The Nova Scotia Gambia Association (NSGA) and their work in Sierra Leone

When Chris and I were travelling, we had the good fortune of travelling with a friend of mine from Nova Scotia, Andrea MacDonald. Andrea is the Executive Director of the Nova Scotia Gambia Association, which works both in The Gambia and here in Sierra Leone. In Sierra Leone, their project is called the Nova Scotia Sierra Leone Program (NSSLP). Andrea was here visiting some of NSSLP’s projects and invited us to travel with her. We went with her to Koidu, Kenema, Bo and then back to Freetown. This was a great way for us to see other parts of the country without going through the trials of using public transportation or paying a lot of money for a private vehicle. Some of the roads were pretty bad (as evidenced by the mud-soaked truck in the photo) and we were thankful to be in a 4x4 vehicle. So thanks Andrea!

Over the 5 days we spent travelling with NSGA, we had the opportunity to visit some of their projects, and I really wanted to say something about the work they are doing here. The NSGA’s work focuses on peer health education. Their motto is “learn and teach others”. The also do voluntary counselling and HIV testing in coordination with health services here. We were able to see some of their peer health education work in action. In Kenema we visited a boys school that had a peer health education program around HIV/AIDS and sexual and reproductive health. It was so neat to hear the boys that are the peer leaders in this program talk openly and without embarrassment about how you can get HIV, how to prevent it, how to have safe sex, and other topics that are so important to sexual health. These boys share this information not only with their peers at school, but also with their families and communities (many of them come from villages outside of Kenema). Without open and frank discussions on these subjects, health issues like HIV (with prevalence rates currently around 2%) and teenage pregnancy (already a big problem here) are sure to become more serious problems in the country.

(As an aside, one of the boys from this group in Kenema told me at the end of the session that he wanted to marry a white woman :-) I don’t think he was proposing to me, because I was there with Chris, just expressing his general dream!)

The project that NSGA is involved in in Kono District (the eastern part of the country) was really interesting to learn about. They are doing the HIV testing and counselling and peer health education component for a larger project that is run by the German Technical Cooperation, GTZ (GTZ has a similar role to that of CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency, in Canada). This project aims to help youth that were displaced by the civil war to urban areas like Freetown, or to the diamond-mining areas, resettle in their old villages. A 3-month pilot project just finished, and GTZ aims to soon launch a five-year project to do the same work, resettling 30,000 youth.


This is how the project works: GTZ “scouts” find young people in Freetown, or in the mining areas in Kono that want to go back home but don’t have the means to go themselves. The scouts then visit the home communities and mediate with the villagers to ensure that the return will be accepted and peaceful (some of these youth may have been perpetrators of or witnesses to atrocities committed during the war). GTZ provides returnees with basic support in terms of transportation and getting set up with farming and housing when they return to the village, and works with them to educate them and the rest of the community in the areas of hygiene, water and sanitation, reproductive health and HIV. This education work is where NSGA comes in. They also work with district health teams to HIV counselling and testing for returnees and villagers.

With Andrea, we visited one of the villages where resettlement has taken place as part of the pilot project, the village of Gbematambadu (photo of villagers to the left), about 15km outside of Koidu (on a TERRIBLE road). The villagers and returnees talked about their experiences thus far (they had been back for about 3 months I think). Everyone generally seemed to be happy with the new arrangement. The returnees were able to feed themselves from their farming (as opposed to living on Le 1,000-2,000/day doing alluvial mining in the diamond areas), and the villagers appreciated having more young people around to share in the work. While there were certainly ongoing challenges (housing and education for the new influx of children seemed to be two big ones), the project seemed for the most part to be successful.

The whole concept of the project is very interesting, as the general assumption in the west is that anyone working and receiving a salary is better off than someone depending on subsistence agriculture, and that moving to an urban centre is better than being in a rural area. However, this GTZ project seems to demonstrate that this is not the case. In fact, rural communities have a lot to offer. Although subsistence farming has its own challenges and is by no means easy, at least people have a certain measure of control over whether or not they can feed their families. Trying to live in a city and pay for lodging and food for your family on only pennies a day (Le 1,000 = about $0.28 CDN) is pretty tough.

