October 21st 7:43 pm (UTC +1:00) and October 22nd 9:49 pm (UTC +1:00)

Thursday
Today was a pretty normal day, if one can have a normal day in Africa. I didn’t do much in the morning, mostly just read a lot. About 3pm I was tired of sulking in the house ( I was having a bit of a bad day with feeling homesick but it‘s to be expected) So I went out and talked to some people from the hospital and wandered around a bit. They are preparing a soccer field on the hospital, they asked if I would play but I said not likely, I’m no good at home, let alone here where every kids past time is playing soccer. Anyway, then I had to get ready for my one class for the day. It went well, I only had two kids show up, Abdul, the one who the Asher’s know well, and another kid Amos. They were really doing pretty good (relative to most of the other students knowledge) with the problems I was giving them. Then I came back home and Saidu was here. Him and I are going to go for a walk tomorrow morning at about 9 before it gets too warm. Other than that it was a pretty uneventful day. Maybe there will be more to report tomorrow.

Friday

So today was a pretty good day. I woke up at about 7 and couldn’t get back to sleep because the Africans were being soooo loud this morning. I understand that not having power for lights at night means that they want to get the most out of the day but the volume of the noise this morning was ridiculous. Anyway, not gonna rant about it anymore than I have. I got up and while I was having breakfast Saidu came over, almost an hour before he said he was coming. So I made him do some math problems, haha. Actually he really wanted to do them, he is one of my favorite students. Then we set out a little after 9am this morning to walk around Kamakwie and some of the local villages. We weren’t in Kamakwie long, walking first to Kadigidigi. Kadigidigi and all the other villages we visited had similar layouts, a collection of buildings (mostly homes) right along the edge of the road. The occasional church or mosque. The children LOVE to say hello and will keep saying hello until they are blue in the face, they usually call out “white man, white man, hello!” and repeat the process. The next village we walked through was Matebour, then Kasama, and finally Kadada. The road goes right through the land past over rivers or other various bodies of water. The view is so awesome, there are all kinds of trees and other plants. Tons of wild animals, I saw three separate varieties of small lizard, a belt snake, which Saidu told me will crawl up your pants if you aren’t careful. We saw an iguana climbing a tree, I got some pictures, but it was kind of far away so the quality isn’t great. Saidu told me people fear the iguanas because, and I quote, “if they hit you in the manhood with their tails you will never walk again”. I just laughed at him and told him we keep them as pets. The Sierra Leoneans seem to have many fears, I don’t remember many of them but they are afraid of the dark, figure that one out, Tom tells me it’s mostly the things crawling in the dark that they fear. I also saw some birds, there is one variety of bird here where a bunch of them all nest in the same tree, there is literally a nest on every branch. Oh, we passed a place where they grow their electric poles. It’s a type of tree that grows tall and straight with almost no branches until you get near the very top. We saw a school for orphans, that made me sad because there were a lot of kids there. But when the mother death rate in Sierra Leone for birthing is as high as 3 in 5 in places, and a lot of men were killed during the civil war I guess it isn’t too surprising. When we reached Kadada, Saidu informed me we had to walk back the way we came, which is not what he told me when I asked if you could get back to Kamakwie after having passed Kadigidigi. Oh well, anyway so by time I got back to the house it was a little before 12, we had walked for almost two and a half hours, and I could feel every minute of it, haha. While we were walking we talked about a bunch of things, one of which being relationships. Saidu told me he has two girlfriends, and apparently dating multiple people is pretty common place here. He told me his one girlfriend has many boyfriends. He told me he doesn’t want a woman who has more money than him because then they will call him a lazy man. I asked Tom about that here and he said that it’s pretty true, the women do a lot of the work here, raise kids, keep house, farm and the men are pretty often not doing very much. He said a lot of the economy is due to the efforts of the women. Anyway, I had a good walk and enjoyed getting to know more about Saidu, it’s good to feel like I’m finally starting to for at least one friendship here. Peter and I took some books down to the secondary school library, some books on English comprehension and a 26 volume encyclopedia of inventions. After that I had to spend a while preparing for class tonight, it took me forever to do anything because I was so tired from the walk this morning. Class went well, I actually ran over my time which is good because so far I’ve not felt like I had enough to talk about for a 45 minute period, let alone having my kids for a 90 minute solid block like I did tonight. We are doing math still, I started trying to work on fractions with them, they have kind of an idea but are really struggling with actually working them out. After class I came back and had dinner, but while we were eating the lