Mango pool and brief update.

We're taking bets on how much mango we eat from now until the end of
June. There's a separate tally for small and big mangoes. Today we
have already eaten 3 big mangoes. Closest guess wins an unsatisfying
North American mango, next time I can get you one. I tried to think of
ways to turn this into a fundraiser for GAF, but it didn't seem
appropriate...

Just so you thought we were bored, here's a brief list of the projects
Katie and I are doing, all of which are at wildly different stages of
development.
1. Health education in amputee camps
2. Business plan for the palm oil farm that is meant to eventually
fund the operating costs of the clinic.
3. Prototype the OpenMRS system.
4. Enter and analyze the survey data.
5. Helping a peer educator program get started in the nearest secondary school.
6. Designing handouts and booklets that go with the health education.
7. Teaching some basic computer skills to the clinic staff.
8. Eventually, conduct a second round of the survey
9. Possibly health education in schools
10. When Bailor returns, some shadowing and clinical work.

Comment freely – it's nice to see who is reading!

All the sizes and shapes.

First, a disclaimer. I've heard people talk about how it's important
to refer to people with disabilities as 'people with disabilities' not
'disabled people.' The same conversation can (and perhaps should) be
had about the term 'amputee.' The main point is to emphasize that
amputees are first people, then amputees. They didn't lose that
personhood when the machete fell. However, it's a useful shorthand,
and I think it's okay, as long as we all carefully consider and remind
ourselves that an amputee is a PERSON with an amputation. I'm going to
write a bit about the amputations that I have seen, and I wish that I
could do so while better preserving the individuality of these
amputees. However, I think it's important to understand the
physicality of this, so I'm going to describe it. Please read it while
keeping the individuality and personhood of the amputees firmly in
mind.

After you've placed your hand awkwardly around a few smooth forearms,
or slipped your thumb in between a couple of thumbs and knuckles, you
begin to notice the different ways that the human body heals these
wounds. To be honest, there is much more that is constant about the
guarded but warm greeting of the amputees then there is about the
shape and size of their stumps.
The forearm stumps, for instance, are usually a bit wider than the
forearm bone, as if while healing, a substantial amount of new bone
developed. One of my favourite women that I have met here is a double
hand amputee in the Wardu camp named Kumba. She gave us a basket of
green oranges, and when we returned to do education in Wardu she still
had that same friendly spark about her. When I shook hands with her,
she stepped closer than most people do and then extended her right
arm. I clasped it gently. Even the third time we met, I was surprised
by the tininess of her forearm. Her skin was also very smooth, but at
the heel of my hand I felt that the tissue around the stump at the end
of her arm was stiffer. As soon as I clasped her forearm, all three
times, she brought her other forearm around to lightly brush the back
of my hand. I'm not sure if it was my imagination, but I felt like I
could feel the healed bone through the scar tissue surrounding the end
of her arm.
Some of the forearm stumps look more like someone twisted the skin
into a cone-shape at the end of the arm, and those don't seem to have
any extra bone. Instead the arm seems to narrow to a point. I've also
noticed forearms with deep scars and irregular bone structure,
probably from unsuccessful amputation attempts. It makes me wonder
what I would do without hands, or arms.
The patriarch of the Wardu amputee camp has two thumbs and eight
knuckles. He also has very dark brown skin, drawn taut with age
instead of wrinkly, but the deep crow's feet around his eyes are
friendly. Shaking hands with him was almost normal, except that the
palm of my hand, just above the heel, closed around his knuckles a
bit. They felt very smooth and rounded, and they moved independently,
like fingers. It was a bit disconcerting. But I soon learned that he
is a determined patriarch – despite the fact he speaks only Kono, he
stayed for the entire health education program. Most of it was
translated from Krio into Kono, but not all. Apparently he has 20
children.
Out of the corner of my eye, finger amputations like his look like a
normal hand that is half clenched in a fist. Try it – clench your hand
in a fist, and then straighten only the knuckle where the finger meets
the hand. That's more or less what it looks like, except a bit
shorter.
When I first met the chair of the Dorma amputee camp, I didn't notice
that he was an amputee. He was seated, and shook my hand with vigor.
But soon he pointed out that he was a double leg amputee. The moment
he mentioned it, I could see the mechanical knees pressing identical
patterns into his thin cloth pants. He can even walk, with crutches,
but it wasn't until a couple of days ago that I saw how he covers long
distances – with a bike contraption. It's a small three-wheeled bike
with a chair instead of a seat. The chain is attached to the front
wheel and it goes up to a hand crank in front of his eyes, so that he
can pedal with his hands. When I first saw it, an eight year old boy
was helping him up the gentle incline outside the clinic by pushing
the bike-chair from behind. He stopped to say hi to Bailor, and then
continued on up the hill, under the blazing sun.
Many of the leg amputees, however, don't have fake limbs. While
walking home from the clinic one day, there was a game of soccer going
on just to the right of the path as we walked through Sinnah Town.
There were three boys playing, each somewhere between 9 and 14 years
old. The eldest was on one crutch, and he had only one leg. I saw the
boy on the other side kick the ball over towards the boy on crutches.
It rolled past him.
Without hesitating, the boy on crutches took three big strides towards
the ball. He tapped it into place with his foot, stepped forward onto
his crutch and then unleashed a kick. It was better than any kick I've
ever done.

