The New Africa

In the eighties, all of this was forest, says Patrick Tommy, a community elder of perhaps 60, whose eyes are starting to fade to a pale blue with the onset of cataracts.

We’re hiking up to One House, a neighborhood so named after the era - not so long ago - when there was only a single human residence on this hillside. It’s hard to un-imagine the profusion of houses all around me, of laboriously etched-out earthen terraces colorful with drying laundry, of children in blue and yellow school uniforms toting water jugs, of men and women trekking up and down the slope with goods for sale. It seems extraordinary that, a mere 30 years ago, wild chimpanzees were probably living here.

Across Freetown, in another hillside neighborhood a bit farther from the central business district, people have not yet exhausted the local supply of wood. Plenty of residents there still eke out a living but cutting firewood, or by transforming it into charcoal, the two most common fuels for household cooking.  Is anyone here planting new trees to replace the ones they’re cutting? I asked a tribal chief we met during our initial visit.

No, no one, he replied.

So how will all of these people manage ten years from now? I persisted.

The chief shrugged. They will find something else to do.

In One House, nobody cuts firewood anymore, since they would have to trek far into the mountains to find any, a journey that wouldn’t make financial sense. So the wood traders here purchase their stock in town, off of boats that come to Freetown from “upline,” in the country’s increasingly rural countryside, and haul it up to One House.

High-speed urbanization isn't just a Freetown phenomenon. All over Africa, people are flocking to cities. The United Nations estimates that by 2050, 60% of Africa's population will live in urban areas. 60% would be a moderate figure in the developed world; in countries like the U.S. and France, around 80% of the population lives in cities. But it's astounding in a continent where, half a century ago, almost the entire population was rural, surviving mostly on subsistence farming. 

Africans leave the countryside for a variety of reasons. Many seek economic and educational opportunities, or aspects of the modern world - media, technology, fashion, lifestyles - that rural areas simply can't offer. In many countries, Sierra Leone included, violent conflict has driven people from their relative vulnerability in rural regions to the relative safety of cities. Though the war here ended 10 years ago, few people want to go home. From what I understand, for many, the memories of suffering and flight are too horrific and heavy, the devastation wrought to their villages too complete, for them to care very much about rekindling their past lives. 

Personally, I often find Freetown completely overwhelming. The streets are so crammed with carts, vendors, soot-spewing autos and near misses with motorcycle taxis, that just getting to work in the morning can raise my blood pressure a few notches. Most of the people I've met work extremely long days - selling cigarettes, carrying loads, breaking rocks, filling boats with sand - only to earn barely enough to feed their families for the day, then wake up and repeat the next. If I had to choose between their lives and a quiet, peasant life raising animals and growing rice in the countryside, I'd almost certainly opt for the latter.

But while some folks I've met hope to someday move out of the slums, nobody talks about leaving Freetown. And so this city, home to a mere 65,000 residents in the 1950s, with a population of over a million today, will continue to grow. And all of those people will do whatever it takes to get by. 

Rainy Season Blues

We're on the way back from Mabella, a textbook slum next to Freetown's most bustling business district. It's extremely humid, as usual, and, as usual, I'm covered with a layer of sticky grime. I invariably leave Mabella feeling filthy. Today we saw an eight-year-old girl drink from a mud puddle nestled along the heavily traveled main dirt track through the slum. Foreigners don't come down to Mabella very often, and children - children who no doubt play in mud puddles, and worse - routinely run up to touch my freakish white skin. Though this season's cholera epidemic is winding down, disease remains a very real threat, and given the dearth of toilets, it's certain that potentially harmful germs are everywhere.  Weaving through the marketplace in the upper part of the slum, you're assaulted by wafts of rotting tubers, urine, dried fish, raw meat and feces, and by people hawking a huge assortment of goods. It's easily overwhelming, and by the time we've finished the day's interviews and navigated our way back to our vehicle, I'm beat. 

All I can think about at this point is an icy bottle of soda. I scan the masses of street vendors, who display a department store's selection of goods in front of the car window, one plastic basin at a time: cheap Chinese watches, chintzy-looking DVDs with religious themes, sticky rodent traps, underwear, beef brochettes, swollen mini cucumbers, electrical tape, laundry starch. Finally, I spot what I'm looking for: a young boy balancing a tub of sodas on his head. I call him over, grab one bottle for everyone in the car, and fork over a pair of dirty 5,000 Leone notes. 

