I have been on break from school for the past couple weeks and have traveled around a lot. The first weekend there was a big birthday party in Freetown I went to. It was for one of the girls in Salone 3. T-shirts were made for the party; they are great! There was also a
After this, I headed to Bureh and relaxed on that beach. I've said before how great this beach is. Again, nobody besides us and the beach bum surfers that run the place were there. Bureh is always paradise.
I had to go home a couple days later in order to run the chemistry WASSCE practical for the seniors. The week before I had to run the physics WASSCE practical. I electrocuted myself with 230V AC. That was pretty bad but again I'm still alive. Running these things was really stressful for me, but everything ended up going okay. The official examiners that came ended up being entirely incompetent and I was able to basically help my students as much as I wanted during the practicals (labs). In America the stuff I was doing would have gotten me in big trouble. The students told me the examiners didn't understand my english and so they didn't know I was basically giving answers to my students the whole time. I think it was pretty obvious what I was doing and they just didn't care enough to get up from their chairs.
Some people will say this was wrong action on my part but you have to try to understand how the system here is. The exams are almost less testing the students' abilities as much as they are testing how much they have been 'helped' by their schools wanting good results. In an ideal Salone, there would be total honesty involved in this hugely important examination (it decides whether or not a person can go on to university or not). I have to face reality a bit and try to put my students on level playing field with other schools. It is no fair to them if everybody else cheats and they end up with a low score just because I wanted to be the honest American. Saying this, I still did less than I think most schools do in order to give their students unfair advantages. I consulted the rest of the teachers and they all told me it would be unfair for my students if I didn't do this in the Salone style. I am a little nervous saying these things on my blog, but it's no problem.
After the exam I started construction on this big oven at this guy Otem Pottery's house. He has experience in masonry and ovens, and I had the initiative to experiment with building an oven of my own design. So now that oven is pretty well completed. I think it is probably the most architecturally advanced structure in my village. I kept in mind principals used in these ovens called rocket ovens. It basically involves making the heat flow over the walls of an insulated inner furnace. There are three layers. The furnace is floating on some bricks inside of the secondary wall which is spaced a couple inches from the furnace on three sides. The front side is sealed and has a passage all the way through into the inner furnace. The design I had looked at was using a big metal box you just set on top of some pillars, but this is Africa so we built the thing entirely out of bricks and mud. This proved to be really challenging. Otem was able to make an arched roof to seal the oven, and then he made another arch with the secondary wall that was similar with the inner furnace and allows the heat to pass over all of the furnace surface. The outer wall is just mud break, and all of the empty space inside is filled with dirt to provide insulation and support for the whole structure. It looks like a big square box with a cone. I'll put up some snaps. It seems to work as intended, but we haven't baked any bread yet. I am a little worried about how much wood it is going to take to heat up all of the inside. There is just a lot of mass to heat up, but if it is well insulated I don't think it should take too much wood.. I am thinking it is going to be something we have to warm up in the morning and then use all day because it will stay super hot and we don't want to waste the heat stored inside all of the brick and dirt. We will see. I am just really hoping it isn't a failed experiment and I have just used a lot of the guy's resources to try to improve on something they already have a design to do fairly effectively. In America it is okay to do experiments like this (it didn't cost a lot besides the clay bricks). Here, people will be upset with failed experiments.
When I left again the oven wasn't quite finished, and now I have come back and Otem has built the secondary wall around the furnace. I left for Bo to see my host family. Everything there is good and I had a good visit with them. I wish they were a Themne family (they are Mende), but it is neat to see both of the tribes. In Bo I met up with a girl in my group, Rebecca. We hung out in Bo for a day and woke up the next morning at 3 to catch a taxi going to Freetown. Waking up and being out at the witching hour doesn't exactly help our status of being witches. I walked to her house under a full moon and was tailed by packs of dogs for half the way. This was really scary. One of the packs was these four dogs, and one was nipping me on my ankle. I tried to stay calm and just keep walking quickly out of the neighborhood. I was so afraid I was going to get bit, but I gave them no reason to bite me so I was okay.
Rebecca and I left in this car and had a frigid 4 hour drive to Freetown. I've never been so cold in this country. We got to town and went to the national stadium for this west african cultural fair thing. There weren't many visitors there, just the vendors sitting around being really bored trying to get us to buy things. There were a lot of west african 'medical doctors' selling remedies for various ailments. Blindness, worms, incontinence, penis enlargement, making your man want you, etc. I tried to take a picture of one booth but the people got really upset with me. I shrugged and turned around to snap the other booth selling the same stuff and the person I initially tried to snap yelled over to them and told them I was trying to take pictures. This man was really pissed off so we backed off and I ended up with no pictures. I don't understand the taboo with pictures. The west africans we met were much more rude than most Sierra Leoneans you come across. They made me appreciate how friendly and willing to help foreigners Sierra Leoneans are. Having a girl with me helps a lot I find, too. Most of the merchants seemed pretty successful and tired of being in a place like Sierra Leone. I am only just now realizing how truly backwards, poor, and dirty this place is. Most other Africans even have a lowly opinion of it.
