Trips, Travel Journals, and Photos

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2006 Trip #1--Travel Journals with Photos

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"Sierra Leone Journal: Two Weeks in the 2nd Poorest Country on Earth"

                          
by Richard Jewell
9999 Words & 31 Photos in 7 Parts.
Scroll down or click on the 7 parts below.
                            

Entry I: Days 1-2, May 7-8 (Su.-M.), 2006.  London. 

            We are headed for Sierra Leone today, a coastal West African nation of about 5 million people in a country the size of South Carolina.  It is ranked second-lowest in the United Nations Poverty Index --having moved up recently from last, thanks to its new outlook, lush vegetation, and rich resources--diamonds, ores, forests, and fish.  Long a slave-trading city, in 1792 the capital, Freetown, became one of Great Britain's first West African colonies.  It declared independence in 1961.  English is its official language; "Krio"--an English-polyglot dialect--is the unofficial one; and Mende, Temne, and other tribal languages dominate in the countryside.

            Why is it so poor?  Sierra Leone's great contemporary tragedy is the civil war it suffered in the 1990s, one of Africa's nastiest.  The death toll was, according to various estimates, 60,000-120,000.  The Sierra Leone Atlas (Macmillan Ltd., 2004) says one-third of the population was displaced and another 300,000 fled to nearby countries.  Rebels sold raw diamonds for munitions to the infamous Charles Taylor of Liberia next door, and systematically inducted children as young as six, turning them into drugged child soldiers and ordering them to chop off the hands and limbs of 8000-10,000 people.  Peace--and democratic elections--were restored in late 2001 and now thrive.

            First we fly overnight from Minneapolis to London, setting our watches six hours forward.  I sleep four hours in my seat while movies play on screens overhead: Peter Jackson's King Kong, a story of Africa that some critics call racist, and Cheaper by the Dozen, a very American Steve Martin comedy about family. 

            As we travel, it is good to talk with others in our group of fifteen.  I expect we'll get to know each other well during our two week trip, as bonding is stronger when you are share something intense.  

            Who are we?  While most (but not all) of us attend a big downtown Minneapolis Protestant church—Plymouth Congregational—we're more specifically an older group of economically-comfortable, sometime-world travelers who love this chance to actually stay in three African villages—most for the first time—and help.  We are short-term missionaries.  In The New York Times Magazine, award-winning journalist Daniel Bergner provides totals suggesting that at least 500,000 missionaries per year work in underdeveloped countries, about one fourth in Africa.  Some proselytize; others do good works.  Proper Congregationalists that we are, we form study committees.  

            My wife and I and a third person, all of us college teachers, are, for example, the Education Committee.  The three of us will talk with schoolteachers in the three villages and survey parents about their children's schooling.  When we return to Minnesota, we will gather our data, make a summary for the larger group, and with this group make decisions.  Our committee and the others—Water, Health/Psychology, Food, Income, and Demographics—are named for key Qualities of Life.  Each of us has a three-ring binder showing all our plans and questionnaires, with our Vision stated in front: "Working in close partnership with our friends in Jokibu, Pujehun and Foindu," we will "eliminate extreme poverty so that the 5000 people in the villages have adequate food nutrition and clean water, and good health, education and economic opportunity," and we will "measurably improve each key Quality of Life standard each year."

            Our recommendations will lead to action.  Already, our overall group, partly from the church and partly not, has given almost $200,000, most of it so far for corrugated-metal roofs at 500 each.  When villagers use these instead of temporary U.N. tarp roofs or traditional thatch, walls no longer need yearly repairs or replacements because of damage from the heavy tropical rains of more than 120 inches per year.  As a result, people can spend much more time farming.  We also have provided tuition scholarships for almost 80 junior and senior high and college students this past year.

             In London's Gatwick Airport, sleepy but excited, we next check in for our flight to Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital.  The airline tells us we should place locks on our bags: no one can predict what Freetown's luggage handlers might do.  

            This reminds me of our visit to our daughter Jess and her husband in Niger, Africa, four years ago when they worked for the Peace Corps.  Before we arrived, she emailed, "Imagine Bill Gates has decided to move next door to you.  That is what it feels like to African villagers when you visit."  When my wife, Ann, and I arrived in Jess' village in Niger (then the second poorest country in the world; Sierra Leone at that time was first) we found that village women were too destitute to buy even a simple $2 flour sieve, a luxury item.  The U.S. Department of State estimates that in Sierra Leone, the average 2005 GDP (gross domestic product) per person was $209.  This means an average family of eight might produce $1600 per year.  A typical city porter might thus earn $4 per day.  The laptop on which I now write might cost his family its income for a whole year.  

            So, as we prepare to fly to Freetown, I imagine myself as a porter briefly carrying a computer costing a year of an average Plymouth Church family's salary, benefits, and investment gains.  Plymouth is not a poor church, so let's call it $150,000.  What if I had a wife, six kids, two orphans, and two grandparents at home, maybe two or three dying?  While the HIV/AIDS rate is only 1.4%, according to the State Dept., the under-five mortality rate is 32%.  Malaria, Lassa fever, and related pneumonias kill or lay people to waste for weeks or months.  For most serious illness, there is no free health care.  According to Time, 1 million people in the world die each year from malaria alone, most of them African children under five.

            I try to imagine one-third of all children in Minnesota dying before kindergarten.  One of my own kids would not be here.  If I were a porter, how bad off would I have to be to steal that $150,000 laptop?  I lock my bags carefully and do not judge.

Entry II: Days 2-3 (M.-Tu.), May 9, 2006.  Freetown, Sierra Leone

            We've arrived!  Some in our group applaud when the airplane touches down late at night.  We traveled with two or three hundred others, most of them Sierra Leoneans visiting or returning home—each bringing the maximum of about 124 lbs. of goods and gifts per person.  

            With all this luggage, the scene in the airport is a madhouse.  Dozens of freelance porters try to move our luggage for us so they can get tips for their work that is their livelihood.  We switch to a helicopter that holds eighteen people and then to three cars.  At each point, more porters call, shout, sometimes nearly beg to help us with our luggage.  In Niger four years ago, I saw two porters almost come to blows over who would carry a tourist's luggage.  While waiting for the helicopter, our pastor drops his billfold from his pocket to the tarmac when he accidentally snags it on the camera he also is taking out.  At least, this is what we think happened.  In Minnesota, with luck, someone might have turned it in.  In big-city Africa, the billfold's $500 in cash is a handsome tip—a couple months' pay—for a quick-eyed porter.  

          

Four 5th-grade girls at Foindu Primary School.

            Outside the helipad building in Freetown, as porters rush us to cars, Ann and I notice a pretty young woman in a close-fitting dress standing where people transfer to vehicles.  She seems to have no specific role or job, but she smiles invitingly at each Western man in turn.         

            Normally, a West African woman does not so readily offer a smile to strange men.  Muslims are 60-75% of the population and Christians 23-30%, says Macmillan's Atlas and the U.S. State Dept., with religious leaders of both often espousing 19^th century ideals about a woman's place.  

