In which I make a truce with spiders

Before I came to Sierra Leone, while I did not consider myself to be deathly afraid of spiders, I still didn’t like them very much and was definitely kind of scared of them. To be honest, I didn't give much thought to potential bugs here before I left, until a friend asked me about it. Even then, I tried not to think about it too much. In the six weeks since I arrived here, I have to say that I have become much more used to spiders. In fact, I would go so far as to say I have called a truce with them. I originally titled this post “in which I make friends with spiders”, but I don’t think I can go that far quite yet. I see spiders here every day. They are in my bedroom, in the bathroom, in the office, in the library, and of course, outside. Some are small, but most are bigger than any spider I have seen at home. Apparently in the bush the spiders can get to the size of dinner plates!

At first they really freaked me out, especially because they tend to come out more at night when it’s dark. This makes them much scarier to deal with. In fact, at the beginning I even avoided getting out of bed to pee a couple of times because I could see there was a spider in the corner by the door to the bathroom. However, they are impossible to avoid. The houses and buildings here are all pretty open to the outdoors, so you can’t keep them out. If you kill one, another will just come along and take its place. Spiders do a good job here – they eat mosquitoes and other bugs that might be in your room, and they aren’t poisonous. I don’t think they even bite. No one here is afraid of spiders and they find it kind of funny that we are. I guess the fact that I am hundreds of times bigger than the spiders and that they usually run away from me makes them easier to deal with too.

All of this, plus seeing them and dealing with them daily, has made me basically resigned to spiders. Eventually I worked up the courage to use my little broom made of twigs to at least poke them out of the way of where I wanted to walk. Now I tend to pay them little attention (although if I see one, I do check if it’s still there later). A spider crawled on my hand the other day when I reached in to the cupboard to get something, and I didn’t even scream :-) Ok, so it was on the smaller side, but I’m pretty proud of myself all the same. I'm even starting to find them kind of interesting.

I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the “friends” stage with spiders. I still wear shoes almost 100% of the time I’m not in bed, and I especially wear them at night, just in case I step on one while walking to the bathroom. And I still shine the light on the ground to make sure one isn’t in my path. But for the most part I have declared a spider truce. As long as they don’t bother me, I am happy to let them go about their little spider lives.

Side note: I wrote this a week or so ago, before Chris arrived, but didn't have a chance to post it until now. However, seeing him see his first big spider here reminded me how far I've come since arriving in terms of my acceptance of spiders :-)

p.s. the spider photo in this post was taken in my room - it's hard to tell the size, but it was about as big as my hand.

On water and power

Yesterday was an interesting day. The chief had a visit from a couple of staff from the UNDP (United Nations Development Program) along with someone representing the embassy of Japan. UNDP is the donor who funded the building of the community centre in Mapaki a couple of years ago, so they came back to see the project and to talk about new projects. It looks likely that UNDP will fund the replacement of pipes so that water can be piped into Mapaki. The water comes from a dam about a mile from the main road in Mapaki. The walk there was beautiful (pictures are posted - link is in the "links" section). The dam was built originally in the 60s or 70s. Water from the dam was carried down to the village via a pipe system (you can see the pipe sticking out in the photo on the right) and allowed people to have much easier access to water, especially during the dry season when water shortages are a problem. However, during the conflict a lot of the pipe, made of copper, was ripped up by fighting forces to be sold or used for other purposes. Since then, the chief has been trying to get the pipe repaired, and it looks like there could be water from this source in Mapaki by the end of this year. Very exciting!

Last night there was the biggest rainstorm I have seen since coming to Sierra Leone. The rain was so heavy, the lightning bright and frequent, and the thunder loud. I find heavy rain here is magnified even more because all of the roofs are made of metal (zinc I think), so the sound of the rain is made even louder when it hits the roofs. Then, in the midst of a very heavy downpour, around 6:30 or so, just when the sun was going down, it started to hail. Yes, you read that right, hail. I didn’t think it could hail in such a hot climate. One of the people I was talking with said this had only ever happened once before. Everyone seemed quite surprised by it, and the kids ran out in the rain picking up the tiny balls of ice. Especially because there is no refrigeration here in Mapaki, ice is really a novelty, so the hail caused a lot of excitement.

If this storm had happened in Nova Scotia, our power would most definitely have gone out! Luckily, there’s no power here to lose! :-) I read an interesting little note yesterday about off grid electricity. The article said (I’ll look for the link and post it if I can find it again) that donors are finally starting to realise that providing central grid electricity across Africa is not going to be feasible (for example, here in Sierra Leone, only Freetown, Bo and I believe Kenema have grid electricity, and even that can be unreliable), and that they need to begin to look at local, off-grid power solutions like solar power, small scale hydro, and other options. The next big revolution in local, small-scale power generation could happen right here in Africa. Interesting.

p.s.  saw a very large centipede in my room this morning - about 6 inches long and half an inch wide. Nice.

A few observations

Now that I have been in Sierra Leone a few days, here are a few things I have learned so far:

- The pace of life moves more slowly here. Despite spending vast quantities of time waiting for people or things in the first few days, I haven’t found myself feeling impatient. Perhaps that’s because I have no sense of all the things that I could otherwise be spending my time on, as I would in Canada. It’s really very nice not to feel impatient, and I’m hoping that Sierra Leone teaches me this virtue well enough for me to practice it when I'm back in Canada.

- The car horn is used differently here. The driving in general is a bit erratic and crazy, and there are usually people and/or animals and/or objects on the road at all times. (I definitely have no plans to drive here by myself at all!) So the horn is just used to say “look out, coming through”. Seems like a wise move to me, given the context.

- You see a huge variety of things for sale that people carry balanced on their heads. I saw people in Freetown and Makeni selling everything from socks and underwear, to bread and fruit, to gum, to DVDs, to firewood, all balanced on their heads. Children learn to balance things on their heads from a very young age. It’s actually quite impressive – I know my balance is nowhere near that good!

- In the rainy season (which it is now), you will get wet. Guaranteed. It seems to rain about 3-4 times a day with dry breaks in between, but sometimes it just rains for several hours, alternating between drizzle and downpour. You can’t always tell when it’s going to start pouring though, so there’s always a good chance of getting wet, which I have done several times already. Only once so far have I been absolutely soaked to the bone though. Unfortunately, it was on the way to meet with Peter Koroma, chair of the cdpeace board, in Freetown. Luckily, he was about a half hour late (see, waiting can be a good thing!), so it gave me a chance to dry off first.

- Bathing out of a bucket and drinking water out of a bag are not as hard as they sound and I am getting the hang of these things. You just have to stand the bag up right after it is open so it doesn’t spill all over (yes, I learned that lesson the hard way!).

- Villages are not quiet places. I had this idea in my head that the rural setting would be quieter than Freetown, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. You can always hear people shouting, talking, children laughing or crying, birds and insects chirping/buzzing. The sounds of the village have their own interest and beauty, and they’re generally more natural than the sounds of a city, but it is definitely not super quiet.

- Also, people get up early. The town crier wakes everyone at a certain time, usually around 5:30 or 6:00 am. It’s not really a place for sleeping in, but that suits me very well.

- Mosquito nets are wonderful things. Sleeping under a mosquito net gives me a safe, cozy feeling, and protects me from any crazy bugs that might be out there in addition to mosquitos. Given I have seen both a cockroach and a spider the size of my hand in my room, mosquito nets are my friend :-)