Saturday, June 27, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Sierra Leone lite, for my roommates.
Dear Sajid, Will, and Jacob,
Ten points about Sierra Leone.
1. It's a great country for doing stuff. For example, the car breaks (often), we have to jump out and push it. And how do I get in and out of the car, you ask? Oh, the window. I grab on the roofrack and jump in... It's fun for someone who knows absolutely nothing about cars. Another reason that it's a great country for doing stuff is that none of the Sierra Leoneans know how to second guess the North Americans. So when we suggest something that seems ridiculous to them (like me helping to make peanut butter) they just look bewildered and make it happen.
2. It's also a good place for figuring stuff out. I found Katie's guest house the other night by noting that one street at the nearby intersection was called "Siaka Stevens" street. That happens to be the first leader of Sierra Leone after colonialism, so I figured it was a major street. It is! Of course, I still got lost on the way.
3. And it's great for hanging out. Long journeys and tons of cultural differences to spark conversation. Unfortunately I still fall asleep in the car on occasion.
4. Water comes in bags. Yep. And we don't even put it in a "what-the-water-should-be-in" for drinking, we just bite off a corner and suck it dry. I think I'll drink my milk like that when I get home.
5. I saw a cobra. Need more be said? (Yes. We were in the car, it was slithering away into the grass. The driver had a typical Sierra Leonean response: he tried to run over it.)
6. I get to pretend I can understand Krio. I'm about as good at pretending to speak Krio as I was at pretending to speak Italian.
7. We went to the north, and then CANOED with HIPPOS. Katie even listened to me be a canoe snob about how the locals weren't using the jay stroke. She even still speaks to me. Whenever I feel bad about being a canoe snob, I just remember that my grandmother was a canoe snob, and so it must be okay.
8. When someone says "White man!" I can respond "Black man!" without getting prosecuted or hurt.
9. Next year, our room is going to be a chiefdom. I want to be paramount chief.
10. There's lots more things to test my invincibility. For example, while I was chilling on the porch at Uncle Ben's a couple weeks ago, I squished a toxic/acidic bug between my shins. That resulted in nasty blistering burns that then got infected. I cleaned them out, and then my immune system did its thing, and now it's healing fine. Apparently this bug ("The Champion") likes me - it also crawled on my arm, and earlier, on my face. But neither of those were as bad. At the time, I thought the one on my face was some kind of disfiguring tropical disease. Fortunately it was not.
Cheers, Chris
Ten points about Sierra Leone.
1. It's a great country for doing stuff. For example, the car breaks (often), we have to jump out and push it. And how do I get in and out of the car, you ask? Oh, the window. I grab on the roofrack and jump in... It's fun for someone who knows absolutely nothing about cars. Another reason that it's a great country for doing stuff is that none of the Sierra Leoneans know how to second guess the North Americans. So when we suggest something that seems ridiculous to them (like me helping to make peanut butter) they just look bewildered and make it happen.
2. It's also a good place for figuring stuff out. I found Katie's guest house the other night by noting that one street at the nearby intersection was called "Siaka Stevens" street. That happens to be the first leader of Sierra Leone after colonialism, so I figured it was a major street. It is! Of course, I still got lost on the way.
3. And it's great for hanging out. Long journeys and tons of cultural differences to spark conversation. Unfortunately I still fall asleep in the car on occasion.
4. Water comes in bags. Yep. And we don't even put it in a "what-the-water-should-be-in" for drinking, we just bite off a corner and suck it dry. I think I'll drink my milk like that when I get home.
5. I saw a cobra. Need more be said? (Yes. We were in the car, it was slithering away into the grass. The driver had a typical Sierra Leonean response: he tried to run over it.)
6. I get to pretend I can understand Krio. I'm about as good at pretending to speak Krio as I was at pretending to speak Italian.
7. We went to the north, and then CANOED with HIPPOS. Katie even listened to me be a canoe snob about how the locals weren't using the jay stroke. She even still speaks to me. Whenever I feel bad about being a canoe snob, I just remember that my grandmother was a canoe snob, and so it must be okay.
8. When someone says "White man!" I can respond "Black man!" without getting prosecuted or hurt.
9. Next year, our room is going to be a chiefdom. I want to be paramount chief.
10. There's lots more things to test my invincibility. For example, while I was chilling on the porch at Uncle Ben's a couple weeks ago, I squished a toxic/acidic bug between my shins. That resulted in nasty blistering burns that then got infected. I cleaned them out, and then my immune system did its thing, and now it's healing fine. Apparently this bug ("The Champion") likes me - it also crawled on my arm, and earlier, on my face. But neither of those were as bad. At the time, I thought the one on my face was some kind of disfiguring tropical disease. Fortunately it was not.
Cheers, Chris
Some snapshots of gender roles in Sierra Leone
In Kamakwe, the village of Dr. Barrie.
“How de body?” I gave our small guardian a measured look. Her name was Asinatu. She was probably about ten years old, with carefully braided hair, a big piece of African cloth that she kept readjusting around herself as she talked, and a serious look.
That morning she hadn’t said a word to me; she had only produced the key to the locked room when Katie, Allan or I needed it. I’d woken up just as dawn broke, and gone outside to sit on the steps of the house. Mist was still thick over the other houses and grass-roof cooking huts. Asinatu moved all around me, carrying buckets and brooms back and forth from the house to the cooking hut. She hadn’t even batted an eye when I first said good morning.
Now we were sitting in the house, waiting. Amhidu had more or less abandoned Katie and I in this house in the corner of Kamakwe, and we were firmly stuck behind a fence of cultural and linguistic barriers. I was sitting on the floor, treating the toxic burns from “The Champion,” a bizarre acidic bug that had visited my legs a few days ago. Apparently it trails the acid as it walks.
Katie was doing something in the room with our stuff, and Asinatu was sitting on a chair, watching us.
In response to my question, she murmured “No’ bad.”
I gestured to my burns, “Me de get burnt na champion. You de know wetin na champion?”
She shook her head. She didn’t know about the champion. At least, that’s what I thought I had asked her. ‘Wetin na’ means what, more or less, but my Krio is quite unreliable. We lapsed into silence. Asinatu continued to stare me down with a very regal gaze, as I sat amidst a couple of alcohol pads and some Purel.
“You de go na school, Asinatu?”
She nodded.
“Which class you de study?”
She held up an open palm.
“Fifth year?”
Nod. We were quickly approaching the end of my Krio, given that I didn’t think she wanted to hear about malaria prevention.
“You de got favourite subject na school?”
She looked confused. I tried again.
“Wetin subject you de prefer, wetin subject you de like?”
Her eyes glimmered for a moment. “Math. Me de like math.” Her voice was much stronger this time.
“Math! Math i’ good. I de like math too. Math will take you very far.” I suppose the last part was a vanity; she didn’t understand my English. “Wetin you wan’ for do after SS?” I thought that meant ‘What do you want to do after secondary school?’
“I’ not for long tem.” She was more reserved again. I heard a note of wistfulness, but I could have imagined it. She was right, however. That was a long way away.
“Ousai you de go for SS?” Where are you going to go to high school?
The confidence was back. “Freetown.”
“That’s good,” then I recalled my first Krio lesson – ‘fine’ means ‘good’ – “fine! Fine.”
We fell back into silence. I dabbed some ointment on my burns, and then capped the tube.
Later Katie and I told Allan about Asinatu. He said “We probably don’t want to know what happens in her life.”
“So Amhidu, your sister lives here?”
“Yes.” Kamakwe was a giant labyrinth of familial relations – as far as we could tell, everyone was related, and none of the Sierra Leoneans seemed to be very careful about using the correct terms. Cousins were sisters, aunts were ‘Mama,’ as were pretty much all ladies older than thirty, and I was confused. However, I did know which girl was Amhidu’s sister.
“Does she have kids? I think we met her last night, on the porch, with a couple of other young women and a huge bunch of kids.”
“No, she does not have children. She takes care of my grandmother.”
“So your sister stays here, taking care of your grandmother?”
“She is not my sister, she is my cousin.” Well, I guess I didn’t know which one was Amhidu’s sister. I did know which one was his cousin.
“Right.”
Katie jumped in. “So wait. Do the girls in this town go to university?”
“No, they stay in the village, and they hope to marry.”
“Do they think that is unfair?”
Amhidu shrugged.
“What about your sister? Will she stay here?”
“She hopes to go to university. But her WASS is not so good.” WASS is the high school diploma (West Africa Secondary School, I believe).
“So she’ll just study, and then retake it?”
“Yes.”
“But wait. What if she just gets married, and can’t go to university?”
Amhidu turned his head a bit, as he often does when thinking. His turning face and eyes draw you along, and give the conversation a moment to pause.
“As for me, I will not let that happen to my sister.”
“What about rape?” We were talking about capital punishment. I had asked Allan about his stance, and then quickly realized that asking Sierra Leoneans would be more interesting.
“No, rape is nine months.”
“Nine months!” Wow, that’s terrible.
“No, no! Eight years, eight years!”
They debated in Krio for a moment, and I couldn’t follow. But I could feel the curiosity and questions oozing out of Katie. She asked, in careful warm tones, “Are there a lot of cases of rape in Sierra Leone?”
“No, not so many. You know, you know, many of these rapes, many of these cases, they are just reported by the families, they are not real rapes.”
