Summer of 2007, Freetown, Sierra Leone

By Ailea Sneller

My body is smattered with tender pink nubs, where mosquitoes, ants, and spiders have eaten pieces of me. There is a tropical film of saline moisture that clings to flesh and clothes, buckles the pages of magazines from home, and dampens sheets and pillows until they mildew.

The sky drips incessantly, littering red-dirt roads with trash, trickling sewage, and swimming diseases. I’m getting thinner, and my hair is falling out.

We are young expats, eyes bright and faces scrubbed, doing the development dance in a burnt, wet corner of a big, poor world. Our stomachs gurgle, from hunger or foreign bacteria. We sweat and give the locals thumbs-up signs, and try to speak to them in their language (which is our language, but dunked in the multicolor goo of colonial history). Ow de body, sa? E no bad.

We stand, hands on hips with our serious faces on, and talk about investment, education, governance, progress. Sometimes in the evenings, we get together and laugh, drink cold beers, and shake our heads over the state of this place.

And at first, the poverty is like walking through a busy emergency room late at night on, say, Halloween. We gasp quietly and point, but only in our minds, so we don’t seem rude. We grimace and gulp. The sights are bones poking through torn skin, lurid costumes that are funny and terrifying all at once.

We don’t know if we should be afraid. We don’t know if we should try to hand out candy, tiptoeing between puddles of blood, trying to avoid the germs.

In my air-conditioned office, I type e-mails to my boyfriend, telling him I miss him. I write on my blog of my adventures in Africa. I eat chicken and rice in the canteen, and watch the big TV that blasts CNN. The Olympics are coming to London. The Middle East is getting blown up.

My daydreams are of 20 years from now, or 50, when this place will be a tourist mecca. It will crawl with university students, bankers, bakers, newspaper editors, happy housewives, and pasty Europeans who come for the beaches.

There will be sparkling sidewalks that brim with cafes, wine glasses, and food smells. Everyone will know how to read, and leaders will be honest and wise. Roads will be paved, and the water will be clean. They’ll pick all the broken syringes out of the sand, one by one. It won’t need me anymore.

But for now, it does, I tell myself.

As it rains, the streets turn into gushing brown rapids. I walk home from work, sidestepping old shoes, dried-up condoms, food wrappers, and monkeys tied to a post with string. The wild little fur balls jump and hiss, and people walk by and hiss back.

The decrepit minivans that serve as public transportation are painted in garish flaking colors, with slogans stenciled across their hoods: LIGHT IN DARKNESS, GOD IS GOOD ALL DE TIME. They groan by honking, and they splash buckets of rancid water onto my pants and skin.

I try not to jostle the children who teeter home with giant yellow jugs of water balanced on their heads, like tightrope walkers, tiny and thin. I try not to stare back at the people staring at me.

I walk by boys throwing rocks at a rabid dog, squealing under the carcass of a car that has decomposed by the side of the road. The smells of fish off the ocean, of burning exhaust, of the poorest people on a poor planet scraping to survive another day, swirl together and seep up through our nostrils, and they enter our brains. It’s a smell that will never leave me.

After a few weeks, it gets normal to see a naked baby lying in the dirt, eyes blank, a mother selling plastic flip-flops and gum from a wooden table 4 feet away. Little boys pull up their ratty T-shirts and rub their bellies, as if to show me how empty they are, and I smile at them.

The family next door, which cooks, sleeps, bathes, and urinates under the easy gaze of whoever might be watching because it lives with no roof, walls, or doors, will wave to me when I walk by. And I’ll wave back. As if we were neighbors on any street in Middle America, looking up from our gardening.

At night, the city goes dark. In the yards of the rich (of people like me), gasoline generators growl to life in locked sheds. Lights flicker, and ice cubes in freezers start to firm up for cocktails. Fans whir into screened bedrooms.

Downtown, in the slums, people light their oil lamps and line up their candles. They step out of their corrugated metal and refugee tarp shacks, and they step into the rainy moonlight to feel the night. Lining the streets are faceless women. Their hands have been amputated by machete years ago, during the war. Their genitals have long since been slashed open and healed. As they squat, they tend plates of mangoes, dried fish, and quarts of palm oil.

I don’t see them, shuffling in slick starlit darkness. I am safe behind brick walls and coiled razor wire, basking under lightbulbs and staring out through shrouds of mosquito netting. I only imagine them, awed and alone. They are hunched, muttering ghosts in the gutters, peddling salvation by candle light.

Ailea Sneller is a freelance journalist and graduate student. She lives in Washington.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 | Email This Post

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