New Blog

I'm sure no one's checking here anymore, but since I left SL in May, I'm not writing here anymore. My new blog is over at juliacoynerrobinson.blogspot.com.

Sending For Visas

After just under a month at home, I will be traveling to Cape Town, South Africa, to be a fellow in the main office for Mothers 2 Mothers, a program that, in brief, strives to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child. I’m in a whirlwind of paperwork and logistics—insurance, financial concerns, and of course, the dreaded visa.

I lived in France when I was 13 because my parents took a sabbatical from Thacher, the boarding school where I grew up and that I attended for high school. We didn’t get visas because the French application process required extensive paperwork, including handwritten forms in triplicate (as I remember it). This meant that we entered the country as tourists and had to leave the country every few months so that we could remain legal. Now, with the Schengen Agreement, which dissolved internal borders between some European countries, it would be more difficult to dodge the visa. But it meant that every so often my sister and I were pulled out of school (or not—the French get a ridiculous, though very nice, number of holidays) for trips. We would traipse off to Switzerland, or across the Chunnel to London (which was a letdown—I had imagined it to be really cool inside, like the mine in The Temple of Doom—it was actually just dark), or to the Isle of Jersey. This was my mother’s favorite because, despite the rough ferry ride, she could stock up on cranberry juice. We would go for day trips, always careful to have our passports stamped going into Jersey, with large rolling suitcases so that we could buy enough Ocean Spray cranberry juice to keep her happy. We’d go to this great Thai restaurant that had a contest in the men’s bathroom that challenged the viewer to pick the woman who was once a man out of the pictures of scantily clad fancy ladies on the wall. On one occasion, my mother got my dad to check the bathroom so that she could sneak in and make her guess—and of course, she got it right. This was my first experience with temporary residence in a foreign country.

When I was in college, I studied abroad in Senegal for just under five months. I expected a seriously confusing visa process—Senegal is an ex-French colony, after all. The application was one page long and only required a trip to a New York Post Office. I got my visa in less than five days. Granted, I was going as a student and had a sponsoring letter from my program, but I was shocked, especially once Senegalese friends began to outline the process for obtaining a visa to the US. I did overstay my visa by a few weeks, but there were no raised eyebrows or questions as I passed through the airport—I was leaving.

The visa process for Sierra Leone was equally easy, and I completed it between New Orleans and Atlanta during a road trip to return my sister to college. I also got my visa in under a week. Once I got to Sierra Leone, things got a bit more complicated. It turns out the multiple reentry visa, good for one year, is actually useless. All visitors receive a one-month stamp upon entry to Sierra Leone, and that is the golden ticket, not the visa. Outstaying your stamp date can result in “fines” paid without a receipt to the customs agents that shake you down at the airport. I tried several times in Freetown to get my stamp extended (on one occasion the entire immigration office was closed for a funeral), only to find out that it required exorbitant fees, paperwork, “honorariums” to various officials, and trips to multiple government bureaus that had decided upon different regulations that would increase their individual piece of the pie. It turns out that an expatriate, especially one coming to volunteer for an international NGO, is seen by the government as much as by the average Sierra Leonean as a vast and untapped source of unimaginable and fabulous wealth. Unfortunately, this will ultimately result in deterring NGO work and volunteers—who wants to pay several hundred dollars after shelling out airfare and visa fees (not cheap), and committing to work for free for a humanitarian purpose? It’s especially hard to say yes when you know that the money will be eaten. So, I did what many NGOs in Sierra Leone have done in the past: I went upline to deal with my paperwork in the more relaxed and friendly atmosphere of Bo.