“What do you mean?” Katie was the soul of diplomacy. I was silent.
“They just happen because the girl, she is a virgin, most of these things they happen to virgins, and she doesn’t think, she doesn’t expect it will hurt, so then she cries out, and the family comes and says that the guy raped her,”
Katie said something to get him to keep going.
“I used to work in the rape unit in the hospital, and we would examine the rape victims when they come in, to see if there is damage, any tears. But most of these girls will not say they were raped, the family will say it,”
“Why?” Again, Katie’s impressive self-control.
“Because they wan’ money. Most of these things, in Sierra Leone, they are settled out of court, for money, so the girl’s family can get money.”
“So these are the reported rapes?”
“Yes, the reported ones. Most of the reported rapes are not real rapes. Maybe one percent.”
I asked a question. “What percentage of Sierra Leonean women would you say have been raped?”
“I don’t know,” someone else answered, “ve’y small. Maybe one percent.” The popular one percent statistic.
Later, I asked Katie what she thought they would say if we told them that a quarter of North American women are sexually assaulted by the end of university (the statistic told by SHARE, one of my favourite student groups at Princeton).
“The thing is, we have to make sure Katie gets well. It’s not just for Katie, I mean, I’ll be really sad if she’s sick.” I actually thought that Katie was already sick. She was standing off to the side, and I was being pushy, trying to make sure the outcome I thought was best was the one that happened. We were in Freetown, and Katie was very rundown after several days of not sleeping well and being well beyond her comfort zone in terms of hygienic conditions. At Uncle Ben’s everything had been fine, and so I thought we should try and head back a day early. Beyond that, Katie couldn’t sleep well at Dr. Barrie’s because there was only one mosquito net, it was noisy, and it was very hot. She has pretty severe reactions to mosquito bites and doesn’t naturally adapt to heat that well. That means that she is constantly facing much more adversity than me, and so I’m completely in awe of her determination. But it was too early in the game to get run down, so right now the best course of action was for her to stay in the hotel we had stayed in the first two nights. It was quiet, it had A/C, it had clean washrooms, and it had power. Katie wanted this too, although she doesn’t like to miss out on things nor to see groups split up.
“Oh yeah, that’s okay. It’s different for girls.” Dr. Barrie’s reply. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen that this was the first place the whole situation would go, but I tried to save it.
“No, it’s not a question of guys and girls, it just happens that I’m lucky that I can sleep on the floor and I’m not bothered by the mosquitoes or the heat.” And I also have dulled hygienic standards, not usually an asset. But for now, the damage was done. I had been the one speaking up in the first place anyway, right? Damn.
So I got lost while trying to find Katie’s hotel. I eventually found it, and we had a sumptuous meal of bread and fresh peanut butter. Calling palm oil repetitive is an understatement, even for my unambitious food tastes.
A couple days later, Alimamy, Katie and I were getting ready to return to Kono. “Keddie,” that was how Sierra Leoneans say it – it’s a Sierra Leonean name, “can you get back to your hotel? Walking?” He had a mischevious gleam in his eye.
“No.” Katie was honest about it. Alimamie laughed.
“Chris is much more clever, haha!” Damn.
“No, not at all, Alimamy. Allan just drew me a map.” I had even gotten lost on the way. But Alimamy’s attention had wandered.
It was very late at night, about one in the morning, and I was waiting to work with Bailor. The power was out.
He works very late. So does Binta, his wife’s younger sister. She’s a secondary school student. Her and Asma, Dr. Barrie’s wife, look like twins, so for a while I thought Bailor and his wife were huddling over some finances. I could hear arithmetic every now and then. But then I noticed, no, it was Binta, not Asma. So he was tutoring her. And I remembered that Allan said he tutored her every night. Given that Bailor usually gets around three hours of sleep a night, that’s a pretty special investment of time.
“No, greatest common factor na...” snippets of math jumped out of the Krio and caught my attention. Eventually I let Bailor know that I was fading, and that if he wanted to review the Open MRS form drafts I had concocted, we’d better do it soon. Binta kept working, and then I went to bed, and as I slipped into sleep I could here the two of them debating greatest common factors.
“Keddie!” Katie and I were walking to the clinic, a week or so ago. We were walking up the hill on the main road, towards the center of town. Two women wearing colorful African dresses were calling her from the righthand side.
“Hi! How de body?” Katie is always very friendly to the people that speak to her. I’m more stony. But these two women often call out to Katie, and it’s much less likely that women will take a friendly wave to mean that they can come tell you a story ending in a plea for money.
“Fine, fine. How de body?”
“Fine!” Katie was smiling from ear to ear. We hardly ever get to even talk to women in Sierra Leone, but they seem to love Katie. These women knew her name from stopping us in the street the week before – I think. But it may have been simply through word of mouth.
It’s not hard to guess why seeing Katie, a ‘white woman’ would be so exciting to these women.
“How de body?” I gave our small guardian a measured look. Her name was Asinatu. She was probably about ten years old, with carefully braided hair, a big piece of African cloth that she kept readjusting around herself as she talked, and a serious look.
That morning she hadn’t said a word to me; she had only produced the key to the locked room when Katie, Allan or I needed it. I’d woken up just as dawn broke, and gone outside to sit on the steps of the house. Mist was still thick over the other houses and grass-roof cooking huts. Asinatu moved all around me, carrying buckets and brooms back and forth from the house to the cooking hut. She hadn’t even batted an eye when I first said good morning.
Now we were sitting in the house, waiting. Amhidu had more or less abandoned Katie and I in this house in the corner of Kamakwe, and we were firmly stuck behind a fence of cultural and linguistic barriers. I was sitting on the floor, treating the toxic burns from “The Champion,” a bizarre acidic bug that had visited my legs a few days ago. Apparently it trails the acid as it walks.
Katie was doing something in the room with our stuff, and Asinatu was sitting on a chair, watching us.
In response to my question, she murmured “No’ bad.”
I gestured to my burns, “Me de get burnt na champion. You de know wetin na champion?”
She shook her head. She didn’t know about the champion. At least, that’s what I thought I had asked her. ‘Wetin na’ means what, more or less, but my Krio is quite unreliable. We lapsed into silence. Asinatu continued to stare me down with a very regal gaze, as I sat amidst a couple of alcohol pads and some Purel.
“You de go na school, Asinatu?”
She nodded.
“Which class you de study?”
She held up an open palm.
“Fifth year?”
Nod. We were quickly approaching the end of my Krio, given that I didn’t think she wanted to hear about malaria prevention.
“You de got favourite subject na school?”
She looked confused. I tried again.
“Wetin subject you de prefer, wetin subject you de like?”
Her eyes glimmered for a moment. “Math. Me de like math.” Her voice was much stronger this time.
“Math! Math i’ good. I de like math too. Math will take you very far.” I suppose the last part was a vanity; she didn’t understand my English. “Wetin you wan’ for do after SS?” I thought that meant ‘What do you want to do after secondary school?’
“I’ not for long tem.” She was more reserved again. I heard a note of wistfulness, but I could have imagined it. She was right, however. That was a long way away.
“Ousai you de go for SS?” Where are you going to go to high school?
The confidence was back. “Freetown.”
“That’s good,” then I recalled my first Krio lesson – ‘fine’ means ‘good’ – “fine! Fine.”
We fell back into silence. I dabbed some ointment on my burns, and then capped the tube.
Later Katie and I told Allan about Asinatu. He said “We probably don’t want to know what happens in her life.”
“So Amhidu, your sister lives here?”
“Yes.” Kamakwe was a giant labyrinth of familial relations – as far as we could tell, everyone was related, and none of the Sierra Leoneans seemed to be very careful about using the correct terms. Cousins were sisters, aunts were ‘Mama,’ as were pretty much all ladies older than thirty, and I was confused. However, I did know which girl was Amhidu’s sister.
“Does she have kids? I think we met her last night, on the porch, with a couple of other young women and a huge bunch of kids.”
“No, she does not have children. She takes care of my grandmother.”
“So your sister stays here, taking care of your grandmother?”
“She is not my sister, she is my cousin.” Well, I guess I didn’t know which one was Amhidu’s sister. I did know which one was his cousin.
“Right.”
Katie jumped in. “So wait. Do the girls in this town go to university?”
“No, they stay in the village, and they hope to marry.”
“Do they think that is unfair?”
Amhidu shrugged.
“What about your sister? Will she stay here?”
“She hopes to go to university. But her WASS is not so good.” WASS is the high school diploma (West Africa Secondary School, I believe).
“So she’ll just study, and then retake it?”
“Yes.”
“But wait. What if she just gets married, and can’t go to university?”
Amhidu turned his head a bit, as he often does when thinking. His turning face and eyes draw you along, and give the conversation a moment to pause.
“As for me, I will not let that happen to my sister.”
“What about rape?” We were talking about capital punishment. I had asked Allan about his stance, and then quickly realized that asking Sierra Leoneans would be more interesting.
“No, rape is nine months.”
“Nine months!” Wow, that’s terrible.
“No, no! Eight years, eight years!”
They debated in Krio for a moment, and I couldn’t follow. But I could feel the curiosity and questions oozing out of Katie. She asked, in careful warm tones, “Are there a lot of cases of rape in Sierra Leone?”
“No, not so many. You know, you know, many of these rapes, many of these cases, they are just reported by the families, they are not real rapes.”
“What do you mean?” Katie was the soul of diplomacy. I was silent.
“They just happen because the girl, she is a virgin, most of these things they happen to virgins, and she doesn’t think, she doesn’t expect it will hurt, so then she cries out, and the family comes and says that the guy raped her,”
Katie said something to get him to keep going.
“I used to work in the rape unit in the hospital, and we would examine the rape victims when they come in, to see if there is damage, any tears. But most of these girls will not say they were raped, the family will say it,”
“Why?” Again, Katie’s impressive self-control.
“Because they wan’ money. Most of these things, in Sierra Leone, they are settled out of court, for money, so the girl’s family can get money.”
“So these are the reported rapes?”
“Yes, the reported ones. Most of the reported rapes are not real rapes. Maybe one percent.”
I asked a question. “What percentage of Sierra Leonean women would you say have been raped?”
“I don’t know,” someone else answered, “ve’y small. Maybe one percent.” The popular one percent statistic.
Later, I asked Katie what she thought they would say if we told them that a quarter of North American women are sexually assaulted by the end of university (the statistic told by SHARE, one of my favourite student groups at Princeton).
“The thing is, we have to make sure Katie gets well. It’s not just for Katie, I mean, I’ll be really sad if she’s sick.” I actually thought that Katie was already sick. She was standing off to the side, and I was being pushy, trying to make sure the outcome I thought was best was the one that happened. We were in Freetown, and Katie was very rundown after several days of not sleeping well and being well beyond her comfort zone in terms of hygienic conditions. At Uncle Ben’s everything had been fine, and so I thought we should try and head back a day early. Beyond that, Katie couldn’t sleep well at Dr. Barrie’s because there was only one mosquito net, it was noisy, and it was very hot. She has pretty severe reactions to mosquito bites and doesn’t naturally adapt to heat that well. That means that she is constantly facing much more adversity than me, and so I’m completely in awe of her determination. But it was too early in the game to get run down, so right now the best course of action was for her to stay in the hotel we had stayed in the first two nights. It was quiet, it had A/C, it had clean washrooms, and it had power. Katie wanted this too, although she doesn’t like to miss out on things nor to see groups split up.
“Oh yeah, that’s okay. It’s different for girls.” Dr. Barrie’s reply. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen that this was the first place the whole situation would go, but I tried to save it.
“No, it’s not a question of guys and girls, it just happens that I’m lucky that I can sleep on the floor and I’m not bothered by the mosquitoes or the heat.” And I also have dulled hygienic standards, not usually an asset. But for now, the damage was done. I had been the one speaking up in the first place anyway, right? Damn.
So I got lost while trying to find Katie’s hotel. I eventually found it, and we had a sumptuous meal of bread and fresh peanut butter. Calling palm oil repetitive is an understatement, even for my unambitious food tastes.
A couple days later, Alimamy, Katie and I were getting ready to return to Kono. “Keddie,” that was how Sierra Leoneans say it – it’s a Sierra Leonean name, “can you get back to your hotel? Walking?” He had a mischevious gleam in his eye.
“No.” Katie was honest about it. Alimamie laughed.
“Chris is much more clever, haha!” Damn.
“No, not at all, Alimamy. Allan just drew me a map.” I had even gotten lost on the way. But Alimamy’s attention had wandered.
It was very late at night, about one in the morning, and I was waiting to work with Bailor. The power was out.
He works very late. So does Binta, his wife’s younger sister. She’s a secondary school student. Her and Asma, Dr. Barrie’s wife, look like twins, so for a while I thought Bailor and his wife were huddling over some finances. I could hear arithmetic every now and then. But then I noticed, no, it was Binta, not Asma. So he was tutoring her. And I remembered that Allan said he tutored her every night. Given that Bailor usually gets around three hours of sleep a night, that’s a pretty special investment of time.
“No, greatest common factor na...” snippets of math jumped out of the Krio and caught my attention. Eventually I let Bailor know that I was fading, and that if he wanted to review the Open MRS form drafts I had concocted, we’d better do it soon. Binta kept working, and then I went to bed, and as I slipped into sleep I could here the two of them debating greatest common factors.
“Keddie!” Katie and I were walking to the clinic, a week or so ago. We were walking up the hill on the main road, towards the center of town. Two women wearing colorful African dresses were calling her from the righthand side.
“Hi! How de body?” Katie is always very friendly to the people that speak to her. I’m more stony. But these two women often call out to Katie, and it’s much less likely that women will take a friendly wave to mean that they can come tell you a story ending in a plea for money.
“Fine, fine. How de body?”
“Fine!” Katie was smiling from ear to ear. We hardly ever get to even talk to women in Sierra Leone, but they seem to love Katie. These women knew her name from stopping us in the street the week before – I think. But it may have been simply through word of mouth.
It’s not hard to guess why seeing Katie, a ‘white woman’ would be so exciting to these women.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
A Wrong Turn
A Wrong Turn.
Allan had drawn me a map; Bailor had approved it. And now I was
there, at the clock tower, one of the main landmarks in Freetown. The
best word I can think of to describe Freetown is "thrown-together",
and that's really two words. Allan has used noisy, dirty, crowded, and
hot, when he's feeling favourably towards the place. But he doesn't
like big cities anywhere (save London, England), because those are
pretty common characteristics of big cities.
The clock tower circle was thick with people. There were fruit
stands, bread stands, piles of crackers and cookies on shelves, on
wheelbarrows, on heads. Cell phone minutes, boiled eggs, roasting
meat, and bags of water, all on top of each other. Everything was
being sold at every height from head height to the ground. The market
chaos was creeping out into the road, getting as close to the traffic
as possible, and there was no room for the pedestrians in between. Of
course, there were piles of pedestrians, four or five across, circling
the clock like a whirlpool.
Five streets come together at the clock tower. I plunged down the first one.
I had to watch my feet, and my hands were glued to my pockets. This
street was much narrower, and there were people everywhere. Women and
men of all sizes and ages were all squished together in a giant
claustrophobic mess, wearing traditional African clothes, or
secondhand North American t-shirts, or both. Some people told me off
in Krio, others stuck with "Wan' to be you friend!" but overall
everyone left me alone. Somehow, in the calm but sweaty crowd, I was
more anonymous than I've been in days.
The road narrowed and immediately curved to the right. The ground was
dirt, not paved, and smelled vaguely of sewage in places. I tried not
to step on anything wet. At this point I'd become a bit numb to the
kaleidoscope of sellers and salesmen. But then I noticed the
poda-podas.
Poda-podas look like old Volkswagon "hippy vans." They are usually
painted in bizarre colors with equally bizarre slogans – everything
from "Man suffer" to "Believe in God" to "Honor thy sister." They are
also all packed with people, sometimes on the outside as well as the
inside. Although you probably have some idea of the size of the
poda-poda, you also need to know that they were exactly as wide as the
road. So we all hustled over to the sides, fitting in around the
boiled eggs and flipflops like the last clothes in a suitcase. A
couple of poda-podas went past. They left a terrific cloud of exhaust
that went nowhere in the humid Freetown dusk.
As I walked, there were more and more poda-poda, and also the odd
industrial truck. Sometimes I had to take my backpack and put it over
my head to squeeze between poda-podas and trucks, and I was lost. So I
turned around. People were crushed together, being carried through
tiny and exhaust-filled gaps around poda-podas. Then,
"White man! White man!" There were more people shouting for me than
usual. Wait... I noticed that everyone had stopped. And there was
music. Orchestral music, playing from cheap speakers. So I stopped.
Some people laughed. Everyone stood still. There was space on the
street, and I looked around. Religion? What was this? National anthem?
The music stopped with a crackly cadence, and all the open space
filled with movement and sound. There was mud and sweat and exhaust
everywhere. But I couldn't see the speakers!
After a few more steps, I was back at the clock tower and not lost. It seemed like it had taken far longer to wind my way down the market streets then to find my way back. From the clock tower intersection, I found the right road - it was paved, and less crowded.
It turns out that every day at 6am and 6pm, the national anthem of Sierra Leone is played in the streets of Freetown. That corresponds to the raising and lowering of the flag for the day.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Funky formatting
To save bandwidth (kilobytes per second is a wild ride) I've been
submitting my blog entries by email. Unfortunately it looks like the
email submissions end up being formatted like bad free verse poetry.
Well, it's not intentional, and I'm not fixing it until I get home.
Enjoy! Cheers, Chris.
submitting my blog entries by email. Unfortunately it looks like the
email submissions end up being formatted like bad free verse poetry.
Well, it's not intentional, and I'm not fixing it until I get home.
Enjoy! Cheers, Chris.
Pastor Kadie's Farm Part I
"So, Eddie, what is... what exactly is the difference... is
masangke... what is masangke?" I tried several different questions in
short succession, as soon as we got out of the car. Eddie, the farm
manager, just looked at me with wide, uncomprehending eyes. I'd
already tried this question many times, and gotten many answers that I
already knew and were not what I wanted.
