expat that doesn't feel an especial attachment to home, and it's something I don't want to let happen to me. As with so many other things, my approach to living abroad is all about balance.

Part of the reason I accepted this job is that I never want to grow so attached to K-W that it prevents me from doing cool things for fear of the unknown. But in the same breath, I deem it absolutely crucial that I retain enough of a link to Ontario that I don't find myself completely alone in a country of strangers on my 35th birthday, with a long list of "friends" back home that I never even speak to anymore.

In truth, though I don't give it much credence in the more logical parts of my mind, I do have minor anxieties about the intrusion of emotional distance in some of my friendships on account of a mere eight months of not seeing each other, let alone anything longer.

So, would I consider another JHR contract in the future? Absolutely. Ideally, I'd like to take up a post on another part of the continent or even in Cambodia, as a member of the inaugural group in one of JHR's new project countries (assuming funding can be found to expand to more countries). I'd like to do it with one of my journalist friends from back home, with whom I could share a flat. And as long as we're speaking in ideals here, I'd like said hypothetical contract to coincide with another Canadian winter.

But not right away. It would have taken a considerably more lucrative opportunity to keep me out of Canada in the immediate aftermath of this contract.

Still, it is nice to know that, if the financial crisis keeps me from landing a job after the Radio Laurier gig, I can grab my passport, hop on a plane and land in a country where opportunities I could only dream of back home suddenly fall in my lap. As Canadians, we really did win the lottery at birth.

This blog name sucks

Clearly, this blog was named by a fool with no experience abroad.

In my defense, I kind of knew it was a crappy name even before I came to SL. I just wanted to start blogging and needed something to fill the space along the top. Still, it's time to fix this egregious wrong. This space will henceforth be known as simply "42.6". And here's why.

"On the ground" is precisely the kind of bullshit NGO-speak I've quickly come to revile. What does that even mean? Of course I'm on the ground. Where else would I be? When I told my friends and family I was moving to Sierra Leone, I imagine many people envisioned many different things, but I am willing to bet a common thread throughout those visions was that my feet were planted firmly on the ground.

"Where will you be?"
"Freetown."
"Yeah, but where in Freetown?"
"On the ground."
"Ahhh, it's a good thing we clarified. Otherwise, I would've assumed you were flinging yourself about using a complex system of high-wire trapeze apparatus."

Such a conversation would be absurd and so is the phrase. There's one that bothers me even more, though: "In the field." To me, this makes it sound as though leaving the Western world automatically means you're going somewhere that, by definition, is completely undeveloped.

"I'm going out into the field to do some work." No, you're not. Unless you're literally setting off for a large clearing, please don't utter this inane expression in my presence. Johannesburg is not a field. Cairo is not a field. And neither is Freetown. It's a densely populated urban city of close to 2 million people. There's really nothing field-like about it.

June 9th, 2:40 p.m.

My roommates are gone, I have only three weeks left at work and this whole crazy train seems to be trying to pull into the station. So I'm doing what any reasonable man would: undertaking a convoluted travel plan to extend my reach into North and East Africa. Observe:


May 8th: Last day at Kalleone Radio, followed by a weekend chilling with the incoming crew of JHR trainers and Craig, the only other trainer not pulling his or her chute early.

May 11th: Board a plane for Casablanca and then hop a train to Marrakech, where I rendez-vous with all-around virtuoso Josh Smyth to raise a glass in celebration of completing our undergraduate degrees - his mere days ago, mine in December - since we will both be missing our June convocation. From there, we hike into the High Atlas Mountains to scale the highest peak in North Africa, Jebl Toubkal, before returning to Casablanca for a few days to end the Moroccan adventure.

May 21st: Find myself on a plane again, which will deposit me back in Sierra Leone.

May 24th: Meet my brother at Lungi Airport and commence a whirlwind tour of my life over the last seven months.

May 28th: Return to Lungi Airport for the fifth time in 2.5 weeks, this time bound for Rwanda. Spend a week and a half there with my bro, tracking wild mountain gorillas, hiking up a volcano, and visiting a number of genocide memorials.

June 7th: Back on a plane and back to Salone, this time for only about 36 hours.

June 8th: Seventh and final trip to Lungi to catch my flight home via Malaga, Spain and London, England.

June 9th, 2:40 p.m.: Disembark at Pearson and set foot on Canadian soil for the first time in 240 days.


Okay, so granted, it's not the most efficient or economical itinerary. Clearly, I planned my destinations more around who I could see them with than their proximity to Sierra Leone. But flights in Africa are all expensive, and I've already visited the neighbours.

When all's said and done, if things go more or less according to plan, I'll be pretty pleased with crossing five African countries off my list in an eight month span, while holding down a job for seven of them. And I think I'll be ready to come home by June. Make sure you've got summer in full swing over there by then, would ya? I don't do 'cold' anymore.

Between my Radio Laurier gig, baseball tourneys, cottages and the like, it's shaping up to be a pretty full, very awesome summer, and I intend to kick-start it by hopefully seeing at least a few of the friends I've missed so dearly on my first Saturday back in the country.

June 13th - save the date, ladies and gents. Or don't. That's cool too. I'm back indefinitely, so don't stress if you can't make it. We'll chill in due time, I'm sure. But if you're not otherwise engaged, I'd love to see you.

I'll probably undertake a less ambitious agenda based loosely around my last Saturday before leaving Canada - starting at Dooly's for some pool (where Brad and I will hopefully regain our once-prolific, trash-talking, pool shark form), spending a good many hours on my beloved Ethel's patio, and - assuming I can bear to leave that fine establishment - rounding out the night at Phil's Grandson's Place.