Sunshine

Okay, so you may have noticed that we eat at the same place every day.
Or you may be curious how one of the most successful businesses in
Koidu Town works. Or you might just be wondering what people in Kono
District eat. Well, here's all that and more. We're going to Sunshine.
We went there on the first day I arrived in Kono, and I've gone back
almost every day since. I have yet to spend enough money to buy me a
plate of rice and sauce at Masala Grill, the most legitimate Indian
restaurant in Princeton.
The entrance to Sunshine is not obvious to the uninitiated. From the
street, there is a nice-looking sign. By nice-looking, I mean that it
is rectangular, white, and the letters are large and black: Sunshine.
It's oriented perpendicular to the road, so you can see it as you walk
towards it from either side. As a side note, throughout Sierra Leone,
advertisements aren't on billboards. They get painted on to houses,
roofs, doors, gates, and any other static surface. The owners of the
house or whatever sell the space to a company, usually a cell phone
company, and then someone comes and paints it. Apparently the cell
companies come around to make sure you haven't cheated them by
painting over their ad. The two most common are Zain, which paints
buildings neon green, and Africell, which paints buildings orange. It
makes for colorful streets.
The road is red, dusty, and lined with market stalls and houses. Both
the market stalls and houses are based off of a row of broken down
single storey cinder block rooms, each about 150 sq ft. They all have
some combination of corrugated tin roofing, wooden sticks for support,
and planks to provide shelves, surfaces and counters. In general it's
pretty obvious that nobody every needs to seal up for winter.
The sign doesn't actually sit in front of Sunshine. It's about fifteen
feet short of the alleyway between broken down cinder block walls that
leads there. So you have to step across the gutter (jump if you're
Katie and 5 foot few) and then duck into the alley. Sometimes when
someone describes something as an "alley" I think of tall, Gotham City
style alleys, dark and full of criminals. This alley is different.
None of the buildings in Koidu Town are tall, and few of them provide
any shade beyond their immediate footprint, so it's very bright. The
ground is still light brownish red dirt, like the road. On the left
there is a collection of young men selling sunglasses, and two steps
further back is a lady who lays out forty odd small mangoes on a
blanket. They're 100Le each (3 cents). You have to make a zigzag
pattern around the right hand side of the sunglasses and the lefthand
side of the mango lady, because the alley isn't wide. Nonetheless,
motorbikes go through there all the time. Today there was also a baby
goat lying under a small, dead-looking tree just beyond the woman
selling mangoes.
There's also usually a small crowd of children milling around behind
the mango lady. Once, when Katie and I came to Sunshine, we passed the
mango lady and a small boy stepped out in front of us. He stopped,
looked up at us with a thoughtful expression, and said to himself in a
matter of fact tone, "Chinese man." So as you pass the children, you
may be assigned multiple ethnicities or genders, and you'll probably
create a stir. My favourite part is when there is a teenager nearby
who sneers at the excitable children. It's nice to have some cultural
constants.
After the mango lady you pass two more of those square cinder block
enclosures on the left, both growing some kind of grass and much more
broken down then the others. There's an open space ahead that's full
of market stalls and people, but to get to Sunshine you have to turn
left. Between Sunshine and the market stalls there are probably a few
motorbikes as well, waiting with their handlebars locked to one side.
The first time I went to Sunshine, after we made this lefthand turn I
seriously thought we were going somewhere else instead of a
restaurant. It looks like it dead ends twenty feet in, with a one
storey building under construction on the right, a couple of unused
ovens or kilns straight ahead, and rusty corrugated tin on the left.
But no, there's a door-shaped hole in the corrugated tin, and when you
duck through it, you're there. You have to duck – I'm 5'10, or 5'11 if
someone near me is shorter than me and claiming 5'11, and most people
I've met in Kono are shorter than me. So sometimes I hit my head on
stuff. It's a new experience.