We'd spent two afternoons coming up with a business plan. Katie and I
had been trading off between saving web pages and reading them on our
computers, passing the USB wireless back and forth. Tenera, Dura,
Psifera... we even knew the genetics that determined the different
breeds of oil palm. We knew the percentage of oil by mass of a fruit
bunch for each breed. We knew the global price per metric ton of palm
oil over the last three years, by the month. We knew the expected
yield of a hectare of Tenera palm every year for 16 years out. We knew
the steps of the process, in theory, and we had some leads on where to
get equipment. I was particularly proud of our discovery that we
should lay out the palm trees in a hexagonal pattern to maximize the
density. The reason why I liked this innovation was that it agrees
exactly with the mathematical fact that if you want to pack the
largest number of identical circles – say, palm tree canopies – into a
given area, each circle touches six other circles.
But most of all, we knew that there was a crucial decision to be made:
which palm should NOW plant on its 10 acres?
Planting season ends at the end of June, and the tractor can plow 1
acre per day. The field has to be plowed before we can plant the oil
palm seedlings, but as the plow works other workers will fill in and
plant in the already plowed land. So the decision about which tree to
use had to be made now; tomorrow at the latest. That left Katie, Allan
and I trying desperately to connect our internet-researched knowledge
with local terminology and wisdom, in order that our research could
inform Bailor's decision. I was trying to decipher the mystery of
masangke, the yellow, less desirable palm oil.
Eddie is the farm manager. He was wearing a shiny blue African shirt,
and his eyes were wide and a bit scared above his sunken cheekbones. I
was trying not to intimidate him by laughing and apologizing for my
barrage of questions. It wasn't working at all.
The car had stopped, for some reason that I wasn't able to understand
from the fast Krio in the front seat. Amhidu, Sahr Bindi, Eddie,
Allan, Ali (new driver), Katie and I had all driven out to see the
nursery where the palm seedlings were kept. I was fervently hoping
that we would resolve our question of which type of palm to plant. At
this point the options ranged between four different varieties, a mix
of two varieties, and a single variety. As I got out of the car, my
brain was firmly engaged in mental calculation about what masangke
might be, and whether it was a product of specific varieties of palm,
or whether any palm could produce it.
The road was gravel and dirt, and cutting across a slope. There was
green everywhere else, both uphill on the left and downhill on the
right. A palm plantation sloped away to the right. It looked like a
valley bowl with a few palm trees and a sparse cassava ground cover.
At the far side of the valley, the land curved upwards again towards a
bald but green hill. In the center of the valley there stood a massive
tree. Its bark was a shiny light grey, and it had no branches for the
first sixty feet of trunk. At that height, the branches arced out like
a menorah, turning gradually upwards and ending in dappled green
leaves.
I gave up on Eddie for a moment. "Wow, look at that tree." I gestured
to Katie and Allan, they didn't hear me. "Look at the tree!" Still no
response. Okay, well, it's a nice tree anyways. Eddie heard me; if he
understood, he might have agreed.
"That's what all of Sierra Leone used to be." Allan did hear me. "But
then they cut it all," Allan made a small 'cutting' shake of his head,
"Look at the grove up there." Further up the hill, on the other side
of the valley, a thick grove of the same type of tree had turned the
hillside dark green. I could see graceful grey branches reaching
sideways through the canopy.
"Wow."
Something caught my attention up on the left. The slope was pretty
steep, but there was a small family a short ways up the hill. There
were fewer trees on the left. A tall black man unfolded from the small
group and began ambling down the hill towards us. He had the answers,
I knew it.
"Eddie, just elbow me or something if I'm being obnoxious." I don't
think Eddie understood me. We were having communication problems, and
they were exclusively my fault. But they could be resolved later – for
now, I was dying to find out as much as possible about oil palms.
"Oh, okay... this is the farmer, the one with the trees..." Eddie
motioned back up towards the nursery. It was in a small town at the
top of the road.
"Right. Maybe we should get Amhidu so we can translate..." I still had
no idea how this meeting was going to go.
"No, no, he is a learned man. A pastor."
Alright, a pastor.
The most striking pastor I've ever met. He wore dusty black rainboots,
olive dress pants, a yellow and blue patterned African shirt, small
round glasses and a faded dark grey baseball cap. He was tall and
skinny, and age had tightened the skin on his bones and deepened the
smile lines around his mouth. By now he was right in front of us,
wearing a wide gap-toothed grin and laughing, and he wrapped up my
hand in a big African handshake. "Pastor Kadie Kanawa."
"Me nem na Chris... Christopher... Sahr Christopher, like Kono."
Pastor Kadie laughed with deep rolling chuckles, slapped me on the
shoulder, and then gathered both Eddie and me up into a greeting with
Allan and Katie.
"Oh, so good to meet you! You know, I had some friends once, some
European friends once. They came and they show me how to do all this
farming." He motioned at the farm. I looked at the big tree. Pastor
Kadie's voice was warm and quavered slightly, but I was impatient.
Answers, answers.
After a moment the pastor swept past and pulled the Sierra Leoneans
with him. Alan caught my eye.
"Chris, slow down on the questions." I was instantly sheepish; Allan was right.
"I know, I know."
"It's just like," Allan let his facial expression finish the sentence.
Katie was up ahead walking right behind Pastor Kadie, and Amhidu, Sahr
Bindi, and Eddie were right behind. Ali had stayed with the car. I
caught up to Katie in a few steps, and then we all turned down the
slope on to a path.
Suddenly I noticed a machete in Pastor Kadie's left hand. It was the
kind with a steak knife handle and a narrow straight blade with a
curve right at the end. The point is at the end of the curve,
perpendicular to the long direction of the blade. The blade itself was
worn and tarnished.
Whenever I turned my head I caught a glimpse of tall oil palms against
blue sky, and the rounded green hill in the distance. But mostly my
eyes stayed down on the path, determined not to put my sandaled feet
in anything spiky or poisonous. My brain was deeply embroiled in
trying to calibrate itself to Allan's advice. I had been too
voracious, so voracious that I might be preventing us from getting the
information. So how could I choose my questions judiciously so that we
learn exactly what we need?
Or maybe I didn't know what we needed to know? I took some deep
breaths, and watched Pastor Kadie for a moment. He moved with an easy
gait through the farm. He didn't move that much, but he covered
ground, and the steps he took looked very familiar and comfortable.
It wasn't a farm in the North American sense, not at all. There were
no rows of anything, no fences, and no immediately apparent
organization. But there was cassava under the palms, to shade out the
weeds, and worn pathways linking the trees.
First Pastor Kadie took us to a short, young oil palm. Its trunk was
maybe four feet high, and the fronds extended out like a fountain.
Clustered around the base of tree were two fruit bunches, one black
and one red.
"This one..." Pastor Kadie swung half heartedly at a couple of plants
between him and the tree with the point of his machete, "is Dura." He
touched a couple of the fronds with the point of the machete, and then
gestured to the fruit. We paused in silence for a moment, and the
Pastor Kadie made a step to continue.
"Wait," I couldn't contain myself, maybe this was the answer to the
masangke mystery, "why is this one red, and that one black?" Maybe
it's ripeness? I thought.
"This one is ripe." He tapped the red one with the point of his
machete. Then we continued down the path.
The fruit bunches are quite alien. They look like large pinecones,
perhaps the size of pillow, except there are many palm fruits stuck in
the spaces of the pine cone. The palm fruits are smooth, shiny and
football shaped, yellow near the points and darkening to crimson red
or maroon in the middle when ripe. As they grow, they are first olive
green, then black, then red or purple. The fruits generally fit in the
palm of your hand, and a fruit bunch has between 50 and 150 fruits.
These are just ballpark numbers to give an idea; even the few fruit
bunches and palm fruits we saw varied widely in size, number, color,
and texture.
After a couple more turns, a bit closer to the big tree, we came to
another squat palm. "She is," Pastor Kadie poked at the palm with his
blade, "she's also Dura."
Eddie came forward, excited. "This one," he pointed to a small bunch
with olive green fruit, "this one will be masangke! It will have
yellow color when, when we make the oil."
"Oh, okay." I nodded. It didn't fill in all the blanks. Could the same
palm tree give both red and yellow palm oil? The red was more
desirable, the yellow was masangke, I thought. To be honest, I'm still
not totally sure, but I'm much more patient about it now.
We walked onwards. The grove was quiet, completely different from
Koidu Town. The palm trees, even the squat ones, had majestic crowns
of palm fronds, and the big tree in the center kept arresting my gaze.
"I'll take you to a place where I have recently harvested." Katie and
I both murmured that that would be great. After a quick turn back up
the hill, I was completely disoriented; I thought that maybe I could
pull out my compass and look at it, but I didn't.
Pastor Kadie glided off to the side, revealing another squat palm
drooping over a pile of fruit bunches. There were about ten or eleven
fruit of them. I stepped off to the side so everyone else could filter
in.
"Can we eat them?" Allan asked. Katie was already eating one. Allan
took a bite. Amhidu and Sahr Bindi reached down and grabbed some. I
leaned over, touched one, and stood up again.
"Mmm, doesn't taste like much." Allan wasn't impressed.
"Well, it's interesting. I'm not sure if I like it or not. It's very
oily." Katie's fruit was half eaten. Inside it was yellow, with plenty
of fibers. I was trying my best to remain impartial, but failing.
Amhidu was clearly relishing his, and Allan revised his opinion
upwards.
"Actually, I like the taste of this oil much more than the palm oil
after it's processed."
