My Family

My family has been so great to me! I am so happy I am going to live with them for a year. The family is very big. I made a family tree the first day I got here. It helped me to quickly learn everyone’s name. So here is my family:

My Dad= Mustapha B. Kanneh. He is a staff member of the NGO and we work very closely together. We often work late into the night at the house after we leave the office. He is also teaching me the Mende and Krio languages. He also taught some ex-combatants how to do carpentry and masonry. He has a workshop behind the house that he lets some former students use to build things.

My Mom (second wife) =Wata

Wata and Mustapha have had 3 children:

Memuma (We all call her drai-yai or dry eye, meaning she very bold, not scared of anything ) (4 years old)

Abu (6)

Mustapha (but we call him Dende, meaning big one) (8)

Wata has another son:

My Brother: Shaka (I call him Tupac Shaka, like the late rap artist Tupac Shakur) (10)
All the children are very smart (they say clever here). Mustapha has to pay many school fees for all his children, there are no free schools here. He even has to pay more for Dende and Abu to go to private school. It should be worth it, both of them get very good grades.

Wata has a sister:

My Aunt=Ajah Nenehiye (nay-nay-eye)
Ajah Nenehiye has 3 children:

My cousin= Mohamed

My cousin= Bobor
My cousin= Limin

Ajah Nenehiye has 3 grandchildren:

Mohamed (the second one) (21)
Limin (the second one) (20)
Backarin (3)

Mustapha’s first wife is named Memuma.

Mustapha and Memuna had 1 child who stays with us:

My older brother and good friend= Abdul (35)

Abdul has his fiance Hawa. (22) She takes VERY good care of me, always cooking me delicious food and doing all my laundry, and cleaning me room, etc. She formerly stayed in Guinea during the war and now is receiving the education she was unable to get during those years.

Hawa and Abdul have a daughter:

My granddaughter= Hawa (another Hawa)

Abdul has a sister:

My sister= Makinnie (or Antionette). She stays here while attending school in the town of Bo,

the second city and very close to Kenema.

Abdul has a brother, whose sister stays with us:

My sister-in-law= Rosalie

Rosalie has a son:

My nephew= Abdul (I call him Big Abdul since his is a very big boy, he will be much bigger than

me) (2)

They also adopted 4 children because they not longer have care-givers:

My sister= Amie (9)
My brother= Albert Mustapha (13)
My brother= Lasanah (13)
My brother= Abraham (23)

I am friends with many other of the youth who live around the house, but that is enough names for you now. I hope this gives you a better understanding of my day-to-day life and now if you call and I refer to people you can know who I talking about. My next posting will by about the staff members my NGO, the Centre for Research, Training, and Programme Development (CRTPD)

This family is making sacrifices for me so I can work here. I want everyone to understand that the work that I am doing would not be possible if not for this.
Here is a picture I took this morning of the whole family:

My NGO

My NGO has a 52 member completely voluntary staff and it consists of 10 members of the board of directors, 32 field workers who act as liaisons between the board and the partner community-based organizations, and 10 messengers/janitors who care for the building. The office is located just across the street from where my host family lives. I am now part of the board of directors. I serve as country program director and am second in command under the chairman.

Our NGO simply supports other community based organizations, grassroots organizations. They have not received any funding from outside sources up to this point. Their funding has simply been personal donations from the staff members themselves. Amazingly, last year they gave contributed what translates to about $4,000, and these are not rich men and women. This helped about 1,850 people in this community. They are only serving people in Kenema District right now, but that covers Kenema town as well as surrounding villages. Some major accomplishments for 2007 include: organizing 10 home-based orphanages, finding caretakers, and donations of food and other basic items, donating seedlings for agricultural projects to reduce hunger and create income, donating scholarships (that is school fees, school is not free here) for 8 students for high school, lending technical assistance to skills training programs for the blind and those with polio.

We are currently we are writing our plan for 2008. We hope to offer more support to our current partners. The biggest project is going to be to create and orphanage village, to include a school, health clinic, and boarding house. Many children here have parents who were killed in the war. There is a huge problem with commercial sex work here. Many young people have no other way to be fed since they have no caregivers. Others are forced to do that work by their parents to support the whole household. We need to give them skills training so they can do something else. Anyways, when I complete the 2008 plan (this week) I will post it. Anybody reading this can support any of the projects they see. U.S. dollars go a long way here. You see all they did with the little money they had last year.