On my first visit, I was skeptical, and I would be worried if you
weren't as well. It's dark, the floor is dirt, and the air is heavy
with water and food smell and person smell. There's a table on the
left with two benches, and a table on the right with two benches.
There are peeling plastic tablecloths on both tables, but only the
lefthand one has napkins. Well, it has a plastic bag tissue box. Most
times there is a crowd, but we can find a place to squeeze in on the
bench. The tables aren't really higher than the bench, so you have to
awkwardly figure out where to put your knees.
At the opposite end from the entrance sits a woman, with three
gigantic pots in front of her. One holds rice, one holds "soup", and
one holds "sauce." It turns out that Sunshine is also the name of the
woman who runs the place, so it's often her holding court above the
three vats of food. Other than that, one of her daughters is usually
buzzing around, getting water from a cooler sitting off to the side
for customers that request it. Around the corner about ten feet away
is where they prepare the meat. The restaurant is more open to the air
on that side, and that opening leads to the cooking area. My first
time there I saw a preteen boy chopping up a side of beef into a
bucket, and I think the side of beef probably outweighed him. The NOW
staff assured me it was clean, and I tried not to think about it.
"Soup" is groundnut soup. It's brown, slightly spicy, and vaguely
nutty. There's both stewing beef and fish in the big vats of sauce and
soup, but if you don't specify Sunshine will just spoon you beef. I
prefer the beef because I'm a wimp when it comes to fishbones. If you
ask for fish, you're liable to get a pile of rice, a dollop of sauce,
and a fish, cooked but intact.
"Sauce" is either based in potato leaves, cassava leaves, or "green"
leaves. I have no idea what green leaves are. The liquid in the soup
and sauce is mostly palm oil. The sauce tends to be spicier. It's
spicy in a sneaky way, too – if you swallow it right, it just has a
very strong taste. But if it somehow stays on your throat, then it
burns. I once had an embarrassing spate of sneezing and coughing
brought on by exactly that. The sauce is my favorite, because it has
so much taste. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.
It's worth mentioning the rice, too. Sierra Leoneans call it "rais."
The Sunshine rice is imported, Jalloh tells me. It's rounder,
fluffier, and more satisfying than normal rice. It has enough flavor
of its own that it doesn't taste watery, and it soaks up the soup and
sauce very well. Most important, there's always mounds of it.
You can order three sizes: 3000Le, 4000Le, or 5000Le. You get the same
amount of rice with each, but they give you more meat with the more
expensive dishes. It's a bit unclear, but there's some kind of
equalization that goes on. I've only ever ordered 3000 plates, and I
have never left Sunshine feeling hungry.
If you want water, you catch the attention of the extra woman just
hanging around and just call out "water!" I've tried please and
thankyou, but that just adds confusion. Then she dips into the cooler
and fishes you out a bag of water. That's right, a bag of water.
They're called "water sachets." Each one has between 450 and 500 mL of
water (a pint, for the Americans) and is square. They look a bit like
mini couch cushions. You have to bite off the corner and then squeeze
it into your mouth. I still embarrass myself with regularity while
trying to do this. Once, at the clinic, I sprayed Katie's keyboard
with water. No worries, it was fine...
After Sunshine scoops you your food, it gets passed to you via the
seated clientele. Nobody waits for everyone to get their food before
they start, and I've already switched over. Not only do people not
wait, but they eat very fast, even faster than me. It's a small
reminder that most Sierra Leoneans have a very different relationship
with food than myself and most North Americans. I don't pretend to be
super skinny, but it's worth mentioning that probably 80% of the
people here are noticeably skinnier than me. Allan tells me that every
one of the NOW staff has been hungry, truly hungry, at some point in
their lives.
Wolfing down the food doesn't take that long, unless the spice causes
you to spray it all over the place and embarrass yourself. When you're
done eating, it's my second favourite part. The meal's 3000Le, and the
water is 500Le. So, altogether, that's 1.10 USD. What a bargain.

What is it like to be a teenager in Kono District?

"So, Amhidu, did you phone the school?"
"A phoned dem, but a tol' dem dat we would be late. So dey are
waiting, waiting fo' us."
"You didn't tell them we were coming at 10am?"
Katie, Amhidu, Jalloh and I were scheduled to present at one of the
local secondary schools at 9am. But it was 9:09am, and we were
printing the handouts we planned to bring with us. I was a bit
annoyed, because I don't like being late. But Katie had made some
magnificent handouts, and they were probably going to go much further
than our spoken message. Poor Amhidu seemed a bit beleaguered by the
sudden schedule disaster. The problem was that power and internet are
so scarce, and it had taken a very long time for us to find pictures
for the handout. And the car was broken down, so we had had to walk to
clinic, which takes about an hour. And then, the printer was slow. Not
a great start.
"Maybe," Amhidu went on, worried but still friendly, "you and Jalloh
will go to the school, and start, and Katie and I will come after with
the handouts."
"Oh, OK. But I won't start until you and Katie come."
"Yeah, yeah, you jus' go dere an tell dem dat we are still coming."
So Jalloh and I set off at a mild sprint. At least, Jalloh thought
so. "This is how fast people walk in New York, Jalloh. Everyone."
We slowed down to Africa speed – as fast as you can go without
breaking a sweat. It was hot.
The school wasn't far away. It was concrete, and only the classrooms
were indoors. The hallways were basically porches, partially shaded by
the roof. We met the teacher that had invited us, Mr. Komba, and we
met the vice principal, Mr. Koti. Then the head boy rang a bell,
everyone assembled, and they were herded into the classroom. The kids
were really loud and really excited. I was pretty excited.
What was I going to do with the time until Katie arrived?
"Hello."
Silence, then a few reluctant hellos.
"My name is Chris. Sahr Christopher." My Kono name always gets a
laugh. Jalloh tells me that sometimes I confuse people because British
people are often "Sir", and so they think I'm a knight...? I didn't
really pursue that one.
"I'm a Canadian – I come from Canada – but I study at a university in
the United States."
"Slower, Chris." Jalloh was leaning against the window at the side of
the class. The students agreed with Jalloh.
"OK. My friend Katie and I have come today to talk to give you some
education about how to keep yourself and your loved ones healthy." I
gave an exaggerated nod. No one responded. "But she is not hear yet,
she is coming with some handouts."
The students were piled into the class. The desks were four or five
students wide, in rows, and there were five or six students at every
desk. There were also many chairs around the side of the room. There
was plenty of natural light, and the room was painted some neutral but
bright colour like white or light blue. In the front there was a
blackboard on a wooden stand. It looked like it had been broken off of
a giant blackboard rock and then affixed to the stand; the edges were
completely irregular and it was more or less flat. The eraser was a
sponge. The chalk, however, was long and pristine. Maybe they had
gotten out the special chalk for the exotic visitors? I didn't flatter
myself for too long with that thought.
"So we have some time to spend together."
They were a little bit restless. It was the entire secondary school,
about eighty students. They were right in the awkward age group where
the girls have begun to grow up but the guys look anywhere from 9 to
15.
"So, I haven't been in Sierra Leone for very long, and I don't really
know anything about it, so I was thinking that I could start by asking
you guys a bit about Sierra Leone."
There was a lot of noise, and the teacher gave a combination
translation-reprimand.
"First, you guys are all in secondary school. Why do you think that
secondary school is important?" I wouldn't be caught dead asking a
North American class of 12-14 year olds that question, but I wanted to
know the answer and didn't really have any idea how a class in Kono
District would behave, so I figured that I might as well try. There
was uncomfortable silence, followed by Jalloh translating the question
in a scolding tone, followed by the head boy walking primly up to the
front. He turned to face the class, and Jalloh and the teachers made
approving noises.
"Secondary school education is important. One, it is important becos
we are learning more things, more particular things. Two, it is
important becos we have more interaction with professors. Three, it is
important because we meet many more people than in primary school, and
we make mo' friends." The teachers made deep approving thank-you
noises and the head boy returned to his seat. I still don't know
hardly anything about Kono District classroom dynamics, but I was
pretty sure that the best way to bridge the gap between foreigner and
student was not getting the head boy to spout answers to the approving
murmurs of the professors.
"Okay, let's try this a different way. Put your hand up," I put my
hand up, "if you walk less than ten minutes to get to school." Mass
confusion. Mr. Komba translated my "ten" into "very short." I like
numbers much more than every single Sierra Leonean I have met. About a
quarter of the class put up their hands.
"What about, twenty minutes? Put your hand up if you walk twenty
minutes or more to get to school." They understood this one.
Two-thirds of the hands were up. "Thirty minutes?" Almost all. I
thought we were done. Mr. Komba said,