The pile of fruit bunches looked a bit like a pile of beehives to me.
I picked up a safe looking red one. It was smooth in my hand, firm and
clearly alive. In my mind I could feel the palm oil inside, see it go
into the pot to be boiled, see it crushed for the oil, see the oil
boiled dry, see the oil bottled into containers, lifted on to trucks,
and bounced six hours into Freetown, where they might wait on a
loading dock for a crane to lift them on to a boat. I could see the
amputees piling the bunches, machetes in hand. What would it be like
to use machetes for their livelihood, and for the livelihood of the
clinic, instead of the nightmare ways that machetes had been used on
them? And how did the machete sit so comfortably in Pastor Kadie's
hand; how could a machete sit comfortably in anyone's hand in Kono?
The palm fruit was firm with vitality in my hand.
masangke... what is masangke?" I tried several different questions in
short succession, as soon as we got out of the car. Eddie, the farm
manager, just looked at me with wide, uncomprehending eyes. I'd
already tried this question many times, and gotten many answers that I
already knew and were not what I wanted.
We'd spent two afternoons coming up with a business plan. Katie and I
had been trading off between saving web pages and reading them on our
computers, passing the USB wireless back and forth. Tenera, Dura,
Psifera... we even knew the genetics that determined the different
breeds of oil palm. We knew the percentage of oil by mass of a fruit
bunch for each breed. We knew the global price per metric ton of palm
oil over the last three years, by the month. We knew the expected
yield of a hectare of Tenera palm every year for 16 years out. We knew
the steps of the process, in theory, and we had some leads on where to
get equipment. I was particularly proud of our discovery that we
should lay out the palm trees in a hexagonal pattern to maximize the
density. The reason why I liked this innovation was that it agrees
exactly with the mathematical fact that if you want to pack the
largest number of identical circles – say, palm tree canopies – into a
given area, each circle touches six other circles.
But most of all, we knew that there was a crucial decision to be made:
which palm should NOW plant on its 10 acres?
Planting season ends at the end of June, and the tractor can plow 1
acre per day. The field has to be plowed before we can plant the oil
palm seedlings, but as the plow works other workers will fill in and
plant in the already plowed land. So the decision about which tree to
use had to be made now; tomorrow at the latest. That left Katie, Allan
and I trying desperately to connect our internet-researched knowledge
with local terminology and wisdom, in order that our research could
inform Bailor's decision. I was trying to decipher the mystery of
masangke, the yellow, less desirable palm oil.
Eddie is the farm manager. He was wearing a shiny blue African shirt,
and his eyes were wide and a bit scared above his sunken cheekbones. I
was trying not to intimidate him by laughing and apologizing for my
barrage of questions. It wasn't working at all.
The car had stopped, for some reason that I wasn't able to understand
from the fast Krio in the front seat. Amhidu, Sahr Bindi, Eddie,
Allan, Ali (new driver), Katie and I had all driven out to see the
nursery where the palm seedlings were kept. I was fervently hoping
that we would resolve our question of which type of palm to plant. At
this point the options ranged between four different varieties, a mix
of two varieties, and a single variety. As I got out of the car, my
brain was firmly engaged in mental calculation about what masangke
might be, and whether it was a product of specific varieties of palm,
or whether any palm could produce it.
The road was gravel and dirt, and cutting across a slope. There was
green everywhere else, both uphill on the left and downhill on the
right. A palm plantation sloped away to the right. It looked like a
valley bowl with a few palm trees and a sparse cassava ground cover.
At the far side of the valley, the land curved upwards again towards a
bald but green hill. In the center of the valley there stood a massive
tree. Its bark was a shiny light grey, and it had no branches for the
first sixty feet of trunk. At that height, the branches arced out like
a menorah, turning gradually upwards and ending in dappled green
leaves.
I gave up on Eddie for a moment. "Wow, look at that tree." I gestured
to Katie and Allan, they didn't hear me. "Look at the tree!" Still no
response. Okay, well, it's a nice tree anyways. Eddie heard me; if he
understood, he might have agreed.
"That's what all of Sierra Leone used to be." Allan did hear me. "But
then they cut it all," Allan made a small 'cutting' shake of his head,
"Look at the grove up there." Further up the hill, on the other side
of the valley, a thick grove of the same type of tree had turned the
hillside dark green. I could see graceful grey branches reaching
sideways through the canopy.
"Wow."
Something caught my attention up on the left. The slope was pretty
steep, but there was a small family a short ways up the hill. There
were fewer trees on the left. A tall black man unfolded from the small
group and began ambling down the hill towards us. He had the answers,
I knew it.
"Eddie, just elbow me or something if I'm being obnoxious." I don't
think Eddie understood me. We were having communication problems, and
they were exclusively my fault. But they could be resolved later – for
now, I was dying to find out as much as possible about oil palms.
"Oh, okay... this is the farmer, the one with the trees..." Eddie
motioned back up towards the nursery. It was in a small town at the
top of the road.
"Right. Maybe we should get Amhidu so we can translate..." I still had
no idea how this meeting was going to go.
"No, no, he is a learned man. A pastor."
Alright, a pastor.
The most striking pastor I've ever met. He wore dusty black rainboots,
olive dress pants, a yellow and blue patterned African shirt, small
round glasses and a faded dark grey baseball cap. He was tall and
skinny, and age had tightened the skin on his bones and deepened the
smile lines around his mouth. By now he was right in front of us,
wearing a wide gap-toothed grin and laughing, and he wrapped up my
hand in a big African handshake. "Pastor Kadie Kanawa."
"Me nem na Chris... Christopher... Sahr Christopher, like Kono."
Pastor Kadie laughed with deep rolling chuckles, slapped me on the
shoulder, and then gathered both Eddie and me up into a greeting with
Allan and Katie.
"Oh, so good to meet you! You know, I had some friends once, some
European friends once. They came and they show me how to do all this
farming." He motioned at the farm. I looked at the big tree. Pastor
Kadie's voice was warm and quavered slightly, but I was impatient.
Answers, answers.
After a moment the pastor swept past and pulled the Sierra Leoneans
with him. Alan caught my eye.
"Chris, slow down on the questions." I was instantly sheepish; Allan was right.
"I know, I know."
"It's just like," Allan let his facial expression finish the sentence.
Katie was up ahead walking right behind Pastor Kadie, and Amhidu, Sahr
Bindi, and Eddie were right behind. Ali had stayed with the car. I
caught up to Katie in a few steps, and then we all turned down the
slope on to a path.
Suddenly I noticed a machete in Pastor Kadie's left hand. It was the
kind with a steak knife handle and a narrow straight blade with a
curve right at the end. The point is at the end of the curve,
perpendicular to the long direction of the blade. The blade itself was
worn and tarnished.
Whenever I turned my head I caught a glimpse of tall oil palms against
blue sky, and the rounded green hill in the distance. But mostly my
eyes stayed down on the path, determined not to put my sandaled feet
in anything spiky or poisonous. My brain was deeply embroiled in
trying to calibrate itself to Allan's advice. I had been too
voracious, so voracious that I might be preventing us from getting the
information. So how could I choose my questions judiciously so that we
learn exactly what we need?
Or maybe I didn't know what we needed to know? I took some deep
breaths, and watched Pastor Kadie for a moment. He moved with an easy
gait through the farm. He didn't move that much, but he covered
ground, and the steps he took looked very familiar and comfortable.
It wasn't a farm in the North American sense, not at all. There were
no rows of anything, no fences, and no immediately apparent
organization. But there was cassava under the palms, to shade out the
weeds, and worn pathways linking the trees.
First Pastor Kadie took us to a short, young oil palm. Its trunk was
maybe four feet high, and the fronds extended out like a fountain.
Clustered around the base of tree were two fruit bunches, one black
and one red.
"This one..." Pastor Kadie swung half heartedly at a couple of plants
between him and the tree with the point of his machete, "is Dura." He
touched a couple of the fronds with the point of the machete, and then
gestured to the fruit. We paused in silence for a moment, and the
Pastor Kadie made a step to continue.
"Wait," I couldn't contain myself, maybe this was the answer to the
masangke mystery, "why is this one red, and that one black?" Maybe
it's ripeness? I thought.
"This one is ripe." He tapped the red one with the point of his
machete. Then we continued down the path.
The fruit bunches are quite alien. They look like large pinecones,
perhaps the size of pillow, except there are many palm fruits stuck in
the spaces of the pine cone. The palm fruits are smooth, shiny and
football shaped, yellow near the points and darkening to crimson red
or maroon in the middle when ripe. As they grow, they are first olive
green, then black, then red or purple. The fruits generally fit in the
palm of your hand, and a fruit bunch has between 50 and 150 fruits.
These are just ballpark numbers to give an idea; even the few fruit
bunches and palm fruits we saw varied widely in size, number, color,
and texture.
After a couple more turns, a bit closer to the big tree, we came to
another squat palm. "She is," Pastor Kadie poked at the palm with his
blade, "she's also Dura."
Eddie came forward, excited. "This one," he pointed to a small bunch
with olive green fruit, "this one will be masangke! It will have
yellow color when, when we make the oil."
"Oh, okay." I nodded. It didn't fill in all the blanks. Could the same
palm tree give both red and yellow palm oil? The red was more
desirable, the yellow was masangke, I thought. To be honest, I'm still
not totally sure, but I'm much more patient about it now.