Mostly, I just want to do something that will allow me to sit and talk with people. People I've missed. People like you. Nothing too crazy, though. Given that I rarely drink here, have lost about 15 lbs., and will still be taking anti-malarial antibiotics, it'd probably be wise not to feed me alcohol if you want me to make it to Phil's - at least, not too fast.

After the 13th, four of my next five weekends are already booked - mostly for baseball - but I'm sure I'll start trying to sort out other plans soon enough, with a couple Toronto trips topping the list in terms of urgency.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that for now, but I'll try to get something up tomorrow that delves a little deeper into my thoughts on the return home. One love.

Changes at Smartfarm

And then there were three.

This morning, I bid adieu to my roommate and colleague, Bryna, who is currently in the midst of a heinously cruel flight schedule that involves a stopover in Ghana and a 19-hour stay in the Nairobi airport, before carrying on to Heathrow. From there, she heads to Germany for a week's vacation before returning to Canada, where she has a summer job lined up at The Globe.

It was sad to see her go. Bryna's been an excellent roommate, easy to get along with and impressively devoid of annoying roommate habits. It's been nice to have someone with whom to vent frustrations when the unique challenges of the Salone media landscape left me tearing my hair out, and her finely-tuned perceptiveness to Anchorman references was an added bonus.

She was also the hardest working trainer in our JHR set, and I have no doubt she possesses a bright future in Canadian media. This is a woman who, in spite of a floundering industry, was offered a full-time position at The Globe and a one-year contract at The Star, the two best newspapers in Canada, and was still cool enough to turn them down and move to West Africa. It's hard not to respect that.

Tomorrow, Patrick will depart on a much more direct flight path to meet up with Bryna for their German vacation, before returning to a contract at the University of Victoria doing web work.

As his impending departure became more and more immediate in the last week, it really struck me how singularly Patrick has tended to all the tedious yet necessary tasks of maintaining a house.

He swept and mopped the floors regularly and ensured the bills were paid on time. He handled the minutiae and left the place better than we found it, replacing all the lights with energy-efficient LEDs and pimping out the generator with higher quality parts. And he did it all without complaint - particularly astounding given how often we lightheartedly poke fun at his crotchety griping about other things.

Over beers along Lumley Beach on our first week in the city, I remember Patrick's reaction to learning that my previous longest stretch traveling abroad was a week and a half in California: "Wow." A pause. "You're really diving into the deep end, eh? ... Well, at least after this everything else will seem easy."

For the most part, Patrick took a more gradual route working up to his time in Sierra Leone, and he has all the interesting stories and expat knowledge you would expect of a man who has spent the better part of the last seven years living abroad, in places like Zambia and Papua New Guinea.

When it comes to someone with whom to share my appreciation for black humour, the Freetown scene will never produce another Patrick. And, along with the armchair pass-outs he was famous for, the department of politically incorrect hilarity will be one of the many large voids his departure from 19 Smartfarm leaves.

Flying out just a few hours before Patrick is Kevin, my JHR predecessor, roommate since January, and fellow Kitchenerite whose pronounced disdain for K-W is matched only by my impassioned support of it. He's taking a brief vacation in Senegal and then heading on to NYC for a month-long visit with his mother.

The last few days have been particularly sentimental for Kevin, who has spent twice as long here in Salone as the rest of us and thus has that many more memories to leave behind.

His knowledge of the city made the transition into Freetown life go remarkably smoother than I'd expected and, socially, his enjoyment of the nightlife and adeptness in networking gave rise to opportunities I don't imagine I would have had on my own.

Together, these three have been the most consistent personality threads throughout my Salone experience. And there were certainly days when the trials of sharing a very cozy three-person apartment among four adults left us perturbed by one another's less savoury habits. That's something of an inevitability in any living situation, but particularly a rudimentary one where months-long water shortages and frequent gastrointestinal irregularities leave you with the choice of whether you'd rather have a shower or flush the toilet on any given day.

But by and large, the Smartfarm crew has navigated a peaceful co-existence, and I've been grateful to have a trio of more experienced expats to help me adapt, with surprising ease, to a living experience unlike anything I'd attempted previously. They've been a constant source of medical know-how, and have helped me keep my ambitions and expectations for Kalleone, as well as my successes and failures therein, reasonably grounded in reality.

So, it's been nice to chill as a cohesive house unit, including honourary Smartfarm member, Craig, over the last few days - from low-key dinners on Friday and tonight, to a couple of more raucous evening affairs. Thursday night, for example, saw me breaking a completely unintentional two-month drinking detox, and sipping Remy Martin with Craig while dissecting Black Star and early Outkast and reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti on my balcony into the early morning hours.

All these nostalgic goodbyes have had another effect: highlighting the rapid approach of my own impending departure. I have just three weeks left at Kalleone before we usher in our replacements.

This has necessitated the all-too-familiar coming to terms with the impossibility of accomplishing all I'd ambitiously set out to achieve here in SL.

In addition to ceasing any freelancing, I had to turn down a guest DJ spot with the country's top station, Capital Radio, because they took too long to get back to me after my audition. Though I still hope to climb Mount Bintumani, almost all my other remaining in-country travel ambitions will probably prove impossible. And three weeks will definitely not be enough to finish all the stories I'd hoped to tell at Kalleone.

Such is the difficulty of a seven-month contract. By the time you're settled in, it's not long before you have to start making plans to leave. Then again, having just listened to my roommates discussing what they're most looking forward to about their return to Canada, I have a feeling that I too will be ready to come home before long.

Burn progress

Editor's note: This will be an atypically brief post, but I'm planning to have three more up by Wednesday, including details of my arrival home. In the meantime, enjoy!


At the urging of Josh, Brandon and especially Heather, here's a photo update on the progress of the burn on my leg, more than six weeks after the accident.