I have also formed a youth group with 56 members. We are part of this program called One World Youth Project (see link). The curriculum is already written. I teach a class of high school students in the morning and one with middle school students in the evening. We have a partner class in Seattle, Washington at a high school. We are doing cultural exchange projects that I email to the class in America and they reply and I show it to my class. We also learn about leadership and we are going to do a large community service project. I dismissed them yesterday for the holiday, but they are writing a series of plays about the hazards of commercial sex work (HIV, unwanted pregnancy, etc), the causes (poverty, peer pressure, etc.) and the solutions (sensitization, skills training, etc.) We are going to video tape it and play it at cinemas (places where people pay to watch tv, mostly for soccer games) around town. We are also going to have a condom distribution project. More to come on that after the holidays.
You can see the office in this picture. There are some member of the youth group in front of it (yeah, they aren’t really used to smiling for pics).

The next picture is of a home-based orphanage I visited.

The two pictures after that are the skills training center for polio patients we support.

Arrival in Kenema

It was a long journey from Freetown to Kenema. We left the bus rank at 7am and didn't arrive until around 3:30. First the bus broke down and we had to wait for a part to fix it for an hour. Later on there were big holes in the road filled with water so we had to get out of the bus so there was less weight so it could pass. But I was in not rush and we got to see many of the small villages along the way.

When I got to Kenema they had a huge cultural dance just for me! It was too nice.

My host family is awesome and my room is very nice. I have been learning Mende, the language they mostly speak here all morning.

This afternoon the whole NGO is having a meeting to formally introduce me, give me all the background about how they got started, their partners, and we will decide on a job description for me. I have told them that I do not only want to work in the office, but would like to do real labor in their agricultural projects. I am really excited about that. I like to be able to see physical changes from the work I am doing. The NGO has 10 staff members, all volunteer. The office is directly across the street from the house I am staying.

Tonight I am going to go to a club with the older girls in the house. They will unsuccessfully try to get me to dance. I want to try some palm wine.

I am very happy here. This is a somewhat big town, but not as big and hectic as Freetown. I feel very welcome here and know I will have a great year.

Arrival in Freetown

Hello all-
So I arrived in Sierra Leone safely Wednesday night. My luggage however, did not. The airport in actually in Lungi, not Freetown. You have to take a ferry to get to Freetown from there. By the time we filled out the report for the missing luggage, we missed the last ferry. We stayed with the Director of the NGO, Shed's cousin in Lungi.

The next day we woke up early and took the ferry to Freetown. I went to the embassy and registered. Then we just explored Freetown and I met many of Shed's hundreds of cousins :) Freetown is beautiful!!! The moutains meet the water and it is quite a sight (pictures in later posts)

Not too much else to report just yet, since we have just been exploring and waiting for the luggage, which I did finally receive last night. So now it is off to the village I will be staying at for the year, Kenema. It is the 3rd biggest city after Freetown and Bo.

I have been playing with a bunch of little kids today and having them help me learn Krio and Mende. It isn't terribly difficult. Shed's wife is in Maryland and I met her before I left. She gave me the Mende name Bahungeh (Bah-whon-gay) which means 'dont explain.' It is a unique family name of theirs and people have been getting a kick out of it.

It is so nice here and everyone has been SO nice to me and been looking out for me. The food here is WAY better than in Botswana, I better start running again when I get to Kenema. I had a great dish called foo-foo, made out of casava leaves. Also, they make a good sauce that goes on rice out of okra that is great. They eat a lot of fish, so I am really enjoying that. Down by the beach they catch lobster and serve it to you fresh from the ocean, awesome! I am going down to Lumley Beach tonight. Tomorrow morning we will catch a bus for the 4 hour ride to Kenema.

Expect frequent posts once I get there. The electricity situation there is actually better than in Freetown. We havent had it for the last two days (this cafe is run by a generator). They have a dam in Kenema so they dont have electricity outages.

Anyways, next time I will post pictures and give you my address in Kenema so you can write me if you like.