We walked onwards. The grove was quiet, completely different from
Koidu Town. The palm trees, even the squat ones, had majestic crowns
of palm fronds, and the big tree in the center kept arresting my gaze.
"I'll take you to a place where I have recently harvested." Katie and
I both murmured that that would be great. After a quick turn back up
the hill, I was completely disoriented; I thought that maybe I could
pull out my compass and look at it, but I didn't.
Pastor Kadie glided off to the side, revealing another squat palm
drooping over a pile of fruit bunches. There were about ten or eleven
fruit of them. I stepped off to the side so everyone else could filter
in.
"Can we eat them?" Allan asked. Katie was already eating one. Allan
took a bite. Amhidu and Sahr Bindi reached down and grabbed some. I
leaned over, touched one, and stood up again.
"Mmm, doesn't taste like much." Allan wasn't impressed.
"Well, it's interesting. I'm not sure if I like it or not. It's very
oily." Katie's fruit was half eaten. Inside it was yellow, with plenty
of fibers. I was trying my best to remain impartial, but failing.
Amhidu was clearly relishing his, and Allan revised his opinion
upwards.
"Actually, I like the taste of this oil much more than the palm oil
after it's processed."
The pile of fruit bunches looked a bit like a pile of beehives to me.
I picked up a safe looking red one. It was smooth in my hand, firm and
clearly alive. In my mind I could feel the palm oil inside, see it go
into the pot to be boiled, see it crushed for the oil, see the oil
boiled dry, see the oil bottled into containers, lifted on to trucks,
and bounced six hours into Freetown, where they might wait on a
loading dock for a crane to lift them on to a boat. I could see the
amputees piling the bunches, machetes in hand. What would it be like
to use machetes for their livelihood, and for the livelihood of the
clinic, instead of the nightmare ways that machetes had been used on
them? And how did the machete sit so comfortably in Pastor Kadie's
hand; how could a machete sit comfortably in anyone's hand in Kono?
The palm fruit was firm with vitality in my hand.
Pastor Kadie's Farm, Part II
I took a bite, and pulled back without removing any fruit. It was
gross. Oily and pretty much tasteless. A couple drops of oil fell on
to my fingers, reminding me of the way I get oil on my hands when I
pick out fishbones from my beef at Sunshine, the restaurant. It looked
the same. Allan and Katie were on their second fruits, and Amhidu and
Sahr Bindi were wolfing them down in their speed-eating way. With a
deep breath, I ripped off a chunk. To be generous, let's say I chewed
it for ten seconds before discreetly removing it and dropping it on
the ground. There was a mess of yellow fibers strung across the fruit
where I had bitten off the skin. The kernel in the middle was visible.
"I can show you how we process the oil too." Pastor Kadie's smile
revealed that his lower teeth were curved like a roller coaster.
After a moment, we set off again. My mind was moving much slower,
calmed by the green foliage and wind and palm trees. It was also
calmed by the palm oil taste; this was a real idea. Maybe we couldn't
wreck it by making the wrong decision. The simmering mess of facts and
processes in my mind was receding, slowly. The accompanying adrenaline
was also going.
The path twisted a bit and went up and down a couple of bumps.
Suddenly we emerged into an encampment of some kind. There was a
triangular grass roof held up on thick sticks, and five or six
children. Just beyond the grass hut there was a silver lidded pot
spewing steam above hot coals, and a set of colorful plastic bowls.
Behind that there was a square pit, maybe three feet deep and six feet
by six feet in area. The floor of the pit seemed to be a mix of
flagstone and mud. At the far edge of the pit there was a hole that
drained out into a ditch; the ditch drained into a marsh. We were down
at the bottom of the valley, and I couldn't see the big tree anymore.
The grove of big trees, however, was plainly visible.
"So here," he gestured to the pit, "we process the oil. You have to
plug the hole."
"With this one. Plug with this one." Eddie had clambered around to the
other side of the pit and was touching a big stone that was roughly
the size of the hole.
We gathered round. Pastor Kadie spoke. "First, we boil them. Then we
put them in the pit and we step," There was some excited Krio, then
laughter. Somebody pointed to the boots. "Yes, with these ones."
Pastor Kadie pointed to them. "Then we add water. And the oil, it
floats, so we jus skim it." The last was said with a conspiratorial
smile. The three 'white' people oohed and aahed in amazement.
"And there is the nuts." Eddie pointed excitedly to a giant pile of
nuts beside the pit. He had been explaining to me earlier that even
though Tenera produced 30% more oil, Dura was also good because its
nuts were bigger and thus it produced more nut oil. Pastor Kadie
nodded towards the nuts.
"Yes, you can also crush these ones and get oil. But," he shrugged,
"we don't have time, so we just leave them. You know they want to make
fuel from these ones."
"Oh really?" Allan has a great friendly prompt.
"Yes, people came by, and talked of making fuel from these ones. It's,
it's like a vegetable oil. It's the one you had." He turned to me. I'm
not sure how he knew, but yes, in the town I had been shown the
difference between palm kernel oil and palm oil. The former is brown,
the latter red or yellow. Both are used in cooking, but the palm oil
is more expensive.
Pastor Kadie handed Katie a nut."Thanks." She looked at it, and Eddie
explained to her what was going on. A little girl appeared, cracking a
nut with a rock. She handed it to Katie.
"You eat this one." Amhidu encouraged her. Katie didn't need
encouragement. She ate some.
"Tastes like coconut!" I tried some. It tasted like wood.
"Yeah," I agreed. My tastebuds aren't great.
Then a yellow squash-like fruit appeared in front of me. "Cocoa." I overheard.
"Wait – this is cocoa? Chocolate."
"Yes." Amhidu said. It had a couple of holes in it.
"You dry the one inside, and then you eat it." Sahr Bindi explained.
"Okay,"
"Here," Eddie already had Allan's attention back near the grass hut.
he had some dried cocoa. It was in a small nut, maybe the size of my
fingernail. I tried some and handed it to Allan. It tasted bitter,
vaguely intoxicating, and similar to dark chocolate.
Then we were back at the edge of the pit. Allan took in a deep breath
and prepared to ask a question.
"Pastor Kadie, why didn't they cut down those trees?"
"What?"
"The trees. They're very big, and they're gone all over Sierra Leone.
Why did they spare those trees?"
"Oh, the forestry."
"Yes, the forestry. Why not take those trees too?" Pastor Kadie chuckled.
"Well, the thing is, we have so many. They can't take all them. We
just have so many. But it is nice to still have some."
"They're beautiful big trees. It's really something to think that the
country used to be covered in them."
Eddie reappeared, two palm fruits in hand. One was big and round, the
other smaller and more square. The round one had a strong yellow color
at the base, while the square one was more evenly red. "This one," he
shook his right hand a bit, "is macocaia. You see how there is yellow
there, that means it has yellow oil. This one is tenera," he shook his
left hand a bit, "and it will have a nice red oil, you see, from the
color, the red here."
"The macocaia is these ones," Pastor Kadie motioned to a pile of palm
fruits at the edge of the dirt clearing. They were noticeably bigger.
"They have very big fruits, very big."
"The nut inside, it's very large." Eddie added.
"But the oil, is not so much as the other ones."
Okay, so macocaia gives yellow oil, and tenera gives red oil? And the
difference in yields – that matches up with what we know about tenera
and dura. But does tenera always give red oil, and macocaia always
give yellow oil?
Pastor Kadie's family had faded into the background to watch. A few
times I tried to say hello, but they remained politely impassive.
Sometimes they were pouring water, or washing something, and one girl
cracked some nuts for Katie, but other than that they remained at the
edge of the clearing and watched.
"So Pastor Kadie, do you process the different oils separately or mix
them all together?" Allan asked a question.
"No, mix them all together." Pastor Kadie gave a brief dismissive shrug.
"And the color is red?"
Pastor Kadie nodded. "It's red, dark red. But we have some variety,
the local palm," he gestured back behind him to a medium sized palm,
"this one is not so good, I don't mix it in. It gives a thicker oil, a
different oil, it is not so red."
Dura? Was that old Dura? Supposedly Dura was native to West Africa,
and there was also an improved variety of Dura.
"And Pastor Kadie, why do you plant all four varieties?" Allan asked
another question.
"So I can harvest all the time, all year."
"Oh, so it gives fruit throughout the year."
"Yes."
I briefly conferred with Katie and Allan. "Should I try one last time
to figure out what masangke is?"
"Yeah, it's worth a try." So I turned to Pastor Kadie.
"Pastor Kadie," he looked at me through his small, round glasses,
"where does the masangke oil come from?"
"Oh, masangke. Well, I tell you where the name comes from. There is a
village, a region, somewhere called Masangke. And they were the first
to have the masangke tree, the first to use them, and so the local
people they just call them masangke."
"So masangke is a type of tree?"
"No, masangke is a name for the five varieties that produce the two oils."
I thought for a moment, then turned to Katie. Pastor Kadie moved away.
"So the masangke is..."
"It's a blanket name for all the varieties of tree that make the oil, I think."
"But no, that doesn't make sense. He said it was the five varieties...
of oil? No, that doesn't make sense either," I was confused. Masangke
was the varieties of tree? It turns that is indeed the case – all the
improved varieties of palm are known as masangke. Katie was right.
