Sierra Leone notes

Arriving at the beach, I find I am the only guest. I don’t know why this fact surprises me; I tend to almost always be the only guest when I travel to these places, and more often than not, wish it weren’t so. Still, when other people do turn up, I mostly find their presence annoying.

My bungalow, unimaginative concrete and tin roof, is on the beach. The sea is grey and approaching angry, I wouldn’t swim in it as it is, and the ten young men who appeared when I made my way down a rocky dirt track seemed unwelcoming at first.

But as we chatted on the beach- someone was cleaning a room for me- I realised they are just reserved. I am not used to not being a total hit right from the start, but it’s nice this way.

I have a bathroom in my bungalow, but no water. When I decide to go and see if I can have a bucket of water, I hear a lot of giggling and peep out of my window at the back of the house to see a string of teenage boys at various stages up a ladder, one standing at the top pouring water into a large black water tower ('Donated by Mobil, December 2002'). Realising that they are filling the water tower by hand, the bucket being passed from the ground right up the ladder to the top, and that they are doing it just for me, I go out to tell them I am happy with a bucket and a cup.

The boys all turn when they hear me coming, and scramble down the ladder and gather in a hut nearby, as if they had been there all along. When I tell Francis, the slightly older manager-type person, that I don’t mind having my water in a bucket, he looks disappointed and tells me that he wants to get the water tower filled so that when my friend comes tomorrow, we will have running water.

Oh yes, my mythical friend. The one that was meant to be arriving tomorrow, whose existence would serve as a warning to those men who may have wanted to kill me in the night, that they would be found out if they did something bad to me. And here they are, filling up a giant water tower by hand so that I can flush my toilet. Shame.

*****


Moustapha Savage is my taxi man. He tells me he doesn’t want to drive me to this beach because the road is bad. We drive to another beach, where I don’t want to be, and I make him ask a young guy in the village what the road is like further down the coast. Fine, he says, just go slowly-slowly.

The road is in fact better. Some rocky passes, but even gravel in some places, as opposed to the mud we have been sliding along in from Freetown. The whole journey of fifteen kilometres takes three hours.

When we arrive at the deserted beach guesthouse, and I am confronted by too many men, but I decide to stay anyway because where else would I go?, I tell Moustapha he can leave me and go back to Freetown.

“No, I wait till you settle,” he says, his bony face smiling as best it can, wide eyes white under a navy cap.

Moustapha wishes the British would come back and take over Sierra Leone. Maybe then the roads would be better.