2 weeks in paradise: Tribewanted Sierra Leone

Introduction

Occasionally on this trip I have visited countries that have really won my heart. In Asia, Indonesia was that place for me. In Africa it was Sierra Leone.

I spent two weeks staying on the Freetown Peninsula at a crowd-funded community run ecoresort called Tribe Wanted. For the first time since landing in Africa I felt like I was really experiencing a country, rather than just passing by and observing the people and their lives like some sort of attraction.

Tribe Wanted

Tourism is frequently frontline in community development, especially in developing countries such as Sierra Leone where there is great potential for tourism and little other industry. However, “tourism” is not one single homologous entity; the nature of tourism is many and varied. As such, the impact that tourism may have on a community is many and varied. After my visit to Ethiopia I wrote about the negative impact that tourism is having in SouthernEthiopia . Tribewanted is at the other end of the spectrum of tourism and how it impacts on the local community.

Tribewanted in Sierra Leone is situated on the Freetown Peninsula at a beautiful beach called John Obey. Adjacent to this beach is the John Obey fishing village and just up the road is the main John Obey village. Tribewanted has been built using traditional building methods with sustainability in mind. The food provided is all locally sourced (every day we ate the “catch of the day”, which was a challenge to me as I don’t normally eat much meat), and is cooked by Amanata with the help of Bale and Zaina. Guests are also encouraged to help in the kitchen, and I found this to be fun and rewarding when I did help (however for the good of everybody who had to eat the food I decided that my input should be minimal). Tribewanted is staffed by young people from John Obey village, and they receive a wage that is more than double the national average. There is so much more to say about Tribewanted, so I will defer to their website, which explains their mission and model far more eloquently than I could ever hope to replicate.

The beach bungalow where I lived for two weeks

The hammocks in the sunset (Tribewanted)

John Obey beach

What made my experience at Tribe Wanted really special were the people. From the people in the local community – Mo Mo, Hassan, Bale, Zaina, Anamata, Muhammed, Tito – to the other travellers and expats I met – The Stephens family, Peace Corps Volunteers, Saskia, John the overlanding motorbike rider, British students and volunteers working in Freetown – to Aurelie (local name “Aisha”), the current Tribe Wanted volunteer, who was my closest friend during my stay in Salone, everybody was so friendly and welcoming and our conversations really made my stay something special. Oh and Joshua the dog!

With Aisha and a local child at Bale's wedding

Daily activities during my two weeks’ stay

My days were filled with the following activities:

•  Participating in clearing an old slave path between John Obey and the next beach up the peninsula, Black Johnson. The jungle had swallowed the path, preventing pedestrians from crossing the peninsula on foot between the two beaches. When I was invited along to this big jungle clearing party (basically we started at one end of the path and the people from Black John at the other end and we met in the middle with beer) I envisioned myself bolding swinging around a machete and showing the jungle who is boss. Unfortunately, this was a definite overestimate of my own abilities and what ended up happening was that Aisha and I took photos, occasionally posed holding a machete, and then carried a big sheet of local fabric (lapa), which we tore into strips to hang off trees to mark the path 

Feminists reluctantly tying bows around trees instead of wielding machetes

At Black Johnson Beach at the end of the path clearing

    Attending a local wedding. Following the jungle path clearing we took a boat back to John Obey from where we walked up to the main village to attend the wedding of Bale, one of the ladies who works at Tribewanted. She looked beautiful but apprehensive. The wedding was truly a community affair with drinking, singing and dancing.

The wedding (obviously)

•      Visiting local beaches. The location of Tribewanted makes it a perfect base for visiting other beaches on the peninsula. My absolute favourite beach on the peninsula was Bureh beach. Bureh beach is home to a surfing school that is a community run development project filled with wonderful, kind and friendly people. Here’s a link to their facebook page. Another beautiful beach is River Number 2, which is a white sands beach similar to Tokeh beach (just North of it) but with more personality. Some friends and I rented a boat and travelled up the river (River Number 2, great and original name!) to some waterfalls that were extremely tame as it was the end of the dry season. We drank some Savannah (South African cider) and talked about how we would open our own beach resort and call it “River Number 3”.

Black Johnson Beach

Bureh Beach

River number 2

River number 2 boat selfie. The only successful selfie that I've ever taken

•      The Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary: Aisha, the Stephens family and I took a day trip up to the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary just north of Freetown. The sanctuary was established as a rehabilitation facility for chimpanzees that have been victims of either the exotic pet trade or bush meat. In Sierra Leone, this turns out to be a large number of chimpanzees. The way that they are rehabilitated and then gradually re-socialised and introduced to their natural habitat is really quite clever. I always find it inspiring to come across sustainable and ecosensitive projects that perfectly address local challenges, and the chimpanzee sanctuary was one such initiative. The great day continued with a waffle, fro-yo and super fast internet session at Gina’s. After the Stephens headed back to Tribewanted, Aisha and I had dinner with John, a friend of ours who is overlanding on a motorbike from the UK to Cape Town in order to raise money for an orphanage. His journey is fascinating and his observations witty and amusing. Here’s his website: http://www.overlandride.com. 

