I was one of the original Peace Corps Volunteers sent to Sierra Leone in January, 1962 where I served as a secondary school teacher at Albert Academy and as acting curator of the Sierra Leone Museum. My tour lasted two years. Having returned two times after that – in 1994 when the NPRC junta was in power after staging a coup against President Joseph Momoh, and again in 1996 as a UN Election Observer at Sierra Leone’s Presidential & Parliamentary Elections, I was anxious to go back again for the 50th anniversary of both Sierra Leone’s Independence and my first visit to the country. It also marked fifty years since President John F. Kennedy started the Peace Corps. Moreover, I wanted to see the new primary school built in Bompehtoke, Moyamba District, funded by “The Magic Penny”, an NGO based in New York and Sierra Leone on whose board I serve.
I confirmed my trip the day before I left New York with Brussels Airlines. I arrived in Brussels on a Thursday but when I tried to check in for the connecting flight to Freetown I was told the plane had left the day before because of problems with the Dakar stopovers. The next flight wasn’t until four days later. They routed me from Brussels to London to Spain to Freetown. Travel through Brussels Airport is made more difficult by the fact that they require transfer passengers to go through a thorough security check upon arrival even though you’ve already been through this at your point of origin. When I got to Lungi Airport my bag was missing and it took 10 days and three visits to the airline office in Freetown before I finally received it. Thank God for Peter Andersen. Peter met me at the wharf and helped me buy everything from a toothbrush to clothes to replace what was in the missing suitcase. But we looked all town for a store selling new clothing. We didn’t find one. The ordinary people buy used clothing sent over from the States, commonly referred to as “junks.”
I stayed at Lacs Villa, a pleasant place on Cantonment Road just off King Harman Road in the center of town, which offers large, air-conditioned rooms with hot water and 24-hour electricity for $ 100/night. But to get there you have to drive down a quarter mile road filled with potholes and deep ruts. And like most of the hotels and restaurants in Freetown, the service is bad due to untrained staff. They have two computers in the lobby with Internet access, both of which are monopolized by the staff using them to access their Facebook accounts.
The banks, restaurants, and black market moneychangers in the street all refused to accept U.S. 100 and 50 dollar bills minted before the year 1996 because of bad experiences with counterfeits. The banks will accept Visa cards but not Master Cards for money withdrawals. But when they put the transaction through, the American credit card companies reject it because they’ve also had bad experiences with money requests coming from West Africa.
In October everyone in the country will have to go to a bank to exchange their present currency for the new Leones scaled down in size and having special threads and holograms in the paper. This will be a logistical nightmare, especially in the provinces. There will be a cutoff date after which the old currency will become obsolete. The new 1000 Leone note will again bear the image of Bai Bureh based on the statue I commissioned for the Freetown Museum in 1962.
Green, white and blue pennants are strung across all of the streets in Freetown and in major towns throughout the country to celebrate Independence. Everywhere you look, street light poles and rocks and stones are painted in the three colors. That was true in Bo, Moyamba, and Shenge as well. Large signs depicting Sir Milton Margai and President Ernest Bai Koroma are seen everywhere. Every part of the city is covered with orange signs and orange concrete walls advertising cell Africell, a cell phone company. Everyone in Freetown seems to have a cell phone.
Roads in Sierra Leone are either terrible or terrific. The road from Freetown to Bo and Kenema is a modern highway, as good as anything here in the States. It has cut back traveling time significantly. But once you leave that road you’re confronted by some of the worst roads I’ve ever seen – nothing but deep holes, giant ruts and washed out areas often made worse by big trucks traveling over them in the rainy season. One of the worst was the road from Moyamba to Shenge.
Road construction is going on all over Freetown, causing terrible traffic problems. Chinese contractors who have a reputation for mistreating their African workers and paying them rock-bottom wages are doing most of the construction. Chinese supervisors can be seen on the major roads in town directing the work. All of the houses, shops and businesses in the work areas are covered with laterite, which also permeates the air throughout much of Freetown. I visited my friend Shirley Gbujama who lives near one of the major road projects and everything in her house was dusted with laterite. Eventually all of the construction will result in good paved roads similar to the Freetown-Bo highway but completion dates are indefinite and far off into the future.