Sierra Leoneans went to the polls today. That was how my story started anyway. I was up and out by 7, when voting should have started, but in the school where the Vice President was going to vote, ballot papers still hadn't arrived at 10am. Tempers were frayed.



The VP did arrive, and people in the queues told him, get to the back of the queue, we want vote. So he went away again.



Eventually, people started to get their votes in, often queuing in the rain standing in muddy fields for hours at a time with probably very little warm food to keep them warm. Whoever says Sierra Leoneans are "slow in their march to democracy" is wrong. Sierra Leoneans, just like the Africans in the four other countries I have reported on elections in, are much more politically engaged than I am, for example. It just isn't always the man on the street who gets heard when he talks.



At lunch time, we decided to go out of the city to a place called Waterloo, where all we did pretty much was visit the Sata de Yum restaurant and eat a plate of acheke: pounded cassava with chicken, potatoes, egg, salad, cold baked beans, tomato ketchup and mayonnaise all in one bowl. Delicious! I just googled acheke and was told:

"Acheke is really significant in Sierra Leone and to its culture. It is important because it strengthens an individual and keeps one going for a long time, without getting hungry."



I ate 8 hours ago. I am still not hungry.

Next to the restaurant was the USA Big Time hair salon, a wooden chair in a concrete room with a tin roof where a young girl was being subjected to a hair cut by a man with a pair of large paper scissors. Wearing a pinny, he first hacked off her hair literally to within an inch of its life, then he used a razor blade, cleverly slotted against a comb so that the teeth of the comb picked up the hair and then the blade sliced it off, to shave off the rest. He offered to do mine. I declined.

On the way home we stopped for petrol. Unremarkable, I know, except...



It was such a great petrol station. The young pump attendant pumped a handle so that the petrol rushed into a glass chamber which could hold a gallon, and then the pump went into the tank and it all gushed out. Magic.