            It is a difficult place.  The childbirth rate is 6.23 per woman, there are mouths to feed with too little food, and often the family has one or two orphans and elderly parents to care for.  Female circumcision also is rampant here.  According to UNICEF, female circumcisers make a living by excising the tip of 90% of adolescent Sierra Leonean girls' clitorises.  Rates are even higher in the interior.  This young woman, however, could be a Krio—one of 60,000 descendants of freed slaves from Great Britain, America, and slave ships on the high seas who settled in Freetown.  They do not practice the ritual.  I wonder whether she is able to smile at men so freely because she has not been cut.  Either way, she likely is a prostitute.  Part of what suggests this is that she looks like a student.  All secondary schools—junior and senior high combined—charge tuition or fees like colleges.  Only a few families can afford them.  According to the U.K.'s Sunday Times, the nongovernmental organization Save the Children estimates that in a nearby capital, Monrovia, Liberia, 60-80% of secondary girls sell themselves for sex. 

            Other Sierra Leoneans are very gracious.  From airport to hotel to our rooms, professional porters and hotel workers offer us warm smiles, handshakes, and hellos (even a few high fives).  Most are male, but the hotel has two female managers who, though properly circumspect, also make us feel welcome.  My first question upon meeting all of these friendly people is, how in God's name could such a horrible, violent civil war have erupted in this land in the '90s?  Its leaders beguiled children and young men to chop, maim, and kill tens of thousands.  I remind myself that in every country, including our own, a minority who love violence and pure power hide secretly among the peaceful majority.

                

Downtown from the Atlantic Ocean.

          

Inside this Freetown market is a maze of passages filled with small booths.

            Our first full day in Freetown, we go sightseeing.  We drive by the new UN compound being built on a far hill overlooking Freetown.  In the past, embassies were raised in the centers of cities, both a sign of majesty and the ability to blend in, but the latest rage—because of 9/11—is to build them as distant fortresses.  Ours looks like a fancy fortress prison.  Three in our group make the mistake of taking pictures of the construction site.  A tall, burly security guard separates these three from the rest of us and watches each of them erase the digital images. 

            We escape this embarrassment and head for two marketplaces.  My wife, Ann, and I were in such markets four years ago in Niger, but most of our group has not had the experience.  We walk down a pitted pathway with crowded shanty booths on both sides shading the sun.  We pass by a million colors and objects; their sellers swarm forward to lure us to their wares.  Most are cheap Western and Asian imports, but some are interesting handcrafted items and beautiful swatches of cloth.  After one glance at skin, clothes, and ages, sellers quote us outrageous prices.  If they get lucky, we don't bargain.  Those of us who know our business haggle.  In Niger, our daughter made it a point of pride to try bringing all offers down to 10% of the original.  Some merchants, she said, are disappointed if you don't argue—the process is as important as the price.  

            One time, after haggling for a beautiful handmade cane for 30 minutes—with much emotional hand waving and fortuitous expressions of poverty on both sides—she came to us, apologetic and dispirited, because she could only bring the cane maker down to 20%.  Comforting her was more difficult than buying the cane.  

            Mostly today our group members learn Market Survival I: look at the displays from the corners of your eyes, shake your heads no, make no eye contact, keep walking, and if you want something, come back later, acting very reluctant, especially if you have fallen in love with it.  Beside the market is a rough but pretty park and basketball court where the teams welcome two of our own group's tall guys, one on each side.  The rest of us stand under a huge, unfamiliar shade tree, wave, and cheer one side or the other.

            Just before we are done, my wife, Ann, buys five bananas for one thousand Leones—about 33 cents.   The seated woman who takes her money is one of the quieter market sellers, waiting for customers to come to her.  When Ann hands her an Le 2000 note and asks for change, the banana woman unwraps a double knot in her long cloth robe, takes an Le 1000 note out of the inner knot, and hands it up—a typical cash transaction by people with no pockets or registers.  Then, as in markets I've seen in Niger, we must cross a muddy street of seeping water that smells like sewage.  Even so, stalls crowd each side.  I wonder if their vendors are the poorer ones, forced here because of the stream of waste.

            We return to our hotel.  It is the nicest in Freetown, a palatial compound surrounded by razor wire where each large room costs us $150 per night, double occupancy—the equal of three weeks of wages for the average Sierra Leonean.  It is as if one of us in the U.S. were staying in a room costing $9000 per night.  From the balcony of the dining room, we can look out over this entire city of two million people and the warm ocean beyond.  I find myself comforted that we have the money to be so safe and cared for, but uncomfortable in many ways that I am, these next few days, among the wealthiest 1% in this town.             

                              

2000 people surround us in Jokibu in welcome.

                  

Grass-skirt dancers whirl at one of the celebrations for us.

Entry III: Days 4-6, May 10-12 (W.-F.), 2006.  Foindu-Maui, Kailahun District, near Kenema, Sierra Leone 

            After a long, dusty, all day journey across most of the country and after two flat tires on our three vehicles, we arrive in Kenema, a small city of several hundred thousand with many diamond-buying businesses.  Sierra Leone has four districts: the western one is controlled by the capital, Freetown, but here in the east, Kenema is the provincial capital.  

            When we arrive, Jeff Hall's local friend, Munir Shallop, gives us a quick but royal feast of Lebanese food.  The Lebanese are the only non-African group who came to Sierra Leone decades ago and stayed.  The State Dept. says about 4000 remain.  Munir runs the construction-supplies company from which Jeff purchases our metal roofs, which Munir then sends on hired trucks to the villages.  In one day, he, too, will join our group in the villages—his first time to do so—and become one of us.  Our drive from Freetown has been mostly in the tribal areas of the Mende, as are the three villages we will visit.  The Mende make up about 30% of the country's population.  (The northern Temne are about 30%, too, with the Krio and fifteen other tribes making up the rest.)  Soon we are on the road again, bumping over terrible potholes for two more hours.  We reach the first of the three villages, Jokibu, on Thurs. evening, May 6. 

             We are all anticipating a big welcome committee.  Instead, we get a solid human wall hundreds deep surrounding the road through the entire village--two thousand people singing, chanting, and waving banners that say, "WELCOME MR. JEFFREY" and dozens of people with white t-shirts saying "The Jeff Project" on their fronts.  

            Our leader, Jeff Hall, was in the Peace Corps here in the 1980s.  After the terrible civil war ended in 2001, he used letters and telephone calls to find some of his old friends in the villages.  They were living in refugee camps sixty miles away or more.  He encouraged them to return to their homes and farms, overgrown by trees and bushes, to clear, rebuild, and re-cultivate.  While about half of Sierra Leone's GDP comes from agriculture (with another 23% is from services, 30% from manufacturing and processing), two-thirds of the population, says the State Dept., engages in "subsistence agriculture" and, in remote villages such as these, almost every family must farm.  Because Jeff encouraged them to return, villagers consider Jeff largely responsible for the remaking of their three towns.  More recently, Jeff and our group have sent over 200 corrugated-metal roofs.  Several large school classes in their uniforms chant a new "Mr. Jeff" song, people press from all sides—we float through a sea of smiling, chanting faces and shakes hands with hundreds, while everyone shouts, "Mr. Jeff, Mr. Jeff is here!"  