There's been definite progress. It's scabbed over and I no longer have to make daily visits to the hospital for cleanings; puss emanates from the wound with rapidly decreasing frequency; and it's itchy as hell, which I take as a sign of healing.

Still, it was obviously a pretty severe burn. Bryna aptly described the scab as "mountainous" and said she can see a small crater where the skin has yet to fill in.

But the thing that concerns me most is that, as it heals, my scar of Africa seems to be losing its likeness to the continental map, which I view as the true tragedy in all of this.

Am I a journalist?

It seems my crisis of purpose is finally upon me and, true to form, it's hardly a crisis.

I've never really doubted whether I wanted to be a journalist. It was the first career to appeal to me with any clarity as I finished high school and it was the route towards which I was pointed throughout university.

All around me, friends were second-guessing their ability or desire to continue along their chosen paths, sometimes opting for drastic new directions, sometimes merely tweaking their previous inclinations.

But I just continued towards a life of reportage, ascending the ladder within the student press with relative ease. No significant obstacles, no doubts. Perhaps neurotically, I actually worried somewhat how I'd react when things inevitably stopped coming so easily.

And then, after serving for a year as Editor-in-Chief of my beloved student paper, The Cord Weekly, it was time to leave the comfortable university bubble and get a 'real' job. I applied for a sports position at The Record, where I'd been working part-time for a couple years and had forged a good enough relationship with the Sports Editor to know he was looking to hire someone relatively young. Things appeared as though they were continuing to roll on in my favour.

But then something happened. In the midst of the hiring process, the paper lost its publisher and announced a hiring freeze. In the end, six months would pass between my February interview and the August hiring of a BC reporter who was notably not me. I'd excitedly accepted my current job in SL the day before receiving an email telling me they'd gone with someone else.

Now, you would think Sierra Leone would be the perfect place to solidify a love of journalism. All around me, stories of immense importance are just waiting to be told. And yet, the change of scenery has instead called into question whether that's the road I really want to take.

A couple months back, I was reading a book called Road Work, an enjoyable collection of journalistic pieces by a writer named Mark Bowden. I was struck by a sentence at the end of the book's introduction, as Bowden looked back on his early days as a reporter after a long career:

I am more confident today than I was then about my reporting skills, but I still enjoy the writing more than the reporting, and I still think I am a better writer than I am a reporter.

Bowden's words resonated with me. My initial logic for pursuing journalism, then in the sports vein, was to combine my two abiding passions: sports and writing. The reporting and interviewing aspects were enjoyable and I eventually got pretty good at them, but I too view myself as a better writer than reporter.

When I arrived here in Salone, I was intimidated. Due largely to my youth and the fact that I was working in radio instead of my more comfortable print surroundings, I felt as though I was the weak link in our crew of trainers. I'm not and it didn't take very long to realize it, but I also know that there are those, like my roommate Bryna, who are flat-out better journalists than me.

There are a lot of aspects of journalism I'm good at. But there are also key facets that I don't do well, weaknesses I've largely been able to sidestep in the weekly cycle of the student press.

I'm not good at writing quick copy, and I'm not especially comfortable having a story mostly written before an event, game, etc. is even over. I understand the necessity of doing so in the modern 24-hour news cycle, but I worry that it puts preconceptions in a journalist's head that, perhaps unfairly, colour their interpretation of events.

When it comes to interviews, I think I ask great questions. But I do so much better when I have time to meditate on an issue and delve into an interview, rather than forming all the relevant inquiries in the five-second space after a press conference announcement. I think I'm good at putting interview subjects at ease and getting them to open up, but I suck at cutting a subject off when deadline looms.

It's a skill set that makes me well-suited to long-form journalism, perhaps writing feature pieces for magazines. Unfortunately, it leaves me woefully inadequate for the vast majority of journalism jobs and almost all the entry-level ones, which revolve around writing on deadline, day in and day out.

While I imagine I could learn to do this well, I'm not convinced I want to. And let me be abundantly clear that I don't mean to disparage such news. People, myself very much included, want the news at their fingertips and I admire the hell out of those who are good at providing it, like my friend and former editor April. And generally speaking, the people that provide the crucial daily copy are good at the more in-depth stuff as well.

But for now, I'm leaning towards trying to find another way to play to my strengths instead of trying to steamroll my weaknesses in a stubborn attempt to hold onto the professional image I've spent the last few years cultivating for myself.

My stock-taking has done more than simply dredge up shortcomings. I've become more acutely aware of my strengths in areas like visioning and mentoring, for example.

Interestingly, I have no doubt that in my brief career to date, I've already trained and guided student journalists beyond my own level of reporting proficiency. My confidence giving direction as an editor exists parallel to my inability to always follow those same directions in my own reporting.

Still, I've been pretty blown away by the reaction of my Kalleone journalists, particularly Sheik, to the teaching I'm doing here, and I've been equally astounded by the degree to which some former Cord colleagues still value my input. So perhaps I should be seeking a career that will put such management and leadership skills to use?

Ultimately, being here has made me less confident than ever in what direction I want to go. But it's a lack of knowledge brought about by deep contemplation and self-assessment, which I deem infinitely preferable to a false sureness fed by being too busy to ever take stock.

And I certainly don't see myself turning my back on journalism altogether. There's a reason it's become such an integral part of my self-image. It's more a matter of trying to figure out where I fit in that journalism world, and I'm finding myself far more excited by the possibilities than scared about the uncertainties.

