This morning I got up at about 9h00 and had breakfast because David told me to be ready between 9h30 and 10h00 to go to the market with him to buy all the things we need for dinner. I requested the groundnut soup, and John told us he really wanted couscous. We took a motor bike to Makeni and stopped at this little shop that was tucked in behind some other buildings and bought some beef from a guy who had about five or six dead animals hanging around the porch of his shop for sale. I saw David pay, and I didn’t realize that meat here is about the same price is at home, which is why no one can afford it.
After meat man, we walked to the market to buy the vegetables and so on. David showed me this small back alley that I hadn’t noticed before that leads behind the market that I’ve known since arriving here into this HUGE warehouse packed with tables and piled high with food that people were selling. There was barely room for one person to walk between the tables, but people were turning sideways and forcing past each other to get around. Sierra Leone is no a place for fat people, or for tall people. The average Sierra Leonean is about five foot six for men and five foot two for women, so if you’re tall or have hips or any amount of fat on you, as the average Sierra Leonean probably has about 3% body fat, you will have some trouble getting around. The warehouse smelled like fish, probably because there were people selling fish there, and people were selling everything from vegetables and onions and potatoes to couscous and spices and groundnuts and limes. There were also people walking around with trays containing little plastic bags filled with juice that people could buy and drink. As I had no way of knowing where the water came from, or in what state the container they used to mix the drink was, I didn’t try it.
I asked David if he would help me buy some pepper, which in Africa means something far different than at home. There isn’t any pepper like we have, that is a ground peppercorn. What they have is African peppers, which are small, the longest ones are only about an inch long, and fairly thin. You buy them in little handful sizes, and they are either green or red or orange, and all the colors are mixed in together. David uses this fresh kind, and cuts off the little stems and mashes them up with onions before adding them to a stew or sauce. When I told David I wanted to get some African peppers to take home, but that I didn’t want the fresh ones, he told me, “Oh, well just buy pepper!” When they dry out the African peppers and grind them into a powder, they call it pepper. Imagine putting that in a peppershaker and watching people’s faces, because let me tell you these little guys pack a punch! If you were to eat a whole one fresh, you’d better have a glass of milk handy to put out the fire! I figured that I would only get a little of the powder since it doesn’t take much to really spice up a dish. David went to his friend and told me that a little packet containing about two teaspoons by my guestimate was 100 Le, or about $0.02, so I said I’d take 1,000 Le worth. Now I wish I’d have just gotten 2,000 Le worth, but 10 of those little packets should be fine to cook a few things for my family when I get home and figure out how to get either African peppers or something similar back home and use the fresh stuff.
David ended up taking me through all these little alleys and talking to everyone, and they were all so impressed that I knew how to greet them in Timone. They would try to talk to me in Timone, and when I would say, “Uh, I don’t know that much Timone!” They would laugh and just smile at me. David also introduced me to his girlfriend, and when I asked about her he flat out told me that he has a girlfriend and a wife. He seemed surprised that I only had one boyfriend, and that I’m Andrew’s only girlfriend. He told me that, “A man cannot be satisfied by one woman, and women need lots of boyfriends to buy them things and make their friends jealous.” I also found it interesting that when we got to his house because he wanted to introduce me to his wife, he told me not to say anything about the girlfriend. Clearly his wife is not as cool with him having a girlfriend as he tried to tell me.
David also kept telling me that he wants to build a bigger house for his family, and that his family is so poor and they have to rent a house that’s only big enough for them all to stay in one room because he has a big family and it’s expensive and that if I were to see his house or his salary that I was like ‘cry with him’ and ‘sympathize with him.’ But by the time I considered that he’s got a girlfriend that he keeps secret, which is an expensive habit, and that he keeps half or more of the money that Erdi gives him every day to spend on food for us when he’s supposed to spend it all on food for us, I was plum out of sympathy for him. He gets a good salary here, and Dr. Erdi knows he keeps a good portion of the food money but doesn’t say anything, so he makes even more, and he’s got a wife and six kids who work hard farming his land all day and selling the crops. And even so, he wants to beg and make me feel sorry for him and give him money. The mentality that everything should be given, not earned, by the locals here is in my mind one of the biggest reasons Sierra Leone is 180th out of 182 on the development scale. No one is taking responsibility for the situation the country is in, they’re all just standing around and looking to the rest of the world saying, “we need more! Help us more!” I think that the NGOs and charities that are at work here are doing some wonderful things, but it’s time to stop handing out food and clothing and instead start educating people on how to go out, do a job, get paid, and buy their own clothing and food. There is a man who hangs around the hospital who had his leg amputated last year. He still hasn’t paid his whole medical bill for his amputation and care here at the hospital, but he’s telling the hospital and anyone who will listen that they need to sponsor him to get a prosthetic leg. The guy has fourteen children, and none of them are willing to help him pay his medical bills and get a prosthetic? I hope the people in Sierra Leone figure out soon how to take responsibility for their situation, or things are going to be like this for a long time.
After we got back from the market Ashley, Taylor, John, and I played about four or five rounds of euchre. Around 16h30 David called me into the kitchen to show me how to made the groundnut soup, and show me what he’d done with the cucumber and so on. It was a lot of fun cooking with him, but some of the things he thinks about like how malaria works and so on is just so ridiculous it’s almost funny. I guess a lot of Sierra Leoneans believe that eating a lot of spicy food protects you from malaria, that the mosquitoes smell it and don’t want to bite you, and that with all that spice in your body the malaria parasite, once it’s in your body, can fit off the spice enough to survive in your body. I think I’ll keep taking my anti-malaria pill, just in case.
Dinner was early, about 17h30 or so, and then we went into town to trade money, pick up some things at the guest house, and get oil, eggs, and ice cream for the brownie mix that Ashley brought, since we’d decided to make it in celebration of Ashley and Taylor’s birthdays. The money traders did not want to give us the normal rate for the $20 bills we had, which was a problem because John was trading a $100 bill and a $20 bill, I wanted to trade a $20 bill, and Ashley wanted to trade $100 but it was all in 20s. Erdi and I tried to haggle with them, saying that they could either trade all of it at the normal rate with us, or we would go somewhere else. We eventually got them to give us the normal 4400Le per USD for the $100 bill, but had to take 4300Le per USD for the $20 bills. For me it was only a cut of 2000Le, but for Ashley it was a cut of 10,000Le. We figured we wouldn’t get a better rate, so we took it. Erdi wanted to drop by a friend’s house and give them something, but didn’t know if they were home, so she let us out to wonder around the market. It’s always cool to look around, but everything was closing up because it was the end of the day, so it was a little less exciting than usual.
After a quick stop at St. Mary’s, we went back to the guesthouse and mixed up a batch of walnut brownies and headed to Steve’s to use his oven. When we got there he had about four guests over, as well as himself and the other two people who live there with him, so they were also excited for the brownie ice cream sundaes. After a couple beers the brownies were ready, but when we started to serve then and tried to put ice cream on them, we found that the ice cream had all melted from being in the car and in our freezer which wasn’t on too long before we got to Steve’s and were able to put it in a working freezer. It was nice and cold though, so we decided to just spoon it onto the brownies and no one was upset. They were great, and after a beer or two more we were all so full and happy that we almost fell asleep on the couches.
After a quick drive back and a call to Dr. ABD, we set our alarms for 7h30 so we could head for the beach by 8h00.
This post is dedicated to Matt-man, the birthday boy. Happy 19th, Bud!
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