In Sierra Leone, it’s relatively easy to get away with things. As long as those activities don’t involve smuggling kilos of cocaine from South America and involving high ranking government officials, which caused a huge scandal in September (though I can imagine that a lot of the planes transporting coke from South America to Western Europe don’t get stopped). Actually, the men arrested for this and tried were recently convicted. The day of their conviction, American forces of one kind or another (allegedly) entered their cells and whisked them to a helicopter and then to a plane that had been waiting several days for the conviction to fly them to the US for drug-related crimes committed on American soil. The US Embassy had no comment. I haven’t found a report online for this yet, but I heard it on the BBC here. Apparently President Ernest Bai Koroma issued a deportation order, which made the American action legal, but all I can imagine is a bunch of spooks in riot gear and balaclavas throwing tear gas into the prison, tearing down the doors, and pulling terrified men out of their cells, putting bags over their heads, and throwing them into the trunk of a car. Though I’d wager that US prison might be a bit more comfortable than the Salonean variety.

Anyway, it’s easy to get away with things—thieves are so brazen precisely because the police don’t respond (unless given a “gift” by the victim, I am told, or unless the victim has good connections), and there is no version of 911 outside of Freetown, and even then, you have to have a certain cell phone carrier to call it. We have the personal phone numbers of friendly policemen in Bo should there be a problem. Almost anything can be bought or swept under the rug as long as you can “remember” or “send for” the responding officer. This means that there is a lot of vigilantism—thieves might be able to get away without being arrested, but they could be severely beaten or even killed by a mob of people should they get caught.

Now, I’m looking at a visa form for South Africa that requires things I’ve never had to do before: chest x-rays to ensure that I am TB-free, proof of financial means, and a background check from the FBI. It all feels a bit excessive. But then again, I’ve been in Sierra Leone for almost eight months now.

Ordinary Oddities

As it’s beginning to sink in that I will be leaving Bo in under two weeks and Sierra Leone in less than a month (after a brief detour to Morocco), the ordinary parts of life for me here start to surface as strange, as things that I will not encounter when I return to California. No traffic lights or stop signs, no strict attention to staying on a particular side of the road, children and mothers clutching newborns helmetless on motorbikes, for example.

What hit me last night, as I was shuffling out to turn on the generator for its daily four and half hour run from 6:30 to 11pm, was the strangeness of having 24-hour light. I have not had a day of 24-hour power since December, when my family came to visit and we stayed in a nice Freetown hotel. I’m not trying to lay a guilt trip on anyone reading this or trying to prove that I’m tough (I’m not—the generator broke about 2 weeks ago and I had a mini-meltdown). The hospital (and all of Bo) was without municipal power from Thursday evening until this morning, so we had over 5 days without light. The city is powered by a hydroelectric dam that relies on a high water level to function. Now, at the very last gasp of the dry season, there have been longer periods of blackouts. Although the government is supposed to supply the hospital with fuel or with money to purchase fuel, it has all been “eaten” on its long journey from Freetown to Bo, through so many bureaucratic hands. It costs just over $100 to power the hospital for five hours—a considerable expense in a hospital that requires patients to provide their own food, linens, dressings, syringes, and blood, even in emergency situations. In a hospital, lack of power is a serious problem, as one can imagine.

Our house is one of a handful of structures that have generators in our neighborhood—the others include a motel, a private hospital, and a district councilman’s house. It becomes immediately apparent at night who has a generator and who doesn’t—if the flares of light don’t give it away, the chugging of the engines certainly does. Lack of power is a fact of life in Sierra Leone. Most people don’t have it or have it intermittently. Some people have visited me at night just to be able to plug in their cell phones (which became apparent when there was no conversation beyond “How are you? Can I charge my phone?”). Cell phone charging stations are a thriving business. When I returned early from work last Friday, a neighbor, Hawa, asked me a standard greeting: “How de work?” I ended up complaining, with an exasperated gesture “Light no deh na hospitu,” only to realize how ridiculous a gripe this was, since Hawa does not have a generator or even wiring in her house to support a generator. I didn’t feel bad about it—we do need power to function as an organization, and it’s incredibly frustrating to come to work and know that nothing is going to get done until the power comes back—but I did realize how absurd it was.