            Tired, thirsty, long overdue for a bathroom break, we are overwhelmed.  The joy is so great that several of us who are immersed in this outpouring wipe our eyes.  Who would expect so much love, here at the ends of the earth?  We divide into three groups, each for one village.  Even as our own group of six drives away to another village, we see Jeff carried off over the heads of townspeople to their open-air town meeting hall.  He shrugs comfortably and waves at us to go on.

                             

Our Foindu village host family.  Parents Musu and Siaka are in the back center.

                              

Our hosts' five-room house.  Right is a tarp-covered cooking tent.  Far right is the new concrete latrine.  In front is the well-swept sand yard.

                       

Our luxury 8' x 10' guest room with concrete floor, full-height wood chair and desk, and a new double bed with mosquito net

                                             

Village houses with gardens in front.  House on left has a U.N. tarp roof.

                 

...and the other two have bullet holes in their roofs.  Notice the bullet hole above the blackboard.

                              

Three dedicated, college-trained teachers at Jokibu School

           At our own village, Foindu-Maui, a celebration begins once again for the six of us.  Town chieftains speak, there is a Muslim prayer and then the Lord's Prayer, and then a traditionalist Mende tribe devil dances before us in a brilliantly colored costume and is vanquished so that we are safe.  Then Jeff arrives as darkness grows and tells the leaders that we must be taken to our homes before full dark so we can unpack, and the rest of the celebration in our own Foindu is put off until the next day.  Tired, amazed, with our adrenaline and surroundings (and our bladders) keeping us alert, we are taken to our host families.

            Our host family, Siaka and Musu Brima ("shock'-uh" and "moo'-soo bry'-muh"), a younger family in their thirties with two foster children and five young kids, take us in gently.  Like many farmers everywhere, they are shy and short spoken.  Their faces are pleasant to observe, one round and the other long, their bodies short and thin.  (A "fat" African would in America be thought average.  About 2/3rds of the villagers often have one substantial meal a day in the "hungry season"—the months before the new crops are harvested).  We have two rooms and a big-city bed with mosquito netting, very fancy as almost everyone in town sleeps on the ground with no protection from malaria.  Siaka gives us the padlocks to our rooms and explains that someone will stay awake every night to insure that we are safe.  His concern is about theft—or that we do not accidentally walk in on a thief.  

            He then walks us to the latrine, where suddenly he says a whole sentence in English.

            "Oh, you know English!" I say.  This was not the case four years earlier in Niger, where French was the official language but, in our Peace Corps daughter's village, only three people spoke it.  

            He replies, "Oh yes, I am literate; I went to school."  

            "That is very good," I say.  "I am happy we will be able to talk with each other."  I am relieved that we are staying with someone intelligent with whom I  can talk.  A vocabulary of 500 or 1000 English words can speak an encyclopedia. 

            As we unlock the padlock on the latrine, he and a nearby friend, who also speaks English well, show us the concrete room.  It was built just for our visit.  I expect a simple hole in the ground.  Instead, he has built a wooden toilet seat.  "That is very nice of you!" I exclaim (in Niger, I had learned the "bathroom squat"—you straddle the hole down close and let go).  Then, jokingly, I call the box a "Freetown toilet" because it is so fancy, which delights the friend, who is in college in Freetown.  Three feet away from our Freetown toilet is a quarter-sized drain hole and two buckets of fresh cistern water, along with two cups for dipping.  This is our bucket shower system—you dip and pour, soap yourself, then dip and rinse—which, with a concrete enclosure and relatively clean water, is another luxury.  It all looks very clean.  "Is this new?" I ask.

            "We have built it for you," Siaka says.  Later I learn that this latrine and another like it built for the other four in our group staying in Foindu are the fanciest bathrooms in town.

            And now, twenty-four hours later, as I write this on our second night here, the terrible civil war that I first read about almost two years earlier in Daniel Bergner's In the Land of Magic Soldiers—the book I loved so much that I assigned it in my college classes, which in turn brought Ann and me to Jeff Hall and to this beautiful land—that war is far away.  I now sit inside our guestroom.  Outside, our first tropical rainstorm rages, with a downpour, thunder, and lightning like the worst of any Midwestern prairie storm.  Tomorrow, our hosts will tell us this is mild—just a light foretaste of tropical summer storms.  For now, though, I am glad to have the coolness blowing through our bedroom window, unimpeded by even a screen.  The difference in the air is palpable: the night before, the air was so hot that I lay in bed with each limb stretched to the limit, sweating from every pore.  

            Ann, however, is taking a bucket shower, caught in the latrine by the storm.  Siaka and Musu are concerned, but I know she is an intrepid camper.  She is simply waiting it out.  Soon we will sleep deeply in the cool air, then rise early to talk with our host family.  They will give us fresh mangos, bananas, or even some fried plantain for breakfast.  Then we will walk to the center of town for yet another celebration of our arrival.  

Entry IV: Days 7-9, May 13-15 (Sa.-M.), 2006.  Foindu, Kailahun District, Sierra Leone 

            Our real work in the villages soon begins.  Our village is laid out on a simple grid with two main roads—which I have nicknamed in my own mind as Broadway and Main Street—at right angles.  "Broadway" is a bush path—a dent through the surrounding forest—but Main Street has all the glory of a minor gravel road with potholes big enough to swallow a Volkswagen bug.  Because the six of us in Foindu belong to several committees, we must ride back and forth among the villages each day.  Our SUV driver who has driven us from Freetown, Robert, is a kamikaze bomber attacking each pothole as the six of us, lined up behind him on two benches facing each other, bounce and hold on for dear life.  

            Ann and I have our work cut out for us.  During our visit, our own SLPP education committee composed of the two of us and another colleague, all from Twin Cities colleges, will visit three classrooms in each of the villages' three primary schools: nine classrooms in all.  We also will talk with three sets of teachers; two student unions representing junior high, high school, and college students; three village education committees; and 24 households, which we will interview about their hopes and needs for education of their children.    

            As we visit each school, we find appalling lacks.  One school has no roofs on two-thirds of its classrooms and bullet holes in the other one-third; when rain falls hard, school is cancelled.  In a second, a teacher has 100 first graders in one room.  In a third school, each textbook serves every five students and, through much of the year, there are no pencils and paper.  In this school, I discover, no one has breakfast—at school or at home.  The government pays for lunch Monday and Friday, but even then there is only enough food for two-thirds of the students at one time.  We also discover, after talking with parents and "secondary" students (those in junior and senior high), that only the students in one village are within walking distance of a secondary school--and then the walk is at least an hour.  In the other two villages, even further away, students must actually move to a different town to attend junior and senior high.  

            College students must go much further--to Kenema or Freetown.  The cost of the trip is so expensive that they are lucky to come home once per year.  They must either be rich to afford room and board or have relatives with whom to live.  They eat very little and jokingly call their eating the "Zero Zero One Food Plan"—0 for breakfast, 0 for lunch, and 1 supper.  

            While the per capita GDP for Sierra Leone is $209 per year, most village farmers see it almost exclusively in the form of crops harvested for their own tables.  A little bit, especially palm oil, can be diverted to cash, but not much when your children have one meal each day. 

            Even with such lacks, the teachers we meet are as energetic as any in the U.S. Most are well-trained college graduates, and the curriculum—in English—is demanding with frequent tests and state-mandated final exams.  If you don't pass, you are held back.  I am amazed and humbled, almost to tears, at the teacher dedication and student learning in such conditions.   