"Oh, but some walk very far, very far-far!"
"Oh, okay, who walks more than thirty minutes?" Some hands. "More
than an hour?" A few hands. "Wow. That's a long way. I'm impressed –
you must have real dedication." I'm not sure if my praise got through
at all.
"What about... malaria? Put your hand up if you have ever had
malaria." Two-fifths of the hands went up. "And dry cough?" Dry cough
is the African name for tuberculosis. Everyone laughed, no hands went
up. Okay, so no dry cough here. "When Katie comes, we will talk more
about both of those."
I stalled a bit by walking up the row and then back.
"Hmm... okay, put your hand up if you have a boyfriend or
girlfriend." Raucous laughter, and then Jalloh said,
"Everyone! Everyone have a boyfriend or girlfriend!" What? Well, all
the hands went up. I shrugged it off and made a mental tick in my 'I
don't understand Sierra Leoneans at all' column.
"Alright, alright. How many of you have brothers or sisters that went
to university?" Mr. Komba translated, no one's hands went up. Jalloh
said,
"It's very hard, very hard."
"Yeah, it is... what about college?" College means trade school, like
carpentry or plumbing. Three or four hands went up. "And how many of
you hope to go to college or university?" A solid eighty percent. I
stalled for a bit more time, walking up the row and back. "What about
me, do you have questions for me?"
They asked me about my educational background, but nothing else. Then
I had an idea.
"Okay, now I have a question only for the girls." That was mildly
controversial, but soon the class was quiet again. They wanted to know
the question. "What do you plan to do after high school?"
At first, no one answered. But I kept quiet and waited. Then one girl
spoke up. "Engineer."
Another girl. "Lawyer."
And another girl. "Nurse."
I threw in some patter about how those were all excellent choices.
Then I asked the boys.
"Doctor." I asked him if he knew that nurses are the ones who really
run the show. Nobody understood. It's hard to be a comedian across
language barriers.
"Trader." That's someone who buys the goods and distributes them to
the local merchants. I only know because I asked. Then I had another
idea.
"Alright, another question only for the girls." Less controversial the
second time around. "What is the biggest problem facing Kono
District."
Momentary silence, then one girl jumped to her feet. I later learned
her name was Fanta.
"Teenage pregnancy!"
The girls nodded. I nodded too, and filled in a bit of space with my
verbal agreement. Then I motioned to another girl with her hand
tentatively raised. "Teenage pregnancy." Her voice was small. Hell,
she was small. They were all small, just beginning to have to worry
about teenage pregnancy.
"Teenage pregnancy is definitely a very serious issue. It can destroy
a girl's life. We will talk more about it when Katie comes."
Katie came almost immediately after that. We got through our modules
with more or less success, and our novel skin color almost offset the
boring information we were force-feeding them. I tried to involve the
class to a certain extent, but mostly I just got confused looks and
people that pretended to understand. So I stuck to writing things
clearly on the board. Then, we came back to teenage pregnancy. Fanta
was participating again. Katie asked a question, half to Fanta, half
to the class.
"Why, why does teenage pregnancy happen?" Fanta jumped to her feet again.
"Becos you don' have any money, you don' have any thing, and der is
some boy, and 'e will give you money if you go with him, and maybe you
don' know what will happen, an you need de money fo' you school, and
den..." Fanta trailed off into the class's murmured consent. Katie
responded.
"Yeah, that's very serious. We'll come back to that, but thanks for
answering." She looked around for other answers.
"Maybe becos you man 'e don' wan' to use a condom." Katie nodded
again. No more answers were forthcoming. She turned back to Fanta.
"So, I understand that it's very hard, and that you don't have money,
and that it's very hard to pay for your school fees. But it's so
dangerous, and it can be so destructive to your education, and it's
not healthy for the baby, and you won't be able to take care of it,
because you will have even less money when there are two of you..."
Katie is impressively empathetic. I could see her trembling in front
of the monumental poverty that must drive someone to engage in sex for
money, whether it's explicit (prostitution) or implicit (more well-off
boyfriend).
"If you get pregnant while trying to get money for school, you can't
go to school." I kept my contribution simple, but there's nothing
simple about this. The girls don't have options. The poverty here is
heart-breaking. People live and smile and laugh, same as everywhere
else, but nobody knows how many girls are getting pregnant – only that
so many of them are getting pregnant that it is the first problem
cited by these secondary school girls. The blame lies perhaps more
with the men than the women – condoms are often looked down on here.
There is so little work that very few women work. It's telling that
there is only one female employee of NOW, a very progressive NGO. My
thoughts are quite disorganized on this, but they are still
passionate. Every one of those girls could be my little sister, or her
friends, or soon, my cousins. It breaks my heart.
The class was riveted by the discussion, but it wasn't clear how to
continue it. And we still had to cover the tuberculosis module...
I can't get used to how extreme poverty and desperation gives way to
the everyday in this place.

