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.