            The education interviews of households are equally fascinating.  Each of the three of us on our committee interview an average of eight families.  We try to gather the head of household, along with as much of the family as is there.  Interpreters--often secondary or college students--help us.  We look in particular for a mix of average and poor families, chiefs and the lowly, and widows with children. 

            My own most memorable interview is of a village imam—a Muslim priest.  He has four wives (which is allowed in Islam if the husband can support them, but most have one or two) and seventeen children.  Ten are adopted from his younger brother who was killed in the war.  I assume one or two of his wives were his brother's, too.  He is a big man, strong and Koran bound as priest and father, but I sense he is kind and fair.  After we finish the survey, I ask him for his advice as an imam.  I explain to him first that one idea we have discussed on the education committee is to offer loans to secondary and college students to be repaid to the villages.  "Would such loans be acceptable to Islam if they are interest free?" I ask. 

            He says, "Yes." 

            "What if we charged a small amount of interest?" 

            He thinks, then replies, "I would be uncomfortable with that." 

            "Thank you," I tell him.  "Your opinion will help me as we talk more about this possibility."  We shake hands, the intelligence glowing in his eyes and, I hope, in mine.  Maybe we have connected.

            As we interview, we also, almost incidentally, hear war stories.  We see no amputees but do learn of death.  In Ann's and my host family, the father of the oldest boy and girl, 20 and 15, was killed in the village by rebels.  Other people talk of relatives and friends cut down in front of them, usually by gunfire.  Orphans and war widows are everywhere.  We thought to heal trauma by having one of us, a psychologist, explore therapy for villagers.  However, she found villagers healing themselves.  University of Copenhagen anthropologist Michael Jackson describes this in his book after the war, In Sierra Leone: "Rather, suffering was seen as something shared, and healing was sought not…through words, but deeds."  The people of our three villages work, tell the truth, put aside the past except to remain fiercely determined to make peace last, and take care of each other.  They do so communally.  There is no social security or welfare, so the extended family is all—in birth, life, and death.  The biggest "Big Man" in our own village of Foindu, Brima Swaray, has 30-40 people living under his own roofs, and he financially and materially helps perhaps 40 more.  

            Others like our hosts, Siaka and Musu, are nuclear families, but even they have close ties to hundreds.  Both relatives and close friends are "brother" and "sister."  Both are as blood.

          

Class in Pujehun School

        

Foindu plantation of palm-oil trees

         

Our group leader, Jeff Hall, is made an honorary Paramount Chief.

                

A dancing "devil" wearing bright clothes and bouncing dolls

         

A dancer wearing a traditional Mende carved head.

          

A major gas station along the road.  Fuel oil is stacked in front like a pump.

          

Shredded wheel that prompted the Flat Tire Choir

         

Poolside at the Country Lodge

         

Bunce Island--breezeless enclosure where hundreds of slaves were kept in direct 90-100 degree sun

            It seems to us that most families have seven or eight children, though what we see here may be inflated by the number of orphans, like our own host family's oldest two.  According to Macmillan's Atlas, the average birth rate is 6.23 per woman (but 32% do not survive past the age of five).  In one school where we visit classrooms, I spend much of the hour interacting with 5^th and 6^th graders.  At one point, I ask them about family numbers.  "Imagine," I say, that someday you will be married and have your own families.  How many children do you want to have in your own family?  Please hold up the fingers on your hands to show me how many children you want."  I suspect they understand, but they are so rarely asked questions like this, apparently, that they wait for the teacher to translate it into Mende.  Surprise shows on their faces, but they hold up their fingers.  It is my turn for surprise: the average number is about three.  Now I am really curious: for most of human history in most places, parents have had as many children as possible in the hope one or two might support them in old age.  How do they expect just three children to support them.  Soon after, in an education interview with one of the town chiefs, I get part of my answer.  He is old by African standards, perhaps sixty, the lines of his ebony face are deep, and his posture is stooped.  In response to one of my interview questions, he tells me he wants high school and even college for his ten children. 

            "What if the only jobs they find will be outside of the village?" I ask. 

            He says, simply, like it's as obvious as the gray hairs on his chin, "They will send money home."  Is it possible, I wonder, to create an Africa with zero population growth through better-educated children who have more money for taking care of their elders?  

            Each night as I go to bed, I hold close to my heart all that I have learned.  On this night, after my bucket shower, I return to our guestroom and find myself sniffing my hands and my arms.  The scent is different.  I smell of Africa, cinnamon and damp red soil.  This place gets to you; it sneaks into your pores, fills up your eyes and ears.  Outside, chickens cluck, and on the  recessed front porch near our window, Siaka and Musu talk gently with their children.  In the distance, a baby cries.  Ann kisses me good night, then rolls over to sleep.  I feel at home.     

Entry V: Days 10-13, May 16-19 (Tu.-Fri.), 2006.  The Three Villages and Freetown, Sierra Leone

            Our leader, Jeff, has told the villages they must combine to have one send off, not three.  We are feted through the final afternoon under several gigantic shade trees in a field at Jokibu's school.  

            Maybe a 1500 people show up, along with a phalanx of chiefs and Big Men, a local representative in Sierra Leone's Parliament, the villages' home-grown medical doctor, and even a Paramount Chief from one of the two kingdoms in which the villages lie, all with obligatory short speeches.  Each town's devil dances for us, as do other misshapen figures—the cross dresser, a ghost man, and a penis man with a big stick pushing out underneath his long gown.  Leader Jeff is made an honorary Paramount Chief and awarded his fourth or fifth village-woven blanket.  We are given more presents—Ann and I together now have eight shirts, six of them woven in the villages; two village-woven hammocks; a ten-yard strip of woven cloth; two tie-dyed pillowcases and a bed sheet; numerous addresses; and a photo collection and academic record from a 32-year-old college student.

            As dusk falls, we six from Foindu return there for our real goodbyes.  When the trip began, one in our U.S. group, a General Mills executive, gave everyone a grocery bag full of boxes of granola bars.  Ann and I have saved them, and now we walk the dusty Foindu path to the town square, where six or eight poor children play.  We rip open the bars and offer bite-size pieces.  Soon we are surrounded by 30 excited kids.  The bars disappear.  We hand a small handful of M & M's to each outstretched hand.  The kids eye the candy with confusion: is it medicine?  I eat a few.  Then they carefully taste their own.  Their eyes grow large.  They grin.  We walk away, many of the children trailing us, and hand several plastic containers we no longer need to two poor mothers.  As we return to our host family's home, many children follow us, even though the chocolate and granola bars are gone.  It is a custom to hold hands in many parts of West Africa, except for adult males and females, but it is common to see women doing so and even some men.  Several of the college students have walked hand in hand with me.  In each case, I was the uncomfortable one, the one to first withdraw my hand after a few minutes.  Now, as we walk down the road, so many children want to hold my hands that at one point I am hanging on to fingers and thumbs belonging to five kids. 

            When we arrive at our guest house, we say goodbye to them, walk into the yard, and sit on the recessed front porch to talk with our hosts.  We speak of final things.  "This visit has meant very much to us," Ann and I say.