Note: we are trying to put together a peer educator program for this
school as a result of this event. Our good friend Christine Prifti is
helping us with the research – she is a self-described health nut, and
she is especially inspired and motivated to work on family and
reproductive health issues. The internet here is so dinosaur-slow that
it's very difficult for us to do any research – we can't even open
pdf's. So a big thank you to Christine for all of her help. If anyone
else would like to help us, here's how. If you find something that you
think we would like to read, copy the text into a Word document or a
text file. Then email us the (much smaller) text file or word doc,
with as little formatting as possible.
You know what else? Let me know your reactions to this challenges this
young group of Sierra Leoneans faces. I'm curious to hear them.

Gas station at night.

It was dark. Darkness in Koidu town is completely free of
streetlights. But it's not empty; motorcycle headlights swept by often
enough to prevent our eyes from fully adjusting to the dark.
It was also raining. The motorcycle headlights lit up all the
raindrops around us, leaving their pattern on the back of our retinas
for a heartbeat after they went by. It wasn't raining very hard, but
it was still raining hard enough that the sound of the raindrops
wrapped around us and kept us from hearing anything else. Except, of
course, the motorcycles.
We were walking down the Main Rd. in Koidu Town, but it was emptier
than I've ever seen it. Our dinner meeting with Allan had started as
the sun went down, and we'd spent all the time before the rains
sitting around and talking. It was nice, but now the nightly
thunderstorm was coming down around our ears in the midst of the
twenty-minute walk home.
"White man an' a white woman..." A young man in hoody walked past us,
his hood pulled up. His tone was observational, not surprised. It
seems that while we sometimes elicit conscious surprise, the response
of many seems completely unconscious, as if they see us and then say
"White man!" or "China!" or "Chinese man!" without thinking.
We walked a few more steps. The roads in Kono are a bit like holes on
a golf course; they have fairways, where the motorcycles drive, and
rough, where the pedestrians walk. Katie was completely silent, and I
thought she was scared. In retrospect, that was probably just some
kind of macho projection of the fact that I was pretty uneasy.
"Katie, would you please just walk on the inside? My backpack is
reflective." Katie switched to the inside. But it was a lot messier
there, lots more potholes where she could twist her ankle.
Don't get me wrong, Koidu Town is very safe during the day. I've never
felt threatened, and hardly anyone has even tried to get their hands
in my pocket. On the other hand, it was colder, darker, wetter, and
stranger at night. It's fair to say that I may have been a little
unsettled.
It started to rain harder, with big, soaking drops, just as we
approached the gun intersection. The gun intersection is a roundabout
with a big artillery cannon in the middle, painted white and
ostensibly a memorial for the rebel occupation of Koidu Town for the
entire civil war. The war is another story, one that I don't know
outside of what I've read, but suffice it to say that almost every
building in Koidu is new, and the old ones are identifiable because
they are burnt out broken down shells.
"Do you want to duck under some roof somewhere?"
"Yeah!"
We walked (fast) up to the gas station. There were two pumps under a
big circle of concrete. A large crowd of motorbikes and young men were
gathered underneath. We jumped up on to the curb between the gas