As traditional media hemhorrages jobs by the second, I find myself contemplating less conventional ways of making a media living, perhaps working for a think-tank or NGO while freelancing long-form pieces on my own time. As I try to decide if I'm better suited to sports or hard news, I'm inspired by reading writers like Bowden and Chuck Klosterman that see no need to make such a distinction, tackling topics as diverse as rhino poaching, Steve Nash, and Radiohead.

Then, in another corner of my brain, the tantalizing notion of starting my own media development NGO with my buddy Brandon screams for attention as I try to determine whether it's more than a simple pipe dream. Even PR, a professional direction that not long ago would have been tantamount to the ultimate sin, seems like a viable option, provided it's for something I'm truly passionate about, like a wicked cool band.

For now, though, I seem to have stumbled upon a pleasing summertime solution. Just recently, I accepted a contract position as the Interim Station Manager of the new Radio Laurier, a role that should allow me to flex those visioning and mentoring muscles nicely.

In essence, my job is to take the campus radio station I grew so passionate about last year and lead it through a period of transition as it moves from the Student's Union to Student Publications, the organization I've devoted so much time to throughout my Cord tenure. It's a move my co-host Joe and I have long championed, and I'm ecstatic about the opportunity to draw on my experience in radio here to help set a direction that will, hopefully, allow Radio Laurier to realize its enormous potential.

As if that weren't good enough, the job only calls for 15 hours/week (though I'll almost undoubtedly put in more) and the hours are flexible, leaving me enough time to work on freelancing three travel pieces that I won't have time to do while I'm here and begin looking for some more full-time work for the fall.

It also delivers the peace of mind of knowing I won't have to miss any games or tournaments when I return to the Kitchener Selects, and I should still have time left over to catch up with the many friends I've missed so dearly these last six months.

Oh, and did I mention that I will be working on this project with Alex 'Playa' Hayter - my right-hand man in my year as EIC at The Cord as well as my successor - in an office full of dear friends? I have a good feeling about this summer.

Fire in Freetown?

Editor's note: The events addressed in this post occurred nearly a month ago, and Freetown has been completely stable for weeks. Still, I promised my boy Jimmy D. more info on the riots in Freetown and I just couldn't look myself in the mirror if I did wrong by that king among men, so here goes.

Oh, and the title of this post is a reference to the song off K'naan's stellar sophomore album. Seriously, go buy Troubadour right now. The blog will still be here when you get back.


On March 16, I sat in the passenger seat of a taxi making its way from Conakry to Freetown. I'd been on the road for just over two amazing weeks, and I was exhausted. My ankle was sprained and swollen. The burn on my leg provided the occasional unwelcome shot of pain. My clothes were uniformly filthy. Freetown couldn't really come soon enough.

So, it would be an understatement to say I was not thrilled when one of my friends' cell phones delivered the news that Freetown was the scene of rioting, as we were told that cutlass-wielding youths terrorized the downtown. Craig wondered aloud if we should divert our course to Makeni.

I didn't want to go to Makeni. I wanted to go to Freetown. I wanted to go to Smartfarm. I wanted to go home. To shower. To do laundry. To eat a good meal. And to sleep.

And a couple hours later as we rolled into Freetown, the fact we'd even considered avoiding the city seemed laughable. All around me, Freetown was as I remembered it and, had I not spent a good portion of the next week reading and talking about what had happened, I'm not sure I would've believed there had been any disturbances at all.

In many ways, my return home was a study in juxtaposition. Everything I was hearing painted an image of a city of untold danger. Even outside the violence, which had begun the preceding Friday, my return home was met by the ghastly news that expats were being med-evaced at an alarming rate due to various mishaps, mostly vehicular. There had been something like six evacuees in the last week.

The worst accident saw four VSOs taken to England after a heinously ironic car accident in which their taxi was broadsided by a Red Cross vehicle. One woman had broken both legs, while another had suffered a number of facial lacerations that would require reconstructive surgery.

Chloe and Rob, a couple who stayed next to my crew at Lakka beach on Christmas Eve, were the other two. Rob was the only one who had escaped without serious injuries, but Chloe was comatose and, last I heard, there was still no guarantee she would live.

And yet, as I took a stroll down to Montana's for a delicious pizza dinner, Freetown seemed anything but threatening.

I was stopped every couple minutes by someone in the neighbourhood who wanted to know why they hadn't seen me for a couple weeks. Rather than the weariness this would've engendered in the days leading up to my vacation, I revelled in the friendly faces as a sort of confirmation that Sierra Leoneans were not interested in violence, whether a few rabble-rousers had begun rioting or not.

Noting the gauze on my leg, even complete strangers inquired about my wound with worried visages. A young boy yelled at me across busy Wilkinson Rd., concern echoing with immediacy in his voice. For every lighthearted explanation of my ocada accident I gave out, sincere declarations of "My sympathies" were returned to me. It was nice to be home.

In the days that followed, though average Sierra Leoneans generally dismissed the notion that the rioting would develop into anything more than an isolated annoyance, the frequent banter in the expat community made it impossible to move beyond it. Rumours were flying.

At a meeting to go over our evacuation plan and take further security measures, JHR's country director, Gbanabom "Elvis" Hallowell, confided that he'd heard the opposition Sierra Leone People's Party was planning to kidnap government ministers and torch the newspaper office of the governing All People's Congress. Thankfully, no such malevolent deeds have come to pass.

Having missed the fracas in its entirety, it's a little difficult for me to recount what exactly happened. Fortunately, our lead trainer, Marie-Jo, has already posted a pretty comprehensive blog on the topic, which I suggest you check out here. It gives background into the escalation of violence and a look at some of the aftermath.