To have power, I have to request for fuel, get the money, get the jerry cans, take them to the gas station, fill them, bring them back, and then get the tank filled (our caretaker, Amara, siphons the fuel into the tank. I am way too much of a wuss to attempt anything that will most likely end in a mouth full of diesel fuel). Then I have to turn it on and sometimes turn it off, making sure that we aren’t keeping it on too long so there’s enough fuel for the whole week.

It’s the same with water—we have a well, we have to turn on the generator to pump up the water to the tank, and then we have running water. When I first got here in September, we had no power and therefore no running water. When Helen first arrived, Amara was hauling water up to the tank by hand so that she could have running water. Once she figured out what was going on, she asked Amara to stop and enacted bucket showers. We recently had to stop allowing our neighbors to use our well (many do not have one of their own) because of concerns that our well will dry up. As it is, I can see the bottom when I lean over and stare down into the water for a while. And two of our neighbors just dug wells, one of which is under 20 feet away from ours. At the hospital, the pump that WAFF donated broke due to some power surges that destroyed the circuits. The patients usually have to fetch their own water for drinking and then we pay a truck to come in twice a week to fill our ward tanks so that the patients can bathe (in a fistula ward, this is pretty vital).

What’s strange about utilities here is that their sources are so near and so apparent. It’s not turning on a light switch or a faucet and what you need is right there—it’s having to see where the power and water come from everyday and knowing everyday that something could go wrong to stop them coming. The house pump or the generator could break. The gas stations could begin hoarding fuel to create an artificial shortage, as they did when the government forced them all to lower to a standard price (Le 12,500, or $4.15). Fortunately, this did not work, and the brief shortages were more annoying than anything else. I’ve never been so aware of water and power, even though I’ve lived in California during “rolling blackouts” and severe droughts, including the one we’re currently experiencing. Here, every minute the generator is on, I am aware of it and aware of the fuel that it is consuming. Every second I’m in the shower, I feel the water draining out of the tank and being pumped out of the ground.

I’m not optimistic, however, that once I go home I’ll be taking cold army showers and keeping the lights off during the day. These amenities are so convenient and beyond that, so important to functioning as a person, family, or society. Yes, you can get along without them. And yes, the vast majority of Americans and other Global Northerners/people in developed nations/Westerners should conserve a lot more power and water than they currently do. But when I go to the hospital and sit in the dark, listening to the patients pass the office to and from the hand pump, I’d take wasted water any second or lights left on when no one is in the room, if it meant that there was, at the very least, running water and power for the hospitals here. And I can only hope that once I go home, I’ll shave a few minutes off my showers and I’ll remember to turn my computer off at night and unplug it. But first I’ll have to get used to turning on the light switch outside the hours of 6:30-11pm.