            "And to us, too," says Siaka.  Musu and the kids nod.  

            "We hope to stay in touch with you and maybe come back some day."

            "You want to come back?" asks Siaka.

            "Very much so," we tell him.

            "That would be good.  We would like that," he says.

            We then give Ibrahim and Hawa, the two oldest kids, final presents: two LED flashlights for studying at night in non-electrified rooms, a backpack for Abraham, and a nice white shirt for Hawa.  We also pull them aside, out of sight of neighbors and younger siblings, and give them each Le 5000 for school supplies.  The money is only $1.67, but to each of them it is like being handed a $100 bill.  Startled, they smile happily, Abraham gives a Mende groan of pleasure, and they nod.  Together they will leave after us in the morning for their twenty-mile walk to school, both with bags of rice to last a month on their heads, their school books and flashlights, and a change of clothes.  

            Ann and I awaken the next morning at five.  The alarm was set, but we didn't need it: the muezzin who sings the 5 a.m. call to prayer is, for a change, directly in front of our house.  He sings part of the call in English, which he clearly has learned for us.  We lie beneath our mosquito net, listening to the sweet, intoned chant, deeply honored.  Around us, our farm family stirs sleepily.  Scents of mango, and palm oil trees, and earth drift in through the open window.  We dress, pull out our packed bags, and say goodbye.  When our SUV picks us up, we sit facing backward, waving hard. 

            At nearly the very moment we leave, a sea change comes to us.  Ann and I experienced a profound cultural shift four years earlier after leaving our older daughter's village in Niger.  We are expecting it, this time.  It begins on our journey back.  This time, though, we are even more disoriented.  Part of the problem is that we have colds but do not know it, yet.  We think, instead, that we are having an allergic reaction to something around us.  I take medicine for it, but the medicine only makes me feel even more spacey.  In addition, this time on the road, Ann and I have drawn the SUV that has two hard benches running  lengthwise on each side and, along with them, the kamikaze driver, Robert.  Robert drives hard and fast over two hours of potholes better suited for cross country motorbike racing.  Being first is something of a badge of honor for drivers, and he speeds far ahead of the other two vehicles, then stops and waits for them to catch up.  At one such stop, I speak for all of us and ask him if he could stay within sight of the others, especially as we already almost did not get through a checkpoint of armed national guards--with no passports on us.  (Later, we suspect we were expected to bribe them, but Jeff is in another vehicle and none of us know the proper etiquette for bribing state police.)  

            Robert replies by chopping the air with his hand.  "We stop," he says, "we stop."  Chop.  "We go, we go."  Chop.  End of conversation.

            All of us are anxious to get back to Freetown, but soon we begin to feel like our trip is doomed.  We start getting flat tires, each necessitating a stop to change it and another stop at the next town to fix it.  Between flats, the front hood of the truck comes unattached at forty m.p.h. and flies up against the front windshield with a mighty "bang!."  One of the people in the front seat said she threw up her arms and screamed.  At another point, we join perhaps ten other vehicles stopped on either side of a huge tree that has fallen across the road, its trunk almost as thick as we are tall.  A lumberjack from a nearby village accidentally felled in the wrong way, and he has spent the previous hour trying to cut a middle section of it, as long as the road is wide.  When he does, people from the stopped vehicles gather on one side and roll the huge cut section of trunk off to the side.  

            The worst moment is when our own driver, Kamikaze Robert, gets upset with one of our tire repair bills.  We are a few miles from his boyhood village, and for him it is a matter of honor that he not be overcharged.  Angrily, he jumps in our SUV and takes off fast.  The garage mechanic, equally angry, hops onto the hood and lies against the windshield in front of Robert.  Though we don't know this until later, Robert--who has already accelerated to 40 m.p.h.--plans to drive the mechanic several miles to the village and pay him the full amount, from which point the mechanic will have to pay someone else the same amount to get back home.  We all yell at Robert to stop the SUV.  He finally listens, and he and the mechanic both jump into the road and yell at each other.  Two of us have to separate them.  The amount of overcharge is Le 5000 ($1.67), and so we pay the mechanic  2000 (.67) and send him on his way, Robert strongly protesting this compromise, and we finally get Robert back in the SUV to drive.  In favor of his side of the argument, perhaps, the same tire goes flat half an hour later.  

            However, I think of two more of Robert's habits.  One is that when he needs to go to the bathroom when we are on the road, he does not walk into the bush or down the road and behind a tree like other Sierra Leoneans; rather, he walks twenty feet away and stands in the road.  Another of his traits is that in towns, the only time he politely stopd to let a pedestrian cross at an intersection (or anywhere) is when she is a young, pretty girl.  Later, Ann and I speculate about whether Robert was a soldier in the civil war.  At the very least, he is an example of the violence and lawlessness that lie beneath the surface, an unhealed blood wound beneath the healing scab of hope and democratic politics. 

            During the repair of our final flat tire--which has completely disintegrated to an almost unrecognizable shredded donut--we gather in the shade between two village buildings and sing.  I should explain that this was not just any singing.  Our church has one of the best choirs in the nation--it was nominated for a Grammy once--and two of our choir members and our pastor lead us.  The rest of us aren't shoddy, either.  We sing old favorites, secular and religious, in two- and three-part harmony.  

            Then another surprise comes: suddenly a villager from this tiny roadside stop joins us.  She is wearing what looks like a well-kept 1960s dark-blue velvet and chiffon prom dress.  In almost perfect English, she begins singing along with our gospel songs and even leads us in a few that we don't know as well as she.  Everyone is smiling and singing, now, and another villager brings us slices of fresh pineapple.  We dub ourselves the "Flat Tire Choir."  A new tire on our wheel, we pile back into our vehicles with smiles and waves to the villagers and especially to the woman who so gladly joined and even led us.  This half hour of tired joy lifts us up enough to endure the remainder of the trip.     

            The last part of our trip takes us along a back road through Freetown, a shortcut during rush hour that takes us alongside a meandering river where many people are swimming, and washing clothes.  City rivers often are heavily polluted in Africa, but people use them anyway, even for drinking water.  Often some of the poorest of city people live by them, police rarely patrol them, and they can be quite dangerous, especially at night.  But it is still daylight and we are elated at being almost back.  Soon we are climbing the familiar hill to the hotel citadel on top, driving through its razor-wire gates, and changing in our rooms.  Not long after, we are swimming, sitting around the pool, and drinking cocktails.

            The next morning, we do a little sightseeing, albeit rather somber.  We take powerboats to Bunce Island, one of the main holding prisons for the Africa-U.S. slave trade, 1770-1820.  Amistad--the book and the movie--is about a slave ship bound from Bunce Island to the Carolinas, where Sierra Leonean slaves were valued because they knew how to cultivate rice.  

            Bunce is undeveloped.  All that remains is ruins, rusty cannons, broken graves, brush, and one historical marker.  We were fortunate to find a team of archeologists restoring it.  They led us on a short tour.  We stood inside the high-walled, airless, sunlit enclosure where hundreds of slaves waited to be stacked in galley holds with little food and water and where mortality rates sometimes rose as high as 90% (though any slaver captain worth his salt usually kept the rate to a "reasonable" 35-40%).  The Gullah people of South Carolina trace their heritage genetically to Sierra Leonean tribes.  