In addition, you can check out all the stories Marie-Jo referenced:

1) BBC story from March 17: "Clashes in Sierra Leone capital"
2) Reuters filed two reports: "Seventeen hurt in Sierra Leone political violence" and "Police open fire during S. Leone political violence"
3) Al Jazeera also had two, the first of which includes the video Marie-Jo mentioned: "Women raped in Sierra Leone clashes" and "S Leone president vows crackdown"

I'd have to agree that Reuters sensationalized the story a little, and I found the phrase "police open fire" in the headline a tad misleading, since they only fired warning shots into the air.

I don't, however, see much from the BBC story to suggest their stringer, Umaru Fofana, hyped the violence, though it clearly concerns him. Even before the Monday incidents took place, the President of the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists - a man known to many as "Obama" because he represents a younger set of journalists and ran on a campaign of change that coincided temporally with Barack's - wrote this in a March 16 editorial in Awoko newspaper:

Methinks that Sierra Leone's stability keeps hanging on a thinner thread by the day. Even as a natural optimist, recent happenings have consumed my sanguinity. From whence we have come, forgotten fools we have become.... My heart is in my mouth, competing for space with my tears. My country is on the edge. Threats and counter-threats have been flying back and forth.

...

This is the warning shot and we must listen to it and change our ways.... If our leaders do not show leadership, we are tinkering on the brink of mayhem in a country whose people know full well what every letter of that word means.

I think this last point is especially significant. Ever since I've been here, the attitude I've generally heard from Sierra Leoneans is that they like President Ernest Bai Koroma, but the knock on him has always been that he's not a strong enough leader. While he is believed to be free of corruption, the perception is that he can't control his ministers, who don't share his integrity.

As alluded to in the Al Jazeera piece, Koroma didn't provide the type of strong leadership a situation such as this demands. It took him entirely too long to come out with a denouncement of the violence, and when he did so it was laden with divisive political overtones.

Rather than offer a strong, non-partisan message designed to unite the country and quickly put down any overzealous sentiment, he opted to take pot shots at the SLPP for being unwilling to accept the opposition role. A nation-building opportunity was clearly missed.

Politically, incidents such as these aren't doing the APC any favours. I've noticed a stark decline in support for the government, as Sierra Leoneans revert to deeply-rooted perceptions that the party ranks are populated by bullies.

But whether the riots give the SLPP the edge at the polls or not, such violence ultimately serves only to further smear the country's international reputation and set back the progress made. It will make things more difficult on whomever wins the elections in 2012, as they will have to battle even harder to convince the international community of the country's stability.

Hopefully, the country's politicians can soon recognize these simple truths, as it's clear that the general population understands them. Many people I've spoken to firmly believe the country has no stomach for a return to violence, and this attitude has fueled my cautious optimism about the nation's stability throughout my stay here.

Still, when unemployment rages and many youths were raised on violence, how quickly does 'rebel soldier' begin to look like a good career option? For the sake of Sierra Leone, I hope the answer is not at all.

52 years. 40 years. 25 years.

I've decided that court reporting would be a kickass beat.

That may have something to do with the fact that I spent yesterday back at the Special Court for Sierra Leone for the sentencing of the three convicted RUF leaders. Admittedly, it might be a tad more interesting than your average court case.

But if lawyers elsewhere in the world are even a small fraction as quotable as the men handling this trial, then courts must be the most sought-after beat in every newsroom in the world.

Personally, I found the sentencing significantly more interesting than the verdict itself, partially because the summary of the sentence given by the presiding judge, Pierre Boutet (a Canuck), revolved mostly around explanations of the submissions made by the defense and prosecution regarding what should be taken into account in determining sentence length.

These aggravating (prosecution's case) and mitigating factors (defense), as well as the court's opinions on those submissions, were a little more accessible than the summary of the verdict, which gets somewhat involved in the case of a six-year trial.

But more than that, I think I liked the sentencing because the lawyers had less to lose by stating their true feelings and were significantly more blunt in their addresses to the media. While the appeals process remains, that's handled by a different panel of judges, leaving the defense counsels free to rage against this trio. And rage they did.

Another thing I think I'd like about court reporting is getting to know the personalities of the various lawyers. Having now interviewed three of the main lawyers in this case on a couple occasions, I've come to forge opinions on their styles, albeit probably prematurely.

First, there's the lead prosecutor, Stephen Rapp. I don't much care for him. He seems like something of a teacher's pet.

For example, as Justice Boutet was about to end the court proceedings yesterday, Mr. Rapp jumped up to deliver a soliloquy on the virtues of the judges and proceeded to thank so many people involved with the trial that I was half-expecting the Oscar music to cut him short. But then, I'm sure the three men who has just been condemned to spend the rest of their lives in a foreign jail would disagree with me about his speech being ill-timed (he said, tongue firmly in cheek).

He also doesn't give interviews after these verdicts until he's first issued a written press statement complete with the approval of the judges regarding the wording. Though I deem the practice slightly more acceptable than I would in a Canadian context because I know reporters misquote with unfortunate regularity, I nonetheless think it worthy of lamentation.

Next up, there's Wayne Jordash, lead defense counsel for Issa Sesay, the Interim Leader of the RUF that yesterday received the longest sentence the court has handed down to date, at 52 years (The three AFRC convicts received 50, 45, and 50 years, while the CDF got off much lighter at 15 and 20).

On Jordash, I'm torn. He is a young, accomplished lawyer (he worked at the tribunal in Rwanda prior to taking on Sesay's defense) that the ladies tend to swoon over, and his stylish playboy reputation makes him an easy target that we at 19 Smartfarm Rd. enjoy exploiting for our own amusement.

When the verdict was delayed by four hours, Kevin joked that Jordash had gone out on his yacht and mistimed the return to Freetown. He seems so in his element at the head of a media scrum that Bryna and I relentlessly theorize that he must allocate 40% of his time for the case on rehearsing looks of righteous indignation and neat phrases in front of a full-length mirror.