The boy looks at the bills, alarmed. My colleague in the backseat takes them from the boy and hands them back to me. What's wrong with these bills? she asks. I take a closer look, and quickly realize that the "dirt" is actually greasy black mold, that has all but destroyed the money. Meanwhile, the traffic ahead begins to flow, and our vehicle lurches forward. The soda vendor, horrified that we may disappear without paying, attempts to run after us, giant plastic tub still aloft. I manage to find two bills with minimal mold damage; my colleague passes them to a runner, who delivers them to the boy. 

Now I'm the one who's stricken. I open my leather wallet, and discover that a gray fungus has colonized the interior. Most of the bills inside have begun to turn black, and some are unusable. 

Freetown is said to be one of the wettest places in West Africa, with about 116 inches of rain a year. That's more than three times the annual rainfall in Seattle. It's certainly the wettest African place I've ever visited. Evidence is everywhere - matches that have absorbed so much moisture that four disintegrate before you manage to light one, towels that don't really dry you off, giant rainforest tree species with enormous buttresses scattered around town and spilling down the hillsides, laundry that takes so long to dry it smells of mildew. And now even my money is rotting.

I make a mental note to buy a new wallet. A cotton one this time. 

What It Means to Be Poor

Once upon a time in Congo, the cook asked how much I’d bought my shoes for.

Seventy dollars, I told her, realizing right away how extravagant this sounded. This was close to two weeks’ salary for her, and comparable to what most people in the country cobbled together in two months. Feeling slightly guilty, I tried to put the price in context. You know, I said, people have more money in the US, but life is much more expensive. I told her about typical costs of rent, tomatoes, cell phones.

She wanted to know how much you could earn in a month as a housekeeper in America. When we did the math, she looked at me wide-eyed. If I got a job in the US, she told me, I’d be rich. I reminded her of the high cost of living, but she persisted. I’d sleep on the floor, she told me, and would live very simply. I’d save everything.

There was no point arguing. After all, knowing her, she was probably right. She’d managed to keep her three children in school after her husband had left her, taking several years’ worth of her savings with him, by selling homemade doughnuts on the side of the road, before she landed a much higher-paying job as a cook and cleaner with our organization. She routinely stayed after hours to finish up tasks that could have easily been postponed a day or two. When I asked her for the broom after foolishly tracking a trail of dried mud into my bedroom, she wouldn’t let me pry it out of her hands, but marched over to the room and swept it up. With her work ethic and selflessness, she’d certainly make more out of a low-paying job in America than most people would.

By virtue of being a white person in Africa, I’m inevitably perceived as being wealthy, and compared to most people here, I guess I am. But back in the U.S., I’m relatively poor, at least in terms of income.

Poverty is relative. The poorest households in the U.S. still have access to certain amenities – free public school, food stamps, electricity, television – that the poorest here, in Sierra Leone, do not. How you define poverty makes a huge difference. Materially speaking, I’m pretty poor, but I’m quite happy with my quality of life, and feel rich in terms of the experiences, opportunities and relationships I’ve had. When I went to visit the brother-in-law of one of my former Congolese colleagues who now lives in Seattle, he said that while he felt grateful for the opportunities being there affords his six children, he feels incredibly isolated from his extended family and homeland, the things he cares about most. 

I’m in Sierra Leone to learn about poverty in the Freetown slums, whose infamously poor living conditions have contributed to the largest cholera outbreak in the country’s history, which peaked a few weeks ago. A colleague and I visited a couple of the slums earlier this week, where a few friendly and no doubt curious locals led us through labyrinthine passages between squashed-in houses, past pigs rooting around in garbage and men huddled under tin-roofed porches listening to music. There are no toilets here; one of our hosts told us they simply defecate into buckets in their houses, which they later empty into the sea. By anyone’s definition, it would seem that the people living here are quite poor.

Yet according to a World Food Program report, people in the slums are wealthier than the national average; only 16% of Freetown slum residents qualify as “poor” or “very poor.” And indeed, as a recent Economist blog post pointed out, you see quite a few television sets while wandering around the slums, certainly more than you would in a remote village in the country’s interior. Again, how we define poverty matters.

And so we’re going to ask the residents of the slums themselves what it means to be poor, and what it means to be better off (“rich” might be a stretch, but we’ll leave it up to them to tell us). In the slums, as anywhere else, we suspect that people are trying to improve things for themselves and their children. By asking the locals about what they’re striving for and how one might expect to get there, we’ll hopefully have a better idea of how organizations like ours can help them to do it.

I moved to Seattle in December 2011 and have since started a new blog, which you can access here.

(It has very little to do with Africa.)