             The island is serene.  Birds call and twitter and the nearby waves climb the shores.  Ancient cotton trees wider than a tall man grow in low spots and at the water's edge.  When they were slightly smaller, two hundred years ago, the trunks felt the hands of slaves and slavers—and the roots the passage of their feet—as the trees now feel us.

            We then return to Freetown and head through the crowded streets to an artisan's marketplace.  It is a two-story building jam-packed with small booths.  

            The downstairs is mostly straw and pots.  Upstairs, Ann heads for the back section, which is cloth.  I go to the front—carvings.  Lahai, one of the central three villagers with whom leader Jeff has communicated for years, walks with me to identify what is Sierra Leonean and even Mende, the villagers' major tribe.  At almost every stall, a salesman reaches out to touch me—the rich white man—stands in my path until I try to walk through him, calls out "Look here!" or shoves cheap tourist junk into my face.  Even when I see good, original work, I must use Market Survival I: walk away the first time, act as if you see nothing you like, and stroll back casually later, acting like you just might, but reluctantly, buy something.  In Niger, our older daughter even taught us to use Market Survival II: walk right by something you like as soon as possible, show no interest, go around the corner, and then describe the item to your daughter; then she, the impoverished young Peace Corps worker, will go back and bargain for you.

            Haggling is everything.  But I am tired of all these hands, the sales pitches.  I wheel and deal myself, giving in so easily that my daughter would be disappointed in me.  Still, the prices I get are excellent by my own standards for three beautiful Mende and Sierra Leonean masks, handsome jewelry from Niger for my ex-Peace Corps daughter, and one old Sierra Leonean cane with people and animals carved all around.  (Later, in Freetown and in European airports, a number of Africans will compliment me for the cane.)  

            As we exit the building, I wonder what Lahai thinks about my spending as much in forty minutes as he may see (and then mostly just in rice and oil) in a year or two  I ask if I can buy him something.  He is hesitant, the one of the merchants suggests he'd rather have the money.  I gladly tip Lahai; he gladly receives it.  This makes me wonder even more about what he and the others from the village must think about the huge amounts of money--to them--that we are spending at the hotel in its restaurant and for rooms.

            I am completely unprepared for what happens next.  While we drive back to the hotel, I sit at a window with my digital camera ready, occasionally snapping a street scene.  Our driver stops in heavy traffic, and a man in a wheelchair and his friend come up beside my door, so close I could touch them.  They say something.  I am literally fresh off the farm—where villagers love having their photos snapped—so I shrug and point my camera at them.  Both men snarl at me, and the man who is standing yells and grabs my camera, trying to wrench it away.  Stunned, I pull back.  The strap is around my wrist, which may be the only thing that saves the camera.  Both men are shouting at me, my friends in our SUV are yelling back, and our driver pulls away.  

            As we drive home, I remember--belatedly--how disable people in Freetown often are beggars who expect money for their picture.  The sheer violence of the episode leaves me hurt and confused--and reminds me how unexpectedly violence can bloom.  It takes me forty minutes--the last twenty swimming laps in the hotel pool--to recover enough to think of contrasts: beggar man, rich American, wheelchair, and pool.

          

From the villages: two college students, back left, and three Big Men

          

Vendor on a busy Freetown street

          

Curb-side fruit and vegetable stands

          

Curb-side food store

             Dinner soon after, while fun for many, becomes a negative exercise of privilege for Ann and me.  Our U.S. group is having a last fete with three Big Men from our villages who have returned to Freetown with us, a handful of the villages' college students in Freetown, and our drivers.  The Sierra Leone Refugee All-Star Band, a reggae/African rock band with a released CD we all own, is playing for us.  I approach the patio wondering whether the villagers with us would quickly trade all the meals, the band, and the hotel rooms for cost of it, huge to them.  I notice one of the college students shivering in the cool sea breeze.  Though I have heard from two of our U.S. people how self centered she is, nevertheless I ask her if I may find sweaters and a coat for her and her friend.  She nods eagerly, and I return to the room to get them.  Ann is there, and she finds a sweater, too.  By the time we return to the party, the only remaining chairs are with the two young college women, one of the drivers (not Kamikaze Robert), and one of the Big Men from the village.  I still feel very tired tonight and not up to the task of communicating with people whose language I don't know and whose English is almost as poor.  But I figure that I--and especially Ann, a whiz at foreign languages--may be able to talk with them more easily than many others in our U.S. group.  Ann sits by the driver and I by the college woman.  On her other side is the Big Man.  College woman is alternately aloof then talkative, distant and then flirtatious.  I discover she was orphaned at the age of fifteen and that Big Man has become her sponsor; she explains in almost exactly repeated phrases several times, almost as if rehearsed, how much she owes him her allegiance while he sits listening to her speech.  

           whose English is poor  difficulty communicating, but I think, That's okay, I think; everyone speaks at least a little English.    Two people in our U.S. group have told me how self centered she is.  Nevertheless, I return to the room to get her a sweater.  Ann, just then ready, comes out with me.  When we arrive again at the dinner patio, all chairs are filled except at the table of this same student, her college friend, one of the Big Men from our villages, and one of our drivers.  Ann sits by the driver and I by the college girl.

            When we talk about books, she asks how many I have.  
  

            "One or two thousand," I say.

            Her eyes and lips grow round.  Then they narrow.  "Give me a book.  I want a book.  I have none," she says.  "Please give me one of yours." 

            I have an extra of Daniel Bergner's In the Land of Magic Soldiers, so I hand it over.

            She looks down at it with a pleased smile.  Then looking at me again, she says, "Please give me more books." 

            "I have no more with me that I can give away." 

            She opens randomly to a page in the Bergner and reads a bit, clearly proud of it.  

            Thinking how the book is a bit difficult even for some of my own first-year college students, I suggest, "You should buy a dictionary.  It will help you read the book."

            "I cannot afford it," she says.  "Will you buy it for me?" 

            "I leave tomorrow morning," I say. 

            "Then give me the money to buy it." 

            "I only give away things," I reply, "not money." 

            Then she and Big Man, seated on her other side, have a short, animated discussion.  She turns to me. "He asks me to tell you he paid for the new latrine at the house where you stayed," she says.  "It cost 100,000 Leones.  He says to tell you he wants you to pay for it."

            I reel back inside.  All of the latrines built for our U.S. group were a requirement for the host families, and they did not have to be nearly as fancy as ours was.  In addition, Jeff paid every family ahead of time to build a good bed with lockable cabinets and buy a mattress and two pillows, all of which the family would keep and use afterward.  Big Man's request is inappropriate.  It is as if I built a new guest bathroom onto my house and then, after an honored guest used it for one week, I asked him to pay for the entire bathroom.  But though I am deeply surprised, I remain calm externally.  After all, this is a village Big Man and friend of Jeff.  

            "We can make no decisions about such things," I say to him, "until after we return to the United States."  College woman translates this to him.  "I also must talk with Jeff, first," I say.  I look in his eyes.  They are hooded.  Under his lids, his gaze is steel.  I stare back, then casually lean away as if to move on to another subject.  However, the truth is that I don't want to look at him any more or talk with him tonight.  I realize I am rather upset.   