Had I written this blog yesterday, I think I would've been unfairly harsh towards Jordash. Admittedly, the high preponderance of suspiciously similar phrases make his schtick come off rehearsed at times, a deliberate effort to win the court of public opinion where he is unable to win in the actual courtroom. These are not attributes that endear him to me, though as a lawyer it is perhaps not a terrible strategy.

Today, however, I attended a press conference and made the mistake of speaking with Jordash informally, one on one, after listening to his arguments in a formal setting for close to an hour. For anyone seeking to irrationally vilify someone, I suggest avoiding speaking to them at all costs; it makes disliking them a hell of a lot easier.

First off, I started to believe his outrage. Even today, Jordash rolled out a lot of his stock phrases, such as when he was asked to comment on his personal beliefs about the guilt or innocence of Sesay. To be clear, I fully understand his patent unwillingness to do so; I just wish he'd mix it up a little from his constant refrain of, "I don't know if he's guilty or not. I'll never know until he's granted a fair trial."

He also continued with his evasive tendency to respond to questions by saying, "Well, let me lay it out for you. Here are the facts. *insert his facts* Do you think that reflects a court that's interested in ... *rephrases reporter's question*?" It's all a little too slick for me.

Still, whether I'm merely being spun or not, he brought up a couple points that did make it hard to dismiss his frustration outright. I haven't had a chance to read the thousands of pages of documentation for the trial (though, if I were a court reporter, I would've been following all along and wouldn't need to), so I'm not certain I believe this, but Jordash said that his defense team has only won a single legal argument (appeal, challenge, etc.) since 2003.

If true, and assuming there were more than three such appeals to be won, it does seem to cast the trial chambers' impartiality into doubt. Six years is a long losing streak for any competent team of lawyers and, my beefs notwithstanding, Jordash and co. are certainly that.

Though I'd grown tired of lawyers and journalists beating the drum that the Court was too politically-motivated to operate in the interests of fairness, Jordash argued it well, noting that the $80-100 million being spent on the SCSL to try only 10 people (if, miraculously, Johnny Paul Koroma turns up alive) tends to implicitly encourage convictions, even more so than something like the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which tries a much larger number and can therefore politically afford an acquittal or two.

More than anything, though, my opinion was tempered by what seemed to be some sincerity to go with the rehearsed bits. When I asked Jordash informally after the press conference if he would have taken on this case if he'd known six years ago how frustrating it was going to be, he didn't hesitate to say no. It was a pleasant surprise. I had expected some bullshit answer about his belief in the need for Sesay to be given a strong defense, casting himself in the role of a noble martyr for justice.

Even looking back at some portions of his post-sentencing interview, embedded below, there are times when he gets flustered amid his outrage - the third snippet in particular - in a manner that seems to point to sincerity. Besides, the journalist in me has difficulty strongly disliking someone so irresistibly quotable.

Wayne Jordash, Lead defense counsel for Issa Sesay

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Next up is John Cammegh, the lead defense counsel for Augustine Gbao. He's easily my favourite, although we barely even got an interview with him yesterday.

As Jordash reigned over his scrum, I noticed Cammegh lingering in the background and eventually walking briskly off with his team. Thinking Jordash had little else to add to his diatribe, I grabbed my Kalleone colleague, Bakarr, and ran Cammegh down, yelling after him three or four times before he stopped to grant us an interview.

As I wasn't freelancing for any international media this time around, I let Bakarr do most of the talking, resulting in a rather inauspicious beginning to the interview. Bakarr soured the mood of an already angry man by mistakenly calling him the prosecution, leading with a question that made absolutely no sense, and then stubbornly pushing the 'politics of the court' angle on someone who clearly wanted nothing to do with it.

I eventually stepped in to ensure Bakarr didn't drive the poor man over the edge, but I thoroughly enjoyed Cammegh's answers for their blunt honesty.

I highly recommend checking out the edited excerpts below, where Cammegh throws a few thinly-veiled jabs at Jordash's heavy pandering to the media, tosses his client's two co-defendents under the bus, roundly admonishes the Sierra Leonean government for shirking responsibility of the imprisonment of the convicted, and, thankfully, gets too riled up to notice that Bakarr didn't even know his name.

John Cammegh, Lead defense counsel for Augustine Gbao

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How could I not enjoy being party to an interview like that? You could base at least three different story angles off such forthcoming commentary. And while I would normally cringe at an interviewee telling the media how to do their job, I actually think in this case Cammegh has a valid point.

In my post about the trial verdict, I wrote the following:

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.

Were guilty verdicts indeed inevitable? And if so, what value does this court really have? Doesn't it kind of make the whole notion of justice a sham if no one of sound mind actually believes the accused have a fighting chance of an acquittal?

These questions are what make the case of Augustine Gbao worthy of more ink, ink I myself should have been spilling when I covered the verdict for IRIN. If his trial had not been tied to those of Morris Kallon and Sesay, would he have been convicted at all?

As Cammegh references, the notion of a joint criminal enterprise, which all the defense lawyers have decried as almost comically overstepping reasonable bounds, is the only thing that is currently condemning this man to a jail sentence, and the grounds for appeal do appear ripe, with the presiding judge having found him not guilty on 17 of the 18 charges in the indictment.

Unschooled as I am in international law, I'm anxious to discuss this case with my good buddy Bryn, who is currently studying that very field in Belgium, to get his views on just what such a high profile acquittal would mean for the still-young field.

Now, I'm not blind to the fact I'm grossly over-romanticizing court reporting on the basis of a few isolated encounters with an international tribunal that no doubt immensely dwarfs the drama at the courthouse on Queen St. in Kitchener. But as a philosophy minor, the myriad issues of ethics and morality that are inherent in criminal cases appeal to me greatly.