In addition, returning to their home communities offers people a support network that they likely did not have in Freetown or Koidu. From my own experiences here, I’ve seen that extended family networks are very important, especially in rural communities. If you live close to your extended family, when you are sick, they will take care of you. When your harvest fails, they will share their food with you. You help each other with work in the fields and in the house. Children take care of parents, grandparents take care of grandchildren, siblings take care of siblings. Again, it’s certainly not a perfect or an easy life, but the family and community networks in rural communities act as an essential safety net for people here, in a country where social services provided by the government are limited or non-existent.

At the community meeting, people talked about what they had learned from the peer health education program. Topics included prevention of sexually transmitted infections, child spacing, and basic sanitation. Some spot checks in different project areas have already seen some changes in behaviour (for example, always covering food and water to prevent contamination, hanging laundry up instead of laying it on the ground to dry, etc.). In a year or two, other bigger changes (such as in the birth rate or rate of STIs) will hopefully be visible as well.

I have more to say about rural communities and about both agriculture and mining in the country, but those will be topics for other posts. For more information about NSGA’s work in Sierra Leone and The Gambia, or to donate to NSGA, please see their website, www.novascotiagambia.ca.

A visit to the farm

Yesterday Alpha took me to visit his farm. Alpha is a boy of 15 who lives here in Mapaki with his family. He and Carolyn were good friends, and he has come often to visit me as well. He is currently in the last year of Junior Secondary School (JSS) here in Mapaki. Alpha dreams of becoming a doctor one day, so he works hard at his studies.

I mentioned to him that I was interested in visiting some farms, so yesterday he brought me to visit. (Photo at right is of Alpha's father harvesting rice. See more photos of the farm at http://picasaweb.google.ca/clarepoulev/AlphaSFamilySFarm#) The family farm is close to Mapaki, only about a 5 minute walk down the road towards Maso, and then a climb up a path to the top of a hill. Alpha told me that his farm is probably smaller than the average in the village. I am rubbish at estimating area and distances, so I won’t try to guess how big it was, but it didn’t seem huge. Alpha told me that a farm’s size is really just limited by the amount of seeds a family has. Families save seeds to use in planting the next time, but of course they also need to eat so are limited in what they can save. If Alpha’s family had access to money for more seeds they would simply clear more land for planting.

The farms here are generally mixed crop farms. On Alpha’s farm was planted rice, sorghum, corn, cassava, a few types of beans, and some vegetables (I saw a few hot peppers and tomatoes). There are also palm trees for coconuts, palm wine and palm oil. Different cops are harvested and planted at different times, and even rice is generally harvested and planted 3 times per year (depends on the type of rice though). The staple crop here is definitely rice (there is a saying that a Sierra Leonean hasn’t eaten until he has had rice), so that is the majority of what is planted. Planting is not done in an organized way in the sense of rows or anything like that – my understanding is that seeds are just thrown and grow where they land. There is no form of irrigation available as far as I can tell – this is why the dry season here is also known as the “hungry” season, because food doesn’t grow as well without the rains.

Apparently Sierra Leone also imports a lot of rice, so people have really been affected by the increasing price of rice and other food commodities over the last year. The price of a bag of rice has increased from 100,000 LE to 120,000 LE. I noticed that the rice I ate at chop houses (restaurants) in Makeni was plain white rice, different from the rice we eat here in Mapaki, which is harvested from the fields.

When the rice is ready to be harvested, it is cut down with a machete and then tied up in little bundles and hung up for a few hours to dry. Once dried, it has to be threshed to separate the seeds from the stalks. Then it must be pounded to open up the seeds to get the grain for cooking. Maintaining the farm and harvesting and processing food are hard work. Generally, the whole family works on the farm. When we visited, Alpha’s father was there as well as his two sisters, Sine (sp?) and Alice. I think that Alice is the older sister, around 24, and the two little boys in my photos are hers. Sine is 19. People go to their farms in the morning and sometimes do not return until dark. Everything is done by hand or with basic tools. Children work on the farms as well as adults – they gather wood, clean, pound rice, etc. Now that Alpha is back in school after the holidays, he generally only works on the farm on weekends.

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 :-)