            Meanwhile, across the table, Ann is having a similar conversation with the driver sitting beside her.  Though I am unaware of it, she has been talking with him about his family.  She has heard college woman get a book from me and ask for more.  She has listened to Big Man ask us to pay for our bathroom.  Next, the driver asks her to support one of his children in college.  She dissembles, as did I and waits a minute or two.  Then abruptly--but quietly enough that I do not notice at first--she gets up and walks away.

            Ten minutes later, I go looking for her.  Our food is about to arrive at the table.  I find her by the pool.

            "Do we have 'Rich American' written on our foreheads?" I ask her. 

            "This is their last big chance to ask," she says.

          "Did you leave because you were upset?"  

          She then tells me her conversation with the driver.  And we return to our places at the table to eat.  

            After eating, Ann wants to dance, but I just want to go back to our room.  I agree to stay to dance one song.  We are the first on the dance floor; others quickly join us.  The band plays its signature song, "Living like a Refugee."  Then I leave while Ann stays to dance another half hour.  

            In our room, I cannot put behind me what happened at the table. I sit down with pen and write a numeric version of the angry letter that a person dashes off to vent anger and then throws away later.  In this case, I list each of the items and their cost that we have given during the past week to the villagers.  Ann returns, and we pack our bags for leaving the next day.  But I realize that this is something that may need resolution before we leave so, once the party is over, I go outside again and talk with Jeff.  I ask him whether I should honor Big Man's request. 

            Jeff seems surprised at what I say.  "Tell him no!" he says, sweeping his hand.  "He shouldn't be asking." 

            I may not see Big Man in the morning, so I go to him then and there near the dance floor.  I shake his hand.  I say, voice almost trembling, "I will not pay you 100,000 Leones.  Ann and I spent 700,000 Leones on the three villages by giving people the flashlights, tools, food, and other gifts.  We have paid enough.  Jeff also says we should not pay.  Do you understand?"  

            Big Man appears stunned, then nods hesitantly.  I pat him on the back, and I walk away.

Entry VI: Days 14-15, May 20-21 (Sat.-Sun.), 2006.  Freetown and London

            By the next morning, a good sleep, a memory, and a handshake make the previous evening more relative.  I wake up thinking about times I have been around extremely wealthy people.  Sometimes they and I have had something in common and have talked easily with no bother of difference.  But on two or three occasions I have felt differently.  I remember, for example, when I lived in Little Falls, Minnesota, a town of ten thousand, and met the elderly heiress of a lumber fortune.  She was reputed to be very self centered, and when I met her, I didn't like her one bit.  A predatory corner of my lower brain, a part of me I'm not proud of, silently asked, How can I profit from meeting her?  As I think this, I wonder if many of the villagers, even those who like Ann and me, can't help but hope to profit from contact with us.  I also remember that the West African "Big Man" system fosters currying of favor.  Danish anthropologist Michael Jackson wrote at length about this system and the neediness expressed by so many West Africans in his recent book In Sierra Leone."  "I felt oppressed," he says, "by this mingling of loss and need that I encountered every day, the dashed expectations that so readily lead to recrimination and resentment."  According to Jackson, a Sierra Leonean politician once told him, "'In Africa, 'if you do well, people close to you will hate you."  

           Then, when I walk outside the hotel's front door, Big Man himself walks up to me.  He has what appears to be a genuine smile on his face.  He reaches his hand out.  We shake.  

            "How you sleep?" he asks in Krio, the inter-tribal tongue of Sierra Leone.

            "I sleep fine," I answer.  He nods gently.  I feel that, ever so subtly, he is at once apologizing and gauging my reaction.  We chat a little bit more, and everything between us seems to be back to normal.  We seem to understand each other once again.  And in his favor, I'm sure that as a Big Man, he is facing many of the same pressures that Ann and I and the rest of our U.S. group feel.  Still, though, I'm not sure what to do with this experience. 

            Our whole U.S. group spends a day at the beach, alternately talking, swimming, and processing.  First we summarize our committee findings.  People have complimented our Education Committee, but Water, Health/Psychology, Food, Income, and Demographics have in some ways accomplished more immediate, tangible, and amazing feats.  Plans now exist for the villages to have one or two deep wells each; for each metal-roofed house to have its own rainwater cistern; for a regular supply of medicine in the health clinic, help for the disabled, and a beginning mosquito-net distribution; for a gas-powered tiller (not to mention the three new, very successful peanut grinders and the high-quality chainsaw we just brought); and for Web-based PDF maps of all three villages (thanks to excellent maps hand-drawn to scale during our visit by villagers). 

            We also pray, and we meditate aloud on what we have felt and done.  This is what I need most today—gentle, deep talk.  I have come to know these people better than if we had sat together in church for a hundred Sundays.  Everyone has been deeply affected.  Those who have never lived among third-world people sound a bit stunned.  One says she knew beforehand that the trip would be life changing; now she must go home and make sense of it.  Others speak of being intensely enveloped by African communal life—people, animals, sounds—even in sleep and the latrine.  I speak of how the experience has been richer than my first, in Niger, partly because I built upon the earlier one and partly because Ann and I lived with a family this time—an excellent one.  Ann notes her deeper understanding of the complex interplay of extended family and larger community. 

            Later, I ask Jeff privately whether he is satisfied.  

            "The trip met my expectations," he says.  

            Considering how high they were—a sometimes almost-daily barrage, starting months earlier, of emailed background information and reprints; a multi-committee structure reflecting the recent UN Millennium Project Report; and a trip schedule always filled with work and travel—I figure his words are high praise indeed.  At the end of our beach discussion, several in the group, including Jeff's brother, stand to make brief speeches about the high quality of his leadership.  It is just our group, now, no thousands calling his name or Big Men making him a Paramount Chief.  I find my eyes growing damp more than once, as, I suspect, do others.  Warmly we applaud him.

            Then we are off to the airport.  Our driver is new; he plays loud West African reggae/ska in his new SUV as we barrel madly through the darkened streets.  I suspect one or two others are scared of his driving, but this time the speeding through the night, the beautiful singing and guitar playing, and the comfort of his new SUV make me feel like an elated teenager out for a night spin—a proper final send off.  However, we have a major delay at the airport.  We leave many hours late.  Four are staying in London anyway, but the rest of us miss our group flight to Minneapolis.  We are forced into an overnight hotel then must scatter among different flights on heavily booked carriers.  

            Thus in London our core group breaks down to nine, then to threes, twos, and ones.  The Flat Tire Choir ends, as T.S. Eliot writes in "Hollow Men," "Not with a bang but a whimper."

            Or does it?  As we fly home, I am disoriented, sick, and dark.  I awake from a dream in which fifteen of us are sleeping on one double bed.  This heaviness of soul is how I felt four years ago after leaving Niger.  The Third World got into my bones.  Anxious after that trip for a whole year to do something, I read Bergner's In the Land of Magic Soldiers and began teaching it in two classes per year.  Jeff Hall and I found each other, and he  asked me to join a committee he was starting at church—the Sierra Leone-Plymouth Partnership (SLPP). 