Learning how to speak chimpanzese

•       I also visited some friends in Freetown later during my stay. They are a group of medical students from the UK who were doing their elective term at one of the big trauma hospitals in Freetown. I had a lovely time visiting them and also dining at a local restaurant called “Phasebook”. I had a stupid accident on a motorbike when I was commuting from their house to the internet café on the morning of my departure (I wanted to surprise my family with a skype call but ended up surprising them with a call where I was traumatised and upset due to the shooting pains down my bruised leg). Basically, it turns out that motorbike taxis are not allowed in the downtown area of Freetown, however this is only enforced where the police notice a foreigner on the back of a bike, which they then try to chase down to solicit a bribe. Naturally, we came across a police officer as we were leaving the downtown area and my driver got flustered and tried to quickly drive away, but in the process my left knee got smashed into another bike. It was fine, but surprisingly painful for something that didn’t look that bad from the outside. It’s still occasionally painful if I walk a lot, but I doubt there’s any actual damage, just some residual bruising.

Lumley beach in Freetown

I love African hair salons

Freetown is an attractive city

•       The other major activity that I did during my stay in Salone was an overnight trip to Banana Island. This was not exactly what I was expecting, as the place where we stayed was out of food and had just replaced its entire staff, so it was a big step down from Tribewanted where I was used to good food and a real sense of community. There was also a miscommunication about the price of the boat transfer so my friend and I ended up paying more than necessary for an inferior boat. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful place and I’m glad that I went there.

Boats in a cove that we stumbled across on Banana Island

Reflections on life in Salone

Obama!

One of the first things that I noticed in Salone was a display board at Tribewanted showing the results of a survey. The survey had a section where people had to select the smiley, sad, or apathetic face that best represented their happiness levels with regards to several aspects of their lives, such as income, job, housing, family, recreation etc. (I wish I’d taken a photo of this board, but I did not think of it at the time) On every single point, the local people who had taken the survey were significantly more satisfied than the foreigners who’d answered the same questions.

The beautiful Stephens family reunited after almost 2 years of their son, Sean, being a Peacecorps volunteer in Salone

This made me reflect on what happiness is and what the relationship is between happiness and wealth, which is a relationship that I have reflected on throughout my travels. The conclusion that I have come to is that there is no linear relationship between wealth and happiness, but rather, your financial situation has a way of determining how you measure happiness. I think that it is too simplistic to say that there is an inverse relationship between money and happiness, ie, as people and their societies get wealthier their happiness decreases. This ignores the fact that, for people who are so poor that they cannot cover their basic needs, economic poverty can be a significant source of suffering and unhappiness. I actually witnessed this more in hospitals in Indonesia and Ghana more than I did in any African villages, most of which had enough to sustain their inhibitants. So I think that, up to the level where basic needs are met, money is actually very important to maintain happiness, as things such as starvation, inability to afford healthcare, and economic entrapment in abusive marriages are obvious recipes for unhappiness.

After that level however, I think that happiness tends to decrease as societies get richer. This is because in wealthy societies there has been a shift from community living and co-dependence to isolation and separation from the community. Once a community doesn’t need to bond together for the sake of survival there can be a sense of detachment. I feel this in Australia; sometimes in Sydney there are several consecutive days where I don’t talk to anybody other than people who I interact with when doing things such as grocery shopping. Likewise, since I’ve arrived in Europe I’ve swung between great days where I’ve found people to hang out with and days that have been so lonely that I’ve gone to bed feeling sad and alone.

I never felt lonely for a single moment in Salone, and I think that this is indicative of the richness that does exist in places that are not classically “rich”. Salone is one of the world’s poorest countries when measured by GDP per capita, however this measure alone does not take into account the wealth of community, the spiritual enrichment of living in such a naturally beautiful place, and generosity of spirit that are all abundant in Salone. I believe that my experience in Sierra Leone has had a massive impact on the way that I view my own life in Australia and it’s made me resolve to build more a community for myself when I return to Sydney, to spend my time fostering the relationships with people who provide me with this sense of belonging, and to forget about people who have the opposite effect on me.

Joshua did his best to ensure that I was never alone

Next up…

The next blog post will focus on my hospital placement in Ghana, which I ended up leaving a couple of weeks early due to the ebola scare. After that I will provide a photographic montage of my time in Europe.