A 52-year sentence sounds like a long time. If it's upheld, Issa Sesay would be imprisoned until he is 90 years old, more than double the life expectancy of his native land. But is it really that long?

A single murder can net you 20 years in prison. If you're found responsible for countless murders over the span of close to a decade, shouldn't that be worth more than 2.5 times the sentence of a single murder, especially if these murders take such heinous forms as chopping off a boy's legs and arms before throwing him into a latrine to drown in a pool of urine and feces? Or is attempting to draw numerical comparisons sheer folly?

Does it matter that Sesay is credited by many as being instrumental in the peace and disarmament process or was his fate sealed by prior acts?

And if he is guilty of such atrocities, should we really be that concerned with whether or not he ever sees his family again? Is doing so taking too great of pains to ensure the rights of those who have consistently taken them away from so many others, or would failing to uphold them sink us to similarly despicable lows?

On all these matters, I have leanings, but would be hard-pressed to take so black and white a stance as to argue one side convincingly. A lawyer I am not. But being a fly on the wall in the courtrooms that seek answers to these questions could be fun, and getting paid to be said fly sounds pretty damn good. So, anyone know of any media houses in search of a young, aspiring court reporter?


Editor's note: I'll update this with a link to the Kalleone story I filed with Bakarr once it's online at the JHR site. But don't expect it to grapple with the complexities outlined in this post.

A Continent for the Taking

Since arriving in Sierra Leone, I have rediscovered my love for reading. It is a passion that I have harboured for as long as I can remember, one that led me to pursue an undergraduate degree in English literature and one that seems to have survived in spite of that, albeit just barely.

Having to read and deconstruct five or six novels for almost every class of my degree took something of the magic out of reading for me. Though my syllabuses included many of the great classics that I'd long wanted to consume anyway, the past-time had nonetheless been drained of its element of freedom and I found myself doing less and less leisure reading.

Enter Salone, a world of few distractions with frequent and sustained stretches of sitting around, and my consumption of the written word has thankfully regained some its previous glory. It is one of the few activities that I know I can partake in here, regardless of electricity supply, even if it is occasionally only by the glow of my cell phone.

But I've noticed one noteworthy asterisk to my return to reading: fiction is no longer my master. Outside of the required readings of my distance education course in children's literature, the only novel I've consumed was Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and even that is semi-autobiographical.

I also breezed through a much-anticipated poetry collection called A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but otherwise I've been drawn exclusively to non-fiction.

Mariatu Kamara's The Bite of the Mango. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. Chuck Klosterman's IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. Road Work by Mark Bowden. A collection of essays entitled The Impossible May Take A Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd. Chuck Thompson's Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces.

Okay, so that last one has some fictive elements. Still, my Salone reading list has been overwhelmingly populated by memoirs and other writing based in real events. This, I suppose, should come as no surprise for an aspiring journalist, and I'm finding that 'personal memoirs of foreign correspondents' is quickly overtaking 'biographies of dead musicians' as my favourite very narrowly defined genre.

Still, if this trend in my leisure reading continues - and the lengthy list of must-reads I've gleaned from conversations with fellow expats gives me every reason to believe it will - I may end up with a small library in itself of classic literature that I own but have never read.

Hopefully, I can continue to keep up a decent reading pace when I return to Canada to allow for both forms. If not, it doesn't bode well for the Dickens and Joyce by my bedside, as this new literary passion has seduced me too deeply to turn back.

Take, for example, my favourite book of the last six months: Howard W. French's A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa. French is an African-American journalist from D.C., who moved to Cote d'Ivoire after finishing college and ended up spending the better part of his next 20 years in Africa.

Simply stated, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the African subcontinent. French grounds his dazzling writing in a keen historical understanding of the myriad factors underscoring the difficulties that Africa faces today, and makes no effort to hide his unadulterated vitriol for the West throughout.

By now, living in Africa was not only required for my job but had also come to involve an intensely personal quest. The continent I had known in the early 1980s, poor and politically backward to be sure, had now settled into a spiral of bloody traumas and chronic disorder. I needed to understand why, and over and over again this question drew me back to Central Africa, a region that, together with a small cluster of West African states, with Liberia at its epicenter, rested atop the continental hit parade of mayhem and decay.

Because of the scale of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda was the site of the one African tragedy people in the farthest reaches of the world knew of. But in political terms, Rwanda's nearly bipolar society of Hutu and Tutsi made it more of an anomaly than a paradigm for the rest of the continent.

More than any other place, Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of Congo] - a country as vast as the United States east of the Mississippi, which shares land borders with eight other countries and is separated by a lake from a ninth, Tanzania - seemed like the country where I might find answers. By African standards, its contact with Europe had been extraordinary both for its duration, going back to the time of Columbus, and its destructiveness. From the earliest days of independence, in 1960, with the destabilization and overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, the country's first prime minister and only democratically elected leader, Western meddling had been persistent and profoundly destabilizing. And like most African countries, only even more spectacularly, Zaire had been misruled for decades ever since - in this case by Mobutu Sese Seko.

Reading this book is sure to raise the ire of even the most tepid African sympathizers at the complacency and outright culpability of the West in creating the disastrous state of affairs that currently embroils much of the continent. It pretty much makes me hate white people and colonialists.

More than a million Africans die every year from malaria without raising a peep in the wealthy countries of the world. Struggling for a way to depict the scale of this disaster, the Tanzanian researcher Wen Kilama said, Imagine seven Boeing 747s filled mostly with children crashing into Mount Kilimanjaro each day, and you get an idea of malaria's horrifying toll.