            The more I try to help, the more ways I find.  This is, for me, essential.  According to Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs' highly respected 2005 book, The End of Poverty, in Africa alone 8 million people per year die of easily preventable diseases.  The U.S. yearly spends about 15 cents per 100 dollars on aid to poor countries, but 20-30 times that on the war in Iraq.  I suspect if we reversed these figures, almost all villages in the world would greet us as joyfully as ours greeted Jeff and our SLPP group.             

            Our group probably has literally, not just figuratively, saved dozens of lives by the nearly $200,000 in metal roofs and storage containers we have helped to provide in the past two years to decrease sickness and improve food supply.  Jeff alone likely has saved dozens more by strongly encouraging villagers to return to their farms after the civil war rather than wither away in crowded refugee camps, and many of the roofs we have bought are through donations from his personal friends.  

            Our effort is about much more than just saving lives, though.  Twice now, in remote African villages, Ann and I have found villagers equal to us in basic intelligence, initiative, and love.  The $500 roofs, clean water, 30-cent mosquito nets, simple medicines, and $10-per-month high school degrees--all of these help our Sierra Leonean villagers have a better chance, greater hope, and more productive work.  I remember how Eldridge Cleaver, co-founder of the notorious Black Panther Party in the 1960s, once said that the people he represented just wanted to have their own little house with the white picket fence.  The American dream is the worldwide one: a simple, peaceful, stable life.  

                                              

Each village has at least one Christian church and one Muslim mosque.  The church above is Methodist.

        

A woman in her garden.  Increasing soil fertility helps.  Access to clean water and health services also is vital.

                   

Jokibu Student Union representatives of village secondary and college students.  Literacy also is necessary.

Entry VII, Postscript: Days 16+, May 21-29, Sun.-Sun.,  2006.  Minnesota.  

            We arrive in Minneapolis on a Sunday night, walking into a home that was quite normal when we left but now seems amazingly clean and well appointed.  As I turn on the tap, I remind myself not to drink from it--then remember that the water is safe once again.  Outside, the weather seems frigid—55 F. at night and 70 by day.  I remember our village friends who followed us to Freetown shivering in the 75 F. breeze off the ocean at night; they donned all the thick sweaters and jackets we could loan them.  As I unpack, I find thick, red African dirt coating everything.  Even after showering, I still smell of it.  This comforts me.  When we crawl in bed on almost two feet of padding, I think of our two-inch mattress in Foindu and the mosquito net over it.

            Our first several days back, Ann and I are hit hard by our African colds.  We now know what they are.  After they leave, a hollowness remains.  Our hearts are in Foindu but we are surrounded by a luxurious alien landscape.  Another member of our U.S. group in Foindu tells us she awakens every day thinking she is still surrounded by the village.  

            Six days later, we attend our first church service since returning.  The small Methodist church we attended in Foindu was, by comparison, a tired little shed on a dusty rural road.  Here in our big downtown Minneapolis church, the ceiling arches soar, the professional singers are perfectly on key, and everyone's clothing looks rich.  Yet the service is no sweeter than it was in Foindu.  Even so, I suddenly find in the middle of the first song--"For All the Saints"--that I cannot sing.  On each note, my mind is filled with the village and its people.  My eyes get wet.  And I'm even worse when I try to join in with the Lord's Prayer.  With each word I recall saying it in the village church.  

            Our pastor, who went with us, is preaching.  Though he's been at the church for ten years, he and I had never talked much—no surprise, with several thousand members.  On our trip, we finally bonded.  Curiously, though, it was not about church work or even the seminary degrees we both have; instead, it was more about our both being Eagle Scouts in troops that camped often.  Now, in church, I listen carefully to see if he mentions our visit to Sierra Leone.  He honors it immediately, saying it was "a trip that cannot be processed in a week or even a month"--an event that "stretched all of us."  

            He also tells us how, during the last few days, everyone in the village started calling him a new name.  "Koo-aye," they would call out, "how are you today?"  

            Finally he asked his host what it meant.  

            The father—with a big, kind smile—said, "The Belly."  

            Up in the pulpit now, our pastor shakes his head.  "You can run but you can't hide."  

            Each of us on this trip had such moments.  After the sermon, as we take communion, I offer mine to God for my friends in Sierra Leone.

            As Ann and I leave our pew, we are drawn inevitably to those in church who traveled with us.  Leader Jeff is a few pews ahead, where his younger daughter has tucked herself under his arm.  Others are in back.  As we talk and joke, I feel like real life is briefly reestablished.  Our small group is one of the last to leave the sanctuary. 

            Now, a week later, Ann and I are starting to feel normal.  Together we speculate whether our culture shock this time has been so strong because we lived closely to villagers.  On the other hand, maybe we'll have this problem after future trips to Africa.  The truth for us, at least, is that coming back even from a month-long American camping trip or a great visit to Europe leaves us feeling a bit empty, too.  Going to an African village is like both and more.  

            One reason it is different is that both times we have come back feeling discontented, wanting to help.  Is it possible?  Maybe.  Harvard's Sachs says that in the 20th century alone, undeveloped areas like India, China, South America, and Mexico have used small steps to leapfrog out of poverty in a few decades.  According to Sachs, these repeated successes prove economic progress is not a zero-sum game--one in which some must win and others lose.  Rather, intelligent planning buoys up all.

            Sachs also mentions that almost a century ago in the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted we would someday wipe out poverty in America.  At the time, the prediction sounded crazy.  The then-dominant economic paradigm, laissez-faire capitalism (which turned out to be a contributor to the Depression), excused the rise of the few on the backs of the many in part by quoting Jesus' words, "For ye have the poor always with you" (Matt. 26:11).  The saying itself is true enough, but I remember one of my daughter's early experiences in her village.  She and her husband discovered a man dehydrated and near death.  No one knew what to do.  They gave him a simple solution of electrolytes and water.  A few days later he was farming again, providing for his wife and children.  A simple dollar bag of chemicals saved a man's life and kept his wife and children from becoming burdens to their society.  It didn't hurt that he will always thank Americans for saving him.

            We in Plymouth Church have incomes placing us, on average, at the upper 10% level of U.S. income.  In turn, our country, along with other well developed ones, lies in the top one-sixth in prosperity.  Sierra Leonean families are at the bottom of  the bottom.  They earn perhaps $1 per day—while families at Plymouth average about 200.  Each roof, food container, pill, tool, and cup of fresh water we thoughtfully offer to villagers enable them to place a foot on the first rung of Sachs' economic ladder.  Keynes' crazy dream of ending most poverty in the U.S. took only two or three decades.  Sachs argues we can end worldwide poverty in two decades merely by keeping our promises of foreign aid: developed nations agreed in 1970 to offer 0.7% of their GNP in aid to poor nations; the U.S. gives just 0.16%, the smallest percentage of all developed nations.

            The possibility of ending poverty soon gives me greater conviction when I look to Sierra Leone.  In the Peace Corps, my daughter used to say it's not until you return to your village years later that villagers really know you care.  Jeff has returned twice, the second time bringing fifteen pale friends for a week—something, he says, perhaps never done before in Sierra Leone.  He loves his villagers.  They, in turn, love him and keep all of us in their hearts.   I hope so earnestly we keep them in ours.