"This is the palm oil," Pastor Kadie was back, with a yellow plastic
container. It was almost completely empty, but he poured out a bit
onto the lid. The oil was opaque and orange-red, with sparkling
suspended particles. It wasn't very viscous.
"Pastor Kadie," Allan wore his questioning look again, "I have a question."
"Yes?"
"Who lived here 100 years ago?"
"Ha! Well, I don't know. They say the Limbe, the Limbe at the coast,
told the Kono to come here and wait, and so Kono, it means wait. Wait
for what, I don't know!"
Soon after we set out. We weren't sure about the plan, so we thanked
Pastor Kadie profusely before we all began to walk out together. I
turned to Allan. "I really love it here. I would love to spend a day
here."
"Yeah, there's something very special going on in this place."
Not ten steps out of the clearing we stopped. "This is cocoa tree."
Pastor Kadie motioned.
"Oh! Wow, a cocoa tree..."
The cocoas were dangling from the branches like Christmas tree
ornaments. On the tree they were a frosty green color.
"Cocoa tastes like sweetsap." Katie was comparing cocoa to another
alien fruit we'd tried. She thinks it's also called cheremoya. If
someone smashed a cheremoya on my doorstep I would think that aliens
were invading. But the insides of the fruits look similar – white,
with a translucent juice.
"Pastor Kadie, does it like sun, or shade?" Allan's baseball cap was
very similar to Pastor Kadie's.
"Well, it likes both. Too much sun, and the breeze blows the fruits
down, but too cold, and he gets black pore disease."
Katie missed what he said, so I explained it back to her. Then she
said, "So, are we going to ask him the rest of our questions?"
"What questions?" I meant which questions.
"The ones we were planning to ask!"
"Oh, well, like which ones? I feel like a lot of my questions have
been answered."
"Well, like what exactly is the yellow oil?"
"Oh... I guess I don't know that."
We followed the pastor up the hill, out a different path than we
entered. When we reached the top, we were on the road again, a ways
above the vehicle.
'Now we will talk. We will arrange the trees." Amhidu told Allan,
Katie and I. I guess we were giving down payment on the trees without
fully deciding which ones we would buy. Okay...
Sahr Bindi, Eddie, Amhidu and Pastor Kadie conversed rapidly in Krio.
I wasn't listening. I was thinking about the giant tree in the middle
of the valley, currently obscured by brush, and looking at the palm
trees right in front of us. Did they really hold the key to financing
the clinic? Were we really going to turn the fruit into chloroquinine,
via plastic jerry cans and loading docks in Freetown? Local lore holds
that the palm oil is an antiseptic; that it heals wounds. Allan put
some on his cut earlier, and had told us that it stung a bit. I wish I
had asked Pastor Kadie about that.
Someone picked up that they were discussing numbers, so I blinked away
my reverie. "Wait. It was 60 per acre?"
"Yeah," Allan agreed.
"But using hexagons, we get 15% more. So," we get 15% more in the same
area, while keeping the minimum 30 feet between trees.
"So 70?" Close enough. "Okay, 70. And add 20%, for the ones that won't
take when we plant them. So 83 or 84."
"That means we need 840 for 10 acres."
"Right. Amhidu,"
"Yes?"
"Make sure you get 830."
"Okay, I will tell him."
Amhidu turned back and told Pastor Kadie, in Krio. Sahr Bindi took the
increased number of trees to mean that we were now planting over
twelve acres. Eddie seemed confused. Allan, despite his lack of Krio,
picked up on it.
"Maybe we're going to have to explain the hexagons?" I grinned. I
really like the hexagons. After a moment, I added, "I really like this
place."
Katie agreed. And Allan put a supernatural spin on it. "Yeah, let's
just say there's something very good going on over there. And yes, I
do mean weird shit." Alan grinned, his eyes dark in the shade of his
dorky hat brim.
Then Pastor Kadie broke out the price. He must have said it in Krio,
but memory has translated it to English.
"So, the ministry, they sell for 5000. For 4500. At the ministry. But
me, I want to help out my fellow farmer," he clapped Sahr Bindi on the
back, "so I say 3000."
Amhidu translated. "He says 3000 per tree." That's about 92 cents per
tree. I nodded, but no one needed my opinion. Allan nodded, and that
was what counted.
"Wait, Amhidu?" Allan caught Amhidu just as he turned back. Both of
them were well framed against blue sky and green foliage.
"Hmm?"
"Tell him we'll give him 3500. And I'll tell you why." He motioned for
Amhidu to tell Pastor Kadie. Amhidu did. There was laughter, and
controversy.
"Amhidu," Allan was explaining, I guess, "we did that to invest in the
future. This man knows a lot. We need him on the farm advisory board,
and we need his help. Tell him that. Tell him that's why he's getting
3500." Later Allan made clear that this was a one-time deal; that the
price does not go up in the area as a result of this.
Amhidu told Pastor Kadie, and Pastor Kadie seemed overjoyed to help.
"Actually, Amhidu, the first thing we need from him is we need him to
come survey the land before we plant." This was relayed to Pastor
Kadie. I wasn't sure why Allan was talking through Amhidu, because
Pastor Kadie hadn't had trouble with our English thus far.
"That's fine, that's fine, because there is something I must show
you." Pastor Kadie took a pair of long strides out into the dirt road,
machete in hand. He began tracing with his machete. The hairs on the
back of my neck rose. "When you plant the trees, you don't plant them
like this." He had traced out a square pattern, and then circled the
space in the center of the square. "Because this space is wasted.
Instead, you plant them in triangles."
He proceeded to draw the hexagons on the ground, with the tip of his
machete, while he explained them in terms of triangles. I was grinning
maniacally.
gross. Oily and pretty much tasteless. A couple drops of oil fell on
to my fingers, reminding me of the way I get oil on my hands when I
pick out fishbones from my beef at Sunshine, the restaurant. It looked
the same. Allan and Katie were on their second fruits, and Amhidu and
Sahr Bindi were wolfing them down in their speed-eating way. With a
deep breath, I ripped off a chunk. To be generous, let's say I chewed
it for ten seconds before discreetly removing it and dropping it on
the ground. There was a mess of yellow fibers strung across the fruit
where I had bitten off the skin. The kernel in the middle was visible.
"I can show you how we process the oil too." Pastor Kadie's smile
revealed that his lower teeth were curved like a roller coaster.
After a moment, we set off again. My mind was moving much slower,
calmed by the green foliage and wind and palm trees. It was also
calmed by the palm oil taste; this was a real idea. Maybe we couldn't
wreck it by making the wrong decision. The simmering mess of facts and
processes in my mind was receding, slowly. The accompanying adrenaline
was also going.
The path twisted a bit and went up and down a couple of bumps.
Suddenly we emerged into an encampment of some kind. There was a
triangular grass roof held up on thick sticks, and five or six
children. Just beyond the grass hut there was a silver lidded pot
spewing steam above hot coals, and a set of colorful plastic bowls.
Behind that there was a square pit, maybe three feet deep and six feet
by six feet in area. The floor of the pit seemed to be a mix of
flagstone and mud. At the far edge of the pit there was a hole that
drained out into a ditch; the ditch drained into a marsh. We were down
at the bottom of the valley, and I couldn't see the big tree anymore.
The grove of big trees, however, was plainly visible.
"So here," he gestured to the pit, "we process the oil. You have to
plug the hole."
"With this one. Plug with this one." Eddie had clambered around to the
other side of the pit and was touching a big stone that was roughly
the size of the hole.
We gathered round. Pastor Kadie spoke. "First, we boil them. Then we
put them in the pit and we step," There was some excited Krio, then
laughter. Somebody pointed to the boots. "Yes, with these ones."
Pastor Kadie pointed to them. "Then we add water. And the oil, it
floats, so we jus skim it." The last was said with a conspiratorial
smile. The three 'white' people oohed and aahed in amazement.
"And there is the nuts." Eddie pointed excitedly to a giant pile of
nuts beside the pit. He had been explaining to me earlier that even
though Tenera produced 30% more oil, Dura was also good because its
nuts were bigger and thus it produced more nut oil. Pastor Kadie
nodded towards the nuts.
"Yes, you can also crush these ones and get oil. But," he shrugged,
"we don't have time, so we just leave them. You know they want to make
fuel from these ones."
"Oh really?" Allan has a great friendly prompt.
"Yes, people came by, and talked of making fuel from these ones. It's,
it's like a vegetable oil. It's the one you had." He turned to me. I'm
not sure how he knew, but yes, in the town I had been shown the
difference between palm kernel oil and palm oil. The former is brown,
the latter red or yellow. Both are used in cooking, but the palm oil
is more expensive.
Pastor Kadie handed Katie a nut."Thanks." She looked at it, and Eddie
explained to her what was going on. A little girl appeared, cracking a
nut with a rock. She handed it to Katie.
"You eat this one." Amhidu encouraged her. Katie didn't need
encouragement. She ate some.
"Tastes like coconut!" I tried some. It tasted like wood.
"Yeah," I agreed. My tastebuds aren't great.
Then a yellow squash-like fruit appeared in front of me. "Cocoa." I overheard.
"Wait – this is cocoa? Chocolate."