After the fair, we went to the downtown area and ate at this place full of white people and snobby rich Sierra Leoneans that was the closest I have gotten to a legit western restaurant. I had a delicious philly cheese steak. I bought a bunch of Themne books to hopefully learn from. All of the books, even the first level one, is entirely written in Themne, so it might be a challenge. I look forward to learning to read Themne, though. Right now I can understand just a little bit of it and have to sound the words out to recognize them, but it should be fun and I think maybe really helpful.
We also went to this place called the big market which is this two story building packed full of expensive cultural items. I've never seen so many baskets, lappas, country cloth blankets, tribal masks and other stuff. All of it is really cool. A few of the merchants travel around the country and buy these sacred objects from the chiefs to sell them to rich people. There were even very cool and artistic bronze statues that had to be at least a century old. I don't see many artistic cultural items here, so this was really interesting. I might buy one at the end of this, but it is quite an investment.
We then traveled to another town and stayed there the night with a couple other people. None of us were the volunteer that actually lives in the place. We rode in the back of a tractor. It was nice, but that is the end of my vacation outside of my village!
Now I am back. I have been running errands all day and am continuing to be busy. I want to cook some thulla and buy the pan for making the roof of the oven. I'm not really looking forward to school starting back. Easter is Sunday. I'm looking forward to partying and dancing with devils! Independence day is the next weekend. I'm looking forward to more partying and dancing!
I have told the story without much of the feeling and inner thought. I need to stop having such separation between posts. So much happens all the time and I am always busy. All of us have really enjoyed the break. At the beginning I was excited but afraid for something bad to happen. This is a relatively common feeling. I have never felt so much fate in my life. I feel like my life is somehow in the hands of God. This place makes you more religious, I guess. I tend to think of God as the ridiculous emergent and abstract machinery of reality rather than some dude. Muslims have sayings that are highly fatalistic that seem to at surface fit the situations faced in this place. Why are some people at the absolute dirty bottom and others are able to have a good life? I don't really know why, but these thoughts come into mind when you see the disabled beggers here living in the horrible slums of the major city of one of the poorest countries in the world. The slums are unimaginable by American standards. Many people here are living lives unimagineable by Americans. You should feel lucky! You were randomly 'selected' to be one of the few humans to have enough valuable paper to have access to my blog!
How do I speak about things without using the vocabulary of fatalism? Transport here is dangerous. Every time I get into a car I think today is the day I might die. If I get out of this place without a scratch, it must just be because the universe (God) just doesn't want me to die yet. I even feel more okay about dying. I see death almost every day. A dead puppy in a dirty gutter, a dead chicken in my backward, standing around a still flaming crushed taxi on the side of the road silently with a large group of people. It doesn't really make too much sense to the human brain desperately trying to rationalize everything. It must just be because God wants it to be that way, right? I am okay dying tomorrow; I'll just try to live well with what I have been given today. If God says yes, which mortal man can say no? I'll survive, Inshallah. I won't be traveling for a little while, so unless God decides it's my time to randomly contract a terrible disease and die a miserable death tomorrow, I'll probably keep you posted on my life. I'll be trying my best to take my life out of the hands of a cruel and unfair God. I hope he won't get me for a good number of decades.
What else? I'm happy, but pondering whether or not I should be given my situation. I have always been a resiliently content individual able to be happy even without people around and that is proving to be of great benefit for me here. A lot of the group seems to be falling into a bit of pessimistic malaise, especially now that we are having to go back to our jobs. I'm trying to stay strong and keep doing cool things. It's been almost a year. I can do another year, no problem. A nice girl would help me get along, but I can survive without one. This job doesn't seem conducive to having a happy and healthy relationship. Everything seems to drive one to find outlets and attachments.
I think everything about my life has changed. I don't think the same about life at all. I have been exposed to a different way that people live. I always knew it was there but I was too busy encased in my own phenomenal experience. Life is less valuable here. I still want to do what I am good at, but I won't be able to shake Africa from my mind. Everything that happens to me in America will be a blessing. This place is ridiculous, beautiful, sad, exhuberant, energetic, full of change, hopeless, all at the same time. We are surviving by the love of our brothers and sisters.
I am headed now to go get my bobo to tote a few sheets of pan for me so we can finish this oven before the rains come and dissolve all of the mud brick.
I ought to mention the current water crisis. I don't even really have enough water to wash dishes and I am struggling to have enough water to drink. Bobos have to walk like an hour to fetch water for me. I hope it rains soon!