Grasping at America

Recently, I had a conversation with a man named Commandah. He detailed his various attempts to get to Europe illegally. Once, he tried to cross the Sahara through Mali to Morocco and from there, a boat to Spain. Like coyotes leading illegal immigrants from Mexico to the US, the “boys” guiding across the Sahara often cheat or rob their desperate clients, forcing them to march until exhaustion or taking away their water and then removing them of all valuables. Commandah marched all night, fearful of desert snakes or being cheated, before he turned around and headed back to Mali. He also tried to stowaway on several boats with the help of bribed accomplices on board. Once, he had to stay strapped into a tiny cot, unable to move except briefly at night when the crew was asleep. He abandoned that venture. I asked him if he would try again to enter Europe. “Not the bad way. Not through the back door. It is the main gate for me,” he said. He now has a wife and child.
Almost everyone I have talked with in Sierra Leone has expressed a desire to go to the US or Europe (except for the 5-year-old daughter of a patient, who shook her head when a woman asked if she wanted to leave with me—clever girl). With the patients, I’ve gotten into a long joking routine where they ask to come with me to America and I tell them they’ll have to stop eating to get “small body” as I open up my purse and point inside, saying “No fine. You body BIG.” This never gets old for them. They’ll ask whether there is palm oil, cassava leaf, and crain-crain (another leafy green) in America. I say no, and I warned them, when they bundled up on mornings that were no cooler than 68 F, that they would be miserable. The usual response is that they’ll pack a five-gallon jug of palm oil with them and they’ll dry cassava leaf. Winter cold, as one may experience in New York or Boston (we won’t get into Chicago, Maine, or the Dakotas) is not a concept for them. One man I spoke to told me that his friend had gone to America legally—a long, intensive, and extremely costly process that often results in a rejection with no monetary refund—only to wish that he could come home. Family pressure kept him from returning to Sierra Leone, after all the money and stress spent on getting him there, and he’s gotten used to it.
It’s sort of strange that the image of the US to people living in such dire circumstances has never changed. Replace a Sierra Leonean wishing to immigrate with a Russian, Italian, or Irish person in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and it’s the same. Everyone is rich and free. The streets are paved with gold (though I prefer “Fievel: An American Tail”—“Where the streets are paved with cheese”). Etc. As I’ve written before, I once had to explain in Senegal that America was still struggling with racism and that Martin Luther King, Jr. had not solved racism in our country. I feel like I’m constantly explaining—the cost of living is so expensive, work is hard to find when you don’t have a lot of experience or education, it will be so different, the food will not be the same, etc, etc, etc. I guess, however, that for most people in the US, things are almost infinitely better—medical care (though expensive) is generally safe and effective, water is almost always clean, malaria, polio and other tropical illnesses are rare to non-existent, and there are job opportunities that will pay incredibly higher salaries than Sierra Leone as long as you can work hard under poor conditions (which is, of course, the standard here anyway). People will work for 60,000 Leones ($20) a month and even lower. Some stay in volunteer jobs for years hoping for full employment. And seeing an expat working for an NGO here reinforces this idea—we have enough money to get over here, at least (one patient was shocked to hear that it costs six million Leones to fly here, then admitted that she wasn’t sure how much six million Leones is), and we drive around in shiny NGO cars and eat out in restaurants or buy expensive groceries from the Lebanese supermarket. But we’re the lucky ones that can afford to come here. And the idea of a world economic crisis is widespread and discussed among Sierra Leoneans, but the image of the rich American is unshakeable, and the dream of becoming that rich American endures.

Resurfacing

It’s been so long since I’ve written here. My friend Jim wrote over on his blog that after a long time, coming back to writing to attack the big stories or events or thoughts is difficult, if not impossible. Which is my sorry excuse for this long absence. How do I fill in the gaps from the past months?

Our Book Keeper, Musa, died of a stroke, suddenly and unexpectedly. I turned 23 the next day. A patient gave birth to twins and once the stress of her pregnancy subsided, she stopped leaking urine. An employee celebrated her engagement to our landlord with a traditional ceremony that included the presentation of kola nuts, envelopes of cash handed out to the many relatives of the bride, and three decoy brides before the entrance of the genuine article. We took the patients to an orphanage for Easter and had a “lolly hunt” and kite flying and dancing and singing. We hired a third driver, an administrator, a nursing director. We are in the process of hiring an accountant. I stopped my work as the Acting Administrator and took over as the Acting Finance Officer. I crunch numbers, I think.

Dr. Maggi came and many operations were done and hordes of patients sent home dry or to wait for more complicated surgery. We renovated a ward for skills training and as a living area for those few patients that have become part of our staff. The pump that WAFF donated to the hospital broke. The garden dried up. When the water truck breaks down, the patients carry water from the hand pump installed near our office, which means that they pop their heads in and ask, while watching me read the paper online, whether the pictures of New York Times Op-Ed columnists are of members of my family. The volunteers found a new walk across scorched fields and through tunnels of green thickets to a tiny village close enough to the road that we could hear trucks rushing by on their way to Freetown but remote enough that we were unsure how the nine-months pregnant woman we met would ever make it to a hospital when she went into labor. Many volunteers came and went and are still asked after now that they are gone.