In some countries, 30 percent or more of the population is infected with AIDS, and yet the common bonds of humanity that are said to exist between us have never drawn the rich and the wretched of the world together in an emergency ...

He continues, turning his condemnation towards his colleagues in the media ...

But the massive hemorrhaging and projectile vomiting associated with Ebola were such cinematically compelling new grist for the world media's insatiable market in images of horror that African disease was guaranteed a spot on the nightly news for as long as the epidemic lasted.

Besides sheer prurience, though, the outside world's interest was being driven by old-fashioned fright and narrow self-interest. Ebola aroused the fear in America and Europe that in today's shrunken and interconnected world, a deadly virus like this was only a plane flight away (like the SARS virus) from the lives that truly mattered - those of Westerners.

"Where Africa is concerned, there is a constant search for tragedy with a new face; it's like 'What else is new in genocide'," Ali Mazrui, a prominent Kenyan scholar, told me on the telephone a few days into the Ebola panic ...

All too often, Africa coverage has come to resemble the cowboys and Indians games of my boyhood. We are quick to find heroes in the Westerners who are always seen as rushing to the rescue, while unconsciously concluding that the Africans served better in the role of, at best, passive spectators. We have too often gotten our explanations from the outside experts and the Western diplomats who professionally wander these parts, rushing right past the very subjects of Africa's dramas, the Africans themselves.

I could keep posting brilliant excerpts until I'd essentially transcribed the entire book to this blog, so consistently offensive to one's sense of justice and fairness are the stories detailed by French. This book is extremely informative about the history, in particular, of the DRC, Nigeria, Mali and Liberia - but its true magnificence lies in how it draws out the continent's overarching tragedies in a way that leaves the reader no recourse but moral indignation.

I'll finish with a quote that I think is especially instructive to any remotely nuanced understanding of modern-day sub-Saharan Africa.

[Congolese novelist Sony Labou] Tansi's concerns were never with the cookie-cutter countries bequeathed by Europe's arbitrary partition and colonial subjugation of the continent. Subtly underpinning all of his art, but always at the forefront of his increasingly rabid politics, was a deeply felt nationalism. It harkened back to what was for many African intellectuals a myth-infused antidiluvian past, before the time, that is, when Europe's imperial mapmakers and colonizing armies destroyed Africa's nascent states.

There was tragic irony in Tansi's rage for redemption. Europe had undoubtedly wreaked untold destruction by shoehorning Africans of different languages and cultures together inside arbitrarily drawn boundaries at the end of the nineteenth century, by halfheartedly imposing its models of governance and economics on the continent for a few short decades in the twentieth century. Then, by washing its hands of Africa and walking away long before the mold had set, it vastly compromised matters even further.

Though born of the indignities of domination by Westerners, Tansi's passions were nonetheless based on a narrow, ethnically driven sense of identity. Everywhere one looked in Africa, runaway ethnicity in politics had the same impact: blinding carnage and chaos. Surely this was not the germ of African renaissance. An ideology like Tansi's struck me rather more like a stick of dynamite thrown into a crowded marketplace - a recipe for death and destruction.

Here in SL, politics are divided along ethnic lines in precisely the manner French describes. At the risk of oversimplifying, if you're from the North, chances are you're Temne and support the governing All People's Congress. If you're from the South, you're likely Mende and back the opposition Sierra Leone People's Party.

Of course, there are many more tribes - Fula and Limba are two of the other big ones in a country of 16 ethnic tribes - and with the splintering of the SLPP before the 2007 elections, there is now a third party, the People's Movement for Democratic Change, who managed to grab 10 of the 120 seats in parliament (though they've since lost one in a bye-election).

Still, I'd have to agree with French's assessment that such ethnically-driven politics are something of a ticking time-bomb, or at least a negative influence on a country's governance.

I still remember with clarity a conversation I had with ABJ in my first week in Sierra Leone, where he explained that very few people actually stopped to analyze the policies and platforms of the country's political leaders, instead mindlessly voting along ethnic lines. It's tempting to grow excited over the fact that political discussions here can often elicit passion, unlike back home, but if that passion has nothing to do with ideology and progress and everything to do with loyalty along an ethnic divide, it's hardly something to be celebrated.

It's easy to become caught up in the depressing realities of modern African politics, rooted as they are in tribalism, corruption and violence, and to adopt a detached cynicism. A few weeks back, my buddy Rob posted sardonically on my Facebook wall regarding the fact there's been a military coup and a presidential assassination in two neighbouring countries (Guinea and Guinea-Bissau respectively) during my first six months in Sierra Leone.

"Usually you would have to wait at least a year for that to happen ... you must be lucky," he quipped.

The comment was an example of the type of dark humour that you sometimes need to avoid becoming crestfallen in the face of such disheartening realities, and I know that Rob is more interested in the plight of African countries than the vast majority of Westerners.

But at the end of the day, I think it's also important to remind ourselves of our moral imperative to try to help improve the situation here, and not simply out of some noble concept of empathy for our fellow human being. The West as a whole needs to stop shrouding its various missions in Africa in altruistic veils and recognize them for what they are: attempts to undo the enormous damage we have wreaked on scores of once proud cultures.

Yes, the ruling systems in many sub-Saharan African countries are unmitigated disasters. But when the West came in with superior technology and exploited the hell out of the continent for strictly selfish motives ranging from the plunder of its resources to the enslavement of its people, ripping asunder sophisticated societies such as the Ashanti people of present-day Ghana or the Kongo kingdom of Central Africa, and, by drawing borders with blatant disregard for existing tribal divisions, created a Babel-like potpourri of neighbours speaking dialects incomprehensible to one another ... well, what the fuck did we expect?