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.