West Africa Overlanding: Togo, Benin and Burkina Faso

I spent an extraordinary three weeks exploring some of West Africa as a typical tourist, specifically Togo, Benin and Burkina Faso. The trip I did was called “The Voodoo Trail” and was run by G Adventures (a Canandian travel company) using the local operator Trans Africa. Unfortunately I’ve fallen so far behind on my blog posts that I can barely remember some of the details, so I’m going to write a briefer than usual post this time (which should also help me to catch up).

Togo

My trip started off in Lome, the capital city of Togo. I liked the vibe in Lome; it was a kind of laid back tropical coastal city with zero tourists (apart from the people in my group). My first day in Lome was a chillout day where I just relaxed around the pool (which turned out not to be all that relaxing seeing as there was a 4-hour children’s swimming lesson). The second day was the first day of my tour and we went to a fetish market where you could buy various parts of various animals. Here are some photos:

A stall where we visited a voodoo priest

Monkey heads (obviously)

Dog heads (obviously)

From Lome we headed up to central Togo to a forest called Kpalame. On the way we stopped at a voodoo ceremony. At the voodoo ceremony there was lots of drumming and dancing. Most participants were walking around in a trance. I enjoyed seeing this ceremony, but had difficulty relating to it. Here are some photos:

We spent the night in Kpalame, a forested area on the Ghanaian border. The following morning we did a morning hike through the forest, which was beautiful. Here are some pictures:

Benin

Our first stop in Benin was Ouidah, a former slave port. This was a poignant place to visit, and the memorials were done very well. There was a gate on the coast marking the place where the slaves would board the ships (which took them to Brazil from where they were resold, often to North American buyers). The location of this gate was not exact, as the former slave route was simply a path through the forest that had long grown over, but I guess that the exact location doesn’t really matter. The slave route was full of symbolism, for example a large tree that departing slaves were forced to circle an auspicious number of times and then declare that their lives were worthless. As these sorts of symbolic rituals have great significance in their society this was deeply offensive to the slaves; indeed it was aimed at destroying their last bit of human dignity.

Here are some photos from the slave route:

The gate of no return on the slave route.

The former "slave market"

The markers along the slave route could only be described as "bizarre and abstract"

After our morning on the slave route we visited a stilt village on a large lake called Lake Ganvie. The experience was scenic, but not particularly educational, as I have been to so many stilt villages like this and generally cruising about in a boat kind of prevents you from interacting with local people (except for maybe waving at them from the boat). I found this experience kind of sad, as when we approached people on our boat they generally hid their faces away to avoid us taking photos. When I asked my guide about this he said that they had been told that people were posting their photos on the internet with derogatory captions accompanying them. This made me sad.

Here are some photos (without derogatory captions):

The following day we visited the King of Bohicon. As this was now over a month ago I cannot remember exactly what he said, however I can remember that he was quite progressive, so I was impressed. He was quite a contrast to another King who we visited later in the trip who turned out to be a disgusting man (I cannot post the details of this on the internet because I’m scared of the potential ramifications for the person who told us of his true nature). This King was trying to promote education and discourage female genital mutilation.

Here is the King:

In Southern Benin we also visited a python temple. I did not have a good time at the python temple. We had the opportunity to have a snake draped over our shoulders (as a photo opportunity). I’m not scared of snakes so I thought “why not?” and went ahead with the photo op. Thing was, once the snake had been on my shoulders for about 30 seconds it started to constrict around my neck, not to the point where it was stopping my breathing, but enough to make me feel quite anxious and uncomfortable. I asked the snake handler to remove the snake and he flatly refused, instead grabbing the snake’s head and trying to put it in my mouth! What a weirdo! I started to panic a bit and considered punching him in the balls, but luckily (for him) he decided to remove his snake from me before I snapped.

Here’s a picture of this horrible incident:

In southern Benin we had the privilege of witnessing an Egun Mask Ceremony. This is a traditional celebration of the Fon and Yoruba people where men where elaborate costumes (“masks”), which represent the spirits of deceased people from the community. According to the local lore, these people are not only representations of the spirits, but are literally the dead reincarnated. I don’t know who had died in the village, but at least one of the deceased must have had severe psychiatric problems if the mask wearers really were the deceased people, because some of them were acting really crazily, like people I definitely would not want to live in a small village with.

There is a belief in the communities who celebrate this tradition that the clothing of the mask wearer is dangerous, and any contact with this person causes “temporary death”. As such, children scatter and people scream as the mask wearers approach their vantage points, something that is quite fascinating to watch. During our time at the ceremony two such temporary deaths occurred. I’m pleased to say that both fatalities made hasty recoveries! Sadly, one of the mask wearers (the one who I thought needed to be put in a straight jacket) got a bit carried away with a metal rod that he was flailing around and ended up breaking the nose of one of the man who was “handling” him. This person did not make a hasty recovery. I hope he’s alright; broken noses are absolute agony!