I was bitten by countless mosquitoes, awakened by countless mice, tempted to pet countless dogs. I hit a rooster with a pillow after it crowed too early too near my window. It was the burning season, and I awoke from an afternoon sleep more than once to flames reaching higher than our wall, stopped only by a short stretch of road, taking trees and leaving termite mounds, driving mice and snakes into the safety of concrete houses. It was the first straining moments of the rainy season and I sweated through my clothes several times, waiting in the blackouts for rain to come as a relief to the dusty wind, to the unbearable heat, to the thick humidity, only to be disappointed day after day. It rained and kept me from sleeping as the drops pounded the zinc roof until it sounded like a flood would wash us away. It has not rained since and the strain has returned.

Everything moves along much as it did before, with new things flaring up here and there, with things coming together and falling apart. Things are as they are. Ideas become projects become accomplishments, or they shrivel while still ideas or fail as projects or are shuffled off before they can reach the stage of being termed accomplishments. Patients, staff, and volunteers come and go. I will be one of the ones going, after some time in Morocco. In a month, I will be home.

unfortunately, no medical excuse for gin and tonics

When I woke up last Thursday, I knew something was off. My neck was stiff and my body ached. Helen calls this a cellular ache. Everything hurt—my eyeballs, my liver, my back, my hair. But that was all that seemed wrong. I figured I’d go to work and come home if things got worse. I lurched out of the car and sat down in the office, assessing within the first five minutes that I needed to go back to the house. Once I got home, the chills set in—it was at least eighty degrees outside, and my nose was cold. Anything touching me was painful, but it worse to be out of the sheets. I tried to imagine being suspended in warm air. The door to my room seemed to zoom in and out, and time slowed to crawl. I tossed and turned, sleeping on and off in the morning and awaking once the chills diminished and my temperature went over a hundred and two in a frighteningly short amount of time. At this point, I took some Tylenol, which dropped me down to a comfortable 99.9, lessened the aches, and brought back a bit of an appetite. It also makes you sweat like crazy, so I spent the afternoon drenched and stinky. WALL-E restored some comfort as well, until my computer battery crapped out. I made the mistake of picking up a book we have at the house that talks about all the various diseases that you can catch in Africa, which gave me several hemorrhagic fevers, infections, parasites, and typhoid as possibilities, though I was pretty sure this was malaria. I’d stopped my anti-malarials, figuring that nine months on antibiotics that make you photosensitive would be a bad idea. I had a treated mosquito net and tried to wear bug spray, but that wasn’t enough, even in the dry season. My dad later called me an idiot, which I guess I had coming.

The volunteers came back, and Helen and I decided it would be wise to get a malaria test the next day. I spent the night mostly awake, running to and from the bathroom, which was neither pleasant for me or for Helen, who woke up every time I got out of bed due to the loud creaks the slats make. She was a wonderful nurse, advising me on what to take, giving me the oral rehydrating salts and Tylenol that I of course did not bring myself, making me drink fluids, flipping my mattress, and even offering to give me a sponge bath (I declined). After spending the morning completely limp and wiped out, I somehow climbed into the Land Cruiser, dizzy from being emptied out, and went to the hospital, where our office neighbor told me that she would “pray for my life” so that I could return to my family in the US alive. This was not reassuring.