pumps, and said nothing. The young men were talking in Krio. After a
minute or so, one guy gestured to me.
"You wan' go insigh (inside)?"
"No, it's fine out here!" I'm really leery of the 'privileges'
afforded me because I'm white, both because I'm worried that someone
will later seize them as a grounds to ask me for money and because
it's not fair that simply being white guarantees me special treatment.
A couple more motorbikes rolled in, to take shelter from the
accelerating downpour. One was wearing an aqua blue down jacket and
another was wearing a Santa Claus hat with a 'P' on it.
"Hey, hey, hey! White man!" A young guy in a white muscle shirt was
getting my attention in the usual way. I looked at him and nodded for
him to go on. "Do you have your local tax papers?"
"What?"
"Your local tax papers! You have to pay a local tax in Kono!" Clearly
trying to scam me for money. Don't misunderstand, the vast majority of
people in Kono have been unbelievably kind and generous to both Katie
and me. For instance, yesterday as we walked through Sinnah Town, a
small village on our route from town to the clinic, a delightful old
grandmother in a colorful blue and purple dress summoned us to her
doorstep to give us mangoes. She gave us five excellent, ripe mangoes.
Then, as we walked back towards the clinic, Jalloh gave one of them to
a small girl walking home from school. The girl was carrying a bunch
of sticks under her arm, but wearing her dark green school uniform,
and Jalloh thanked her and tucked the mango into her other hand.
"I don't live here."
"Oh, you didn't pay the local tax?"
At this point a skinny older man chimed in. "He's a tourist! He come
to see Kono! Probably from Korea or something, right?"
"Uh, Canada and the USA..."
The first guy was a bit annoyed. "No, everyone must pay the local
tax!" I decided to say nothing for a bit, to see what would happen.
The wind was now blowing, and the concrete circle fifteen feet
overhead wasn't really sheltering us anymore. Katie looked really
cold.
"No, he no got to pay no tax," then he turned to me, "I be your
lawyer, I do the talking for you."
"Thanks. Hey, wetin na you nem?" (What's your name, in Krio.) I nodded
back at the first guy, the one in the muscle shirt. He took my
outstretched hand.
"Osman. An' you?"
"Chris."
"What?"
"Christopher." The extra syllables help.
"Ok."
I looked back at my lawyer. "Thanks, sir. But I don't need a lawyer,
though I'm happy to meet you." He smiled and said something
unintelligible in Krio. Katie spoke with him about the fact that we
were from the USA and Canada. People are always amazed that Katie is
not from China.
"Hey, hey!" Osman was getting my attention again. He had the
exasperating tone of a testosterone-overloaded young man looking to
show off. "Have you ever seen one of those before?"
"One of what?"
"The gun!"
The gun. It was sitting in the middle of the roundabout, white,
getting rained on and getting lit up by the occasional blast of
lightning.
"Uh, well,"
"When it's working? You ever see it when it's working?"
"No, not when it's working."
"It's amazing."
I attempted to damage his credibility a bit. I won't claim to be
immune from testosterone myself.
"Who made it? Where's it from?"
"It's Russian."
"Oh."
A moment of silence, only pounding rain.
"It killed a lot of people, that one. During the war." Osman was
smiling, and his tone was reverent. I replied without thinking.
"What, are you happy about that?!" Luckily he couldn't parse the fast
and angry English. It really wasn't the ideal time to create a
confrontation. "That's not good." I'm not sure if he heard that
either.
"It was an amazing thing, to see it working."
I let the conversation trail off. It kept raining, and it was pretty cold.