A "temporary death"

Northern Benin was a stunning place to travel, regardless of its remoteness and the various difficulties of travelling in this region (the roads, the food, the toilets with tricky locks designed to trap you in the cubicles etc). Unfortunately, at this point in my travels, the tribal villages had all started to blend in to one pan-tribal identity in my mind, so I’m having difficulty recalling the nuances of the various places that we visited, so I will treat them all as one entity here (an approach that I realise is somewhat disrespectful as each ethnic group in the region has unique traditions and identities, however I need to work with my intellectual limitations here).

Voodoo: voodoo remained an essential part of life in Northern Benin (and Northern Togo). We visited a shrine called Dankoli where we placed wishes for supposedly a small fee which changed according to how much the people running the shrine could wrangle out of you. I’m pleased to say that I paid the least (about $1) using my foolproof approach of pretending that I didn’t understand that people were asking me for money. Interestingly, voodoo in French West Africa exists alongside more conventional religions (Christianity on the coast and Islam further inland); people weave the two traditions together seamlessly.

Voodoo priest in Northern Benin

Architecture: the traditional architecture in these areas is amazing. Many of the houses were reminiscent of small castles rather than simple huts. Each residence included a granary (a place where grain is stored), the integrity of which was integral to the stability of the household (we met a man whose wife had left him because his granary broke). Here is a photo of one of the houses:

Tribal markings: I can’t find a photo of it (I haven’t looked very hard because I am both lazy and time poor) but the houses in this region have distinctive patternes etched onto their outer walls. Likewise, the people have these patterns etched into the skin on their faces! This normally occurs at a young age, and the said purpose is to identify children so if they wander off people can identify the village that they should be returned to. In my view, there are probably better, and less cruel, ways to identify lost children. Sadly, we saw a boy with keloid scarring all over his face as a result of this practice. Keloid scarring is common in non-Caucasians and is also incurable, so I think that it’s sad that children are exposed to this complication by this tradition. Here is a child suffering from keloid scars as a result of his tribal markings:

Gender relations: like other places that I have visited in Africa, it seems that women do a lot of the work and men do a lot of the drinking.  I’m not going to bang on about this again, rather I would like to explain how divorce works in this region. Women are given a symbolic callabasse (pot made out of goard) that is kept as a prized possession in their house. If the husband decides to divorce his wife he goes and smashes up her callebasse and she knows what this means and leaves without protest. In contrast, if a woman wants to divorce her husband she simply sleeps with another man to send the message.

Here is an intact callebasse:

Food: a staple food in this region is “fufu” which is essentially ground up cassava or yam paste. As fufu happens to be my favourite slang term for vagina (this is not just my term, see urban dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fu%20fu&defid=281110) I ended up laughing everytime that this was mentioned, especially when we stopped to watch some fufu being “pounded”.

Burkina Faso

From Northern Benin we crossed briefly back into Northern Togo, from where we crossed into Burkina Faso. Some of us had to get our visa on the border, which was quite an experience. Rumour has it that the price is constantly changing, and we were unlucky to be charged the maximum price that this visa has ever been (about USD200). Nonetheless, this went smoothly (until we left the country and discovered that they'd written that the visa was only valid for 7 days, despite being actually valid for 90 days!) and we were accepted into the country.

Our first few stops in Burkina were very rural areas near the borders with Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. These areas were culturally quite similar to what we saw in Northern Benin and Togo, albeit with slightly different cultures and customs.

We visited the Gurunsi region, where the houses are spectacularly decorated with geometric patterns. Here are some pictures:

For the few days following our visit to the Gurunsi I was feeling quite unwell (combination of food poisoning and extreme fatigue) so my recollections are not all that clear. I have many stories from those few days, however none of them are appropriate for my blog, so I’ve decided to instead leave a gap.

The second largest city in Burkina is called Bobo Dioulasso. I loved Bobo; it was a happening place full of music and life. Unfortunately, my computer decided to randomly delete all of my photos of the city walk that we did, which is a crying shame as I had taken many lovely photos of the west African style mosque, and also of djembe playing and street art. Luckily, I have some photos of the spectacular landscape that we got to visit around Bobo:

After Bobo, on route to Ouagadougou – the world’s most fabulously named capital city – we attended a ceremony of Bwa ceremonial dance. This ceremony was explained to me as “a form of street theatre that melds sacred, traditional and entertainment elements” and I think that about sums it up. I personally thought that the masked dancers looked like Snuffelapagus off Sesame Street, but here are some photos to allow readers to make up their own minds:

Our journey finished in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso. I really liked Ouagadougou, although it didn’t really have much in the way of tourist attractions (apart from some creature comforts, which attract me. And I’m a tourist so I suppose you could call hot showers and functional air conditioning a tourist attraction!) I don’t have any photos from Ouagodougou, sorry!

Next instalment: Sierra Leone, my favourite African country so far on this trip (Indonesia was my favourite Asian country).