"Yes." Amhidu said. It had a couple of holes in it.
"You dry the one inside, and then you eat it." Sahr Bindi explained.
"Okay,"
"Here," Eddie already had Allan's attention back near the grass hut.
he had some dried cocoa. It was in a small nut, maybe the size of my
fingernail. I tried some and handed it to Allan. It tasted bitter,
vaguely intoxicating, and similar to dark chocolate.
Then we were back at the edge of the pit. Allan took in a deep breath
and prepared to ask a question.
"Pastor Kadie, why didn't they cut down those trees?"
"What?"
"The trees. They're very big, and they're gone all over Sierra Leone.
Why did they spare those trees?"
"Oh, the forestry."
"Yes, the forestry. Why not take those trees too?" Pastor Kadie chuckled.
"Well, the thing is, we have so many. They can't take all them. We
just have so many. But it is nice to still have some."
"They're beautiful big trees. It's really something to think that the
country used to be covered in them."
Eddie reappeared, two palm fruits in hand. One was big and round, the
other smaller and more square. The round one had a strong yellow color
at the base, while the square one was more evenly red. "This one," he
shook his right hand a bit, "is macocaia. You see how there is yellow
there, that means it has yellow oil. This one is tenera," he shook his
left hand a bit, "and it will have a nice red oil, you see, from the
color, the red here."
"The macocaia is these ones," Pastor Kadie motioned to a pile of palm
fruits at the edge of the dirt clearing. They were noticeably bigger.
"They have very big fruits, very big."
"The nut inside, it's very large." Eddie added.
"But the oil, is not so much as the other ones."
Okay, so macocaia gives yellow oil, and tenera gives red oil? And the
difference in yields – that matches up with what we know about tenera
and dura. But does tenera always give red oil, and macocaia always
give yellow oil?
Pastor Kadie's family had faded into the background to watch. A few
times I tried to say hello, but they remained politely impassive.
Sometimes they were pouring water, or washing something, and one girl
cracked some nuts for Katie, but other than that they remained at the
edge of the clearing and watched.
"So Pastor Kadie, do you process the different oils separately or mix
them all together?" Allan asked a question.
"No, mix them all together." Pastor Kadie gave a brief dismissive shrug.
"And the color is red?"
Pastor Kadie nodded. "It's red, dark red. But we have some variety,
the local palm," he gestured back behind him to a medium sized palm,
"this one is not so good, I don't mix it in. It gives a thicker oil, a
different oil, it is not so red."
Dura? Was that old Dura? Supposedly Dura was native to West Africa,
and there was also an improved variety of Dura.
"And Pastor Kadie, why do you plant all four varieties?" Allan asked
another question.
"So I can harvest all the time, all year."
"Oh, so it gives fruit throughout the year."
"Yes."
I briefly conferred with Katie and Allan. "Should I try one last time
to figure out what masangke is?"
"Yeah, it's worth a try." So I turned to Pastor Kadie.
"Pastor Kadie," he looked at me through his small, round glasses,
"where does the masangke oil come from?"
"Oh, masangke. Well, I tell you where the name comes from. There is a
village, a region, somewhere called Masangke. And they were the first
to have the masangke tree, the first to use them, and so the local
people they just call them masangke."
"So masangke is a type of tree?"
"No, masangke is a name for the five varieties that produce the two oils."
I thought for a moment, then turned to Katie. Pastor Kadie moved away.
"So the masangke is..."
"It's a blanket name for all the varieties of tree that make the oil, I think."
"But no, that doesn't make sense. He said it was the five varieties...
of oil? No, that doesn't make sense either," I was confused. Masangke
was the varieties of tree? It turns that is indeed the case – all the
improved varieties of palm are known as masangke. Katie was right.
"This is the palm oil," Pastor Kadie was back, with a yellow plastic
container. It was almost completely empty, but he poured out a bit
onto the lid. The oil was opaque and orange-red, with sparkling
suspended particles. It wasn't very viscous.
"Pastor Kadie," Allan wore his questioning look again, "I have a question."
"Yes?"
"Who lived here 100 years ago?"
"Ha! Well, I don't know. They say the Limbe, the Limbe at the coast,
told the Kono to come here and wait, and so Kono, it means wait. Wait
for what, I don't know!"
Soon after we set out. We weren't sure about the plan, so we thanked
Pastor Kadie profusely before we all began to walk out together. I
turned to Allan. "I really love it here. I would love to spend a day
here."
"Yeah, there's something very special going on in this place."
Not ten steps out of the clearing we stopped. "This is cocoa tree."
Pastor Kadie motioned.
"Oh! Wow, a cocoa tree..."
The cocoas were dangling from the branches like Christmas tree
ornaments. On the tree they were a frosty green color.
"Cocoa tastes like sweetsap." Katie was comparing cocoa to another
alien fruit we'd tried. She thinks it's also called cheremoya. If
someone smashed a cheremoya on my doorstep I would think that aliens
were invading. But the insides of the fruits look similar – white,
with a translucent juice.
"Pastor Kadie, does it like sun, or shade?" Allan's baseball cap was
very similar to Pastor Kadie's.
"Well, it likes both. Too much sun, and the breeze blows the fruits
down, but too cold, and he gets black pore disease."
Katie missed what he said, so I explained it back to her. Then she
said, "So, are we going to ask him the rest of our questions?"
"What questions?" I meant which questions.
"The ones we were planning to ask!"
"Oh, well, like which ones? I feel like a lot of my questions have
been answered."
"Well, like what exactly is the yellow oil?"
"Oh... I guess I don't know that."
We followed the pastor up the hill, out a different path than we
entered. When we reached the top, we were on the road again, a ways
above the vehicle.
'Now we will talk. We will arrange the trees." Amhidu told Allan,
Katie and I. I guess we were giving down payment on the trees without
fully deciding which ones we would buy. Okay...
Sahr Bindi, Eddie, Amhidu and Pastor Kadie conversed rapidly in Krio.
I wasn't listening. I was thinking about the giant tree in the middle
of the valley, currently obscured by brush, and looking at the palm
trees right in front of us. Did they really hold the key to financing
the clinic? Were we really going to turn the fruit into chloroquinine,
via plastic jerry cans and loading docks in Freetown? Local lore holds
that the palm oil is an antiseptic; that it heals wounds. Allan put
some on his cut earlier, and had told us that it stung a bit. I wish I
had asked Pastor Kadie about that.
Someone picked up that they were discussing numbers, so I blinked away
my reverie. "Wait. It was 60 per acre?"
"Yeah," Allan agreed.
"But using hexagons, we get 15% more. So," we get 15% more in the same
area, while keeping the minimum 30 feet between trees.
"So 70?" Close enough. "Okay, 70. And add 20%, for the ones that won't
take when we plant them. So 83 or 84."
"That means we need 840 for 10 acres."
"Right. Amhidu,"
"Yes?"
"Make sure you get 830."
"Okay, I will tell him."
Amhidu turned back and told Pastor Kadie, in Krio. Sahr Bindi took the
increased number of trees to mean that we were now planting over
twelve acres. Eddie seemed confused. Allan, despite his lack of Krio,
picked up on it.
"Maybe we're going to have to explain the hexagons?" I grinned. I
really like the hexagons. After a moment, I added, "I really like this
place."
Katie agreed. And Allan put a supernatural spin on it. "Yeah, let's
just say there's something very good going on over there. And yes, I
do mean weird shit." Alan grinned, his eyes dark in the shade of his
dorky hat brim.
Then Pastor Kadie broke out the price. He must have said it in Krio,
but memory has translated it to English.
"So, the ministry, they sell for 5000. For 4500. At the ministry. But
me, I want to help out my fellow farmer," he clapped Sahr Bindi on the
back, "so I say 3000."
Amhidu translated. "He says 3000 per tree." That's about 92 cents per
tree. I nodded, but no one needed my opinion. Allan nodded, and that
was what counted.
"Wait, Amhidu?" Allan caught Amhidu just as he turned back. Both of
them were well framed against blue sky and green foliage.
"Hmm?"
"Tell him we'll give him 3500. And I'll tell you why." He motioned for
Amhidu to tell Pastor Kadie. Amhidu did. There was laughter, and
controversy.
"Amhidu," Allan was explaining, I guess, "we did that to invest in the
future. This man knows a lot. We need him on the farm advisory board,
and we need his help. Tell him that. Tell him that's why he's getting
3500." Later Allan made clear that this was a one-time deal; that the
price does not go up in the area as a result of this.
Amhidu told Pastor Kadie, and Pastor Kadie seemed overjoyed to help.
"Actually, Amhidu, the first thing we need from him is we need him to
come survey the land before we plant." This was relayed to Pastor
Kadie. I wasn't sure why Allan was talking through Amhidu, because
Pastor Kadie hadn't had trouble with our English thus far.
"That's fine, that's fine, because there is something I must show
you." Pastor Kadie took a pair of long strides out into the dirt road,
machete in hand. He began tracing with his machete. The hairs on the
back of my neck rose. "When you plant the trees, you don't plant them
like this." He had traced out a square pattern, and then circled the
space in the center of the square. "Because this space is wasted.
Instead, you plant them in triangles."
He proceeded to draw the hexagons on the ground, with the tip of his
machete, while he explained them in terms of triangles. I was grinning
maniacally.
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