Ghana – Chapter 13
Accra, August 12, 2005
It seems to
me that my last chapter was written sometime in May. That gives you an idea of
how busy I've been.
(I said “busy”, not “lazy”)
First, Ellen and David came to visit in May.
Then I went to the
US for a
couple of weeks of meetings. Since coming back to Ghana, I've been to Liberia
twice and Sierra Leone
once and my mother came for a visit (and to celebrate her 86th birthday).
I'm going back
to
Sierra Leone
this Sunday, then on to Liberia
and
Mali - to keep me on the road until mid-September. So I had better get this one
in the mail.
First of all, a picture for Gina: This is Rebecca, my housekeeper, making her
famous fruit salad (pineapple, bananas, mango, orange, papaya, watermelon and a
little lime juice
– lots of chopping).
Now, on with the news.
I was in Sierra Leone for 10 days - and am going back there this weekend for
another week. No, it's not the holiday spot of West Africa.
Sierra
Leone,
like
Liberia,
has survived a long, really vicious civil war. Freetown (the capital
of SL) wasn't destroyed the way that
Monrovia was,
but the people were pretty traumatized and I'm told that in some regions
upcountry the destruction was pretty bad. Like Liberia, a lot of people became
internally displaced people (IDPs - refugees in their own country), fleeing the
country side and the violence.
Freetown
is a little hard to get to. You first fly to Lungi Airport which is across a
lagoon from Freetown.
Then you either take a helicopter over to Freetown or have a 2 1/2 hour drive to
get there. I chose the helicopter
and had to sit in the way back.
It's an old Russian helicopter, flown by some old Russian (or Ukrainian) pilots
in their Hawaiian shirts and flip flops. It's only an 8 minute ride (Thank
God!). There used to be a hydrofoil water taxi that crossed the lagoon to
Freetown,
but apparently it sank. I'm
told that helicopters will float if they don't hit too hard. Actually, it’s not
a bad ride – it rattles a lot and is a little bumpy, but the view would be great
if they would clean the portholes.
I stayed in a nice little hotel in
Freetown,
called the Country Lodge. Freetown
is surrounded by high hills (low mountains) and the CL was up on top of one of
them, overlooking part of the city. This is the view from my room (those are
the beach chairs around the pool).
I was working with the USAID mission in Sierra Leone.
Their main projects, like Liberia,
are mostly involved with feeding people and trying to reintegrate the IDPs back
into the country. Sierra Leone is infamous for its "conflict" or "blood"
diamonds. These have been used to buy arms for the wars and support the rebels,
as well as - apparently - for international terrorism. These are alluvial
diamonds, that people find digging in the beds of creeks and rivers. USAID/SL
is working with the miners to try in what is called the Peace Diamond Alliance,
along with De Beers and some other diamond companies. Next week I'm going
upcountry with De Beers to see the diamond mines and meet the farmers.
Freetown
is apparently the wettest capital city in the world (most rainfall
annually). The first two days I was there were nice and sunny, but the next
eight days it rained from sun up to
sun down, all day long -
not just drizzle, but constant heavy downpours. And I left my umbrella in Accra!
Freetown reminded me a lot of the old part of Kingston, Jamaica – the old
British colonial architecture. Everyone speaks a kind of English, plus Creole –
which if you listen real hard contains about 30% and 70% other languages (mostly
African).
SL is a poor country. Let me show you just
how poor...
If you walk across the patio at my hotel (under the red roofed structure in the
photo above) and look over the side, this is what you see down below:
This is a man making gravel by hand. He is one of several guys
there. They take big rocks (about 1 or 2 feet across) and break them into
pieces about the
size of a large foot and then pound the pieces
into gravel smaller than golf balls. This guy worked about 12 hours a day (even
in the rain).
There are whole families of people breaking up the rocks and hauling the gravel
on their heads to different building sites. Next time you see something built
from concrete (gravel mixed with cement) - like a big dam - think about how many
heads full of gravel it would take to build it in Sierra Leone (and everything
here is built from concrete because termites can't eat it).
That's it for now.
Love to all,
Greg the
Diamond Guy
Woops - almost forgot the weather report. It has cooled off quite a bit these
days.
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High: 84° |
High: 84° |
High: 85° |
High: 83° |
High: 81° |