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.