Share the file, not the virus.

'WARNING! Infected files found. Win32/...vcab.dll...' NOW has three
computers. One middle aged Dell desktop, one inconsistently-functional
Eee, and one Acer laptop. The Acer is the newest of the three. When we
arrived, the Dell's back was broken with viruses and Microsoft popup
window terrorism. Microsoft constantly gave us warnings that it may
not be a genuine copy of Windows XP. The Acer was mostly functional,
although the mouse buttons were slow and the internet didn't work. And
the Eee was lovely – worked like a charm. That's when we came.
Then we brought all the computers out to the clinic to figure out
which ones would stay here and which ones would go back to Freetown.
Before we could decide that, we needed to breathe some life back into
the Dell and fix up the Acer. So we began by wiping the hard drive of
the Dell and then reinstalling Windows. It took a couple of tries of
different Windows CD's that Bailor procured, but eventually we found
one that worked, sort of. It left the screen with 4-bit color and the
smallest resolution. Katie's described the disaster of typing in Word
– the screen just turns black. But after finding some drivers, loading
some antivirus software, and installing the printer, this desktop is
now the flagship of the NOW computer armada.
The Acer had also been wiped and reinstalled sometime in the past, and
since then the network connections had not functioned, hence no
internet. We downloaded and reinstalled some drivers, and then it
worked too, with the printer and the internet.
The Eee, on the other hand, now gives mysterious messages on boot and
then dies. So we are returning it with Allan, and we will get a more
conventional laptop. Our experiment in adventurous technology has not
been a success.
With the help of the Avast antivirus software on Allan's laptop, we
installed solid antivirus protection on our own computers and the
clinic's computers. And then we uncovered the depth of the virus
problem.
Bailor keeps large chunks of his important data on USB flash drives.
These flash drives get passed around between computers, and have
picked up most of the worms and trojan horse viruses that the Dell
carried before we cleaned house. So immediately after plugging in his
USB to the desktop yesterday morning to pass our updated health
education handout to him, the desktop went haywire over his USB. We
deleted a couple of files, but then he became worried we were deleting
his only copies of important info. So then we just began to quarantine
them. There were 21 viruses in the 900 odd files on his USB, and I
haven't had the chance to give it a real scan. It was stressful.
I'm going to teach some classes on how to keep the Avast software
registered so that NOW doesn't run into this problem again.