Helen I went to the Rayan Laboratory with an order from our Medical Director for blood tests for typhoid and malaria. The building was run down, with peeling paint and the black patches of mildew that gather on all walls in tropical climes. There were horrific posters of the oral sores that most often manifest in HIV-positive patients on the wall. I was a bit nervous, given the infection control methods and bedside manner I’d witnessed in various healthcare situations I’ve experienced here, but the receptionist was fast and efficient. I didn’t even wait five minutes before I was sitting in a high chair (I felt like a small child at the dinner table again) watching the lab tech pull out a fresh pair of gloves and a syringe in a sterile package. Helen looked on with hawk’s eyes, which was reassuring. He pulled the tiniest piece off a cotton ball and swabbed my arm. When he put the strap around my upper arm, he apologized. Please excuse, he said. He found my vein faster than any other nurse, doctor, or blood mobile technician I’ve ever had take my blood, apologizing again—excuse—before sticking me. I was struck by how polite this was—so much better than having someone say Ok, you’re going to feel a slight pinch. He then pulled off another tiny piece of cotton and a tiny piece of cloth tape and bandaged what would become a very nice track mark. Despite the fact that there was no sharps container, everything was done very nicely—labels on the vials, new gloves, needle opened in front of the patient, irreproachable bedside manner. The only scary part came when Helen said, just before he stuck me Are you OK getting blood drawn? I thought this was a polite way of saying This guy did something wrong, which was not exactly soothing as the needle was coming closer, but it turns out she meant Are you going to pass out? Which I did not. The results came back a few hours later—right on time, shockingly—as P. falciparum, the most common, most dangerous, and most responsive to treatment of the four strains of malaria. Falciparum can cause brain hemorrhaging if left untreated but is not recurrent.

Contracting malaria made me think about several things. First off, malaria is strange as a concept because it can be taken so seriously and so lightly. At home, malaria is thought of as some terrible, debilitating illness that leaves the victim in a hallucinatory, feverish nightmare. In Sierra Leone and probably most malarial zones in sub-Saharan Africa, malaria is commonplace, something that makes you feel bad for a bit, but not a big deal—people here will often come in to work, and many won’t use bed nets because they are too hot (true) and claustrophobic.

What malaria should be seen as, for both the US and Sierra Leone, for the Global North and the Global South (or developed and developing countries—there is no good term for this), is as the great killer in Africa and in tropical zones around the globe. Malaria kills more frequently in places like Sierra Leone because health and nutrition are already poor and because people who contract it cannot get to health centers or buy treatment, either because they’re too remote or too poor or both. Malaria is not as much of a problem for me, for example, because I have easy access to transportation, several nurses and doctors, and medicine. I’m well fed and in good health. I could probably buy most medicines without a prescription here because of my skin color, for that matter. Malaria does not need to be thought of with panic (I’m afraid my dad was not so happy when I told him I had it), but it does need to be taken seriously. Malaria kills, but it would kill less frequently if there were more health clinics, or if the roads were better, or if hospital visits were cheaper. Or if children could get enough to eat or weren’t sick most of the time with other things—worms, chronic coughs, malnutrition, diarrhea, etc, etc, etc. Malaria can still kill a well-fed, healthy individual; don’t get me wrong. It’s just that everything becomes so much worse once you add in the factors that put Sierra Leone at the bottom of the Human Development Index this year.

After my results came in, the Medical Director told me what to buy (no prescription needed) at the pharmacy. The man at the pharmacy started when I asked him how to take the Artesunate tablets. He laughed, explaining that he thought I was a doctor, and then advised, once he realized I was the patient, that I should be on anti-malarials and sleep under a bed net. Thank you. Even one pill later, I felt better. I’m still not one hundred and ten percent yet, but I’m getting there. The child of one of our patients came down with an undiagnosed fever yesterday, almost burning to the touch and crying out of discomfort. Her mother sharply told her to quiet down.

Why Poda Podas are Trouble and Other Stories

After leaving Banana Island back in November, we dozen or so pumoi on the trip had a bit of an adventure. The poda-poda (a minibus/large van vehicle that can seat anywhere from 10-20 plus livestock depending on your comfort level) named “Make It Rain” that we had hired out for the weekend did not meet us on the mainland at the scheduled pick up time. A call revealed that the poda-poda had not even left Kissy yet, at least 2 hours away with the evening Freetown traffic. After waiting several hours, as the night grew darker and the block party that spilled off the beach and onto the streets grew rowdier, we got a call. The poda-poda was stuck at a police checkpoint due to some paperwork that was out of order. Numerous pleas over the phone to the officer were unsuccessful, so we decided to walk through the party and meet the vehicle at the checkpoint. We were more than a little conspicuous, and though I felt nervous as we walked by, I made an effort to make eye contact, to walk with squared shoulders. Men grabbed at my arms; I yanked them away. After we’d made it through, a small group of young (and inebriated) men followed us, heckling and asking for money. The road grew less lively, the lights disappeared, the houses looked closed and empty. At the bleakest point on the road, the men suddenly surged forward to grab at stragglers’ packs, back pockets, anything, even targeting the larger men in our group. We tried to chase them, yelling for help, but they kept coming back, and in greater numbers. That was the scariest part—their brazenness. I moved ahead, looking for shelter. Cold Drinks, the sign said. There was light. Thinking it was a bar, I yelled for everyone to get inside, but as we entered the compound, a startled family tried to shoo us out. After begging for help, they ushered us into their living room, an unbearably hot, ramshackle space with dirty lace antimacassars on the shabby chairs and phones plugged into every outlet in the wall—a standard business for any house lucky enough to afford a generator. They asked us to stay inside, locking the door behind us. But the windows were wide open. We could hear yelling and scuffling outside. All of us were unharmed, none of us had been robbed, and everyone was calm.

A check of our cell phones revealed that none of us had service in the house, so a few of the better connected among us (not me) went out to make calls to security buddies at the US Embassy, to bosses at the UN Special Court, to the British High Commission, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, landlords, powerful friends, roommates. Discussions with the household revealed that the men had called professional thieves and that they had set up a roadblock to catch us if we tried to leave. A few rocks thumped against the side of the house and the women and children of the house were rushed inside with us, huddling in the corner as I moved an electric fan, supplied by our gracious hosts, over the room, trying to keep people from passing out (it was that hot). That was when I got scared—what dangers had we brought on this family? Rumors reached us of a woman unconscious outside, possibly injured by a rock thrown by one of the thieves. A trained medic among us offered help, but the family told us to stay inside, explaining that the thieves may have sent her as a decoy to lure us out on the road, since they assumed that we were all doctors (sidenote: once at the hospital in Bo, a sizeable group of angry friends and relatives of a man critically injured in a car accident gathered around the office and vehicles and it was suggested that I leave, since they thought I was a doctor and were beginning to angrily wonder why I hadn’t come out to help yet).

The entire neighborhood heard and began gathering at the house. Eventually, enough people showed up, including the incredibly kind staff at Banana Island, who boated over to help us, to chase the thieves further down the road. The poda poda arrived, and the driver and apprentices tried to nonchalantly high five a few of us, offering zero apologies and even less remorse. After two hours or so, a large truck full of local police arrived, and an hour later, a UN escort of two vehicles. We thanked the family, the neighbors, the well wishers, the children. They seemed ready to see us off but not in any way upset that we had invaded their house. Many of them had turned the situation into a social event, sipping soft drinks, catching up with neighbors, and boasting about their exploits in the “battle” with the thieves. Making do with soda soap, so to speak. This was the lesson learned: despite the poverty that causes criminal behavior in a few in Sierra Leone, the vast majority of the people will protect you, offer you shelter, and go above and beyond as hosts. I tried to imagine what would have happened if I’d been threatened in New York in a similar way, and I can only think that it would have ended a lot worse. Sierra Leoneans don’t stand by idly when someone is in trouble.

The four who were employees of the Special Court rode in UN vehicles; the rest of us crammed back in to the poda poda, which spun out on the gravel in front of the house and almost crashed when we tried to depart. Needless to say, most of us were ready to kill the driver, especially because he acted as if nothing had happened and that none of it was his fault. We pulled out, the UN vehicles in front, then “Make It Rain,” then the truck full of police. We made it back to Freetown safely, having learned that poda poda drivers are always not trustworthy, that block parties should be avoided, but most importantly, that the people of Sierra Leone are good, generous, gracious people, who will offer the best that they have to guests, even ones that force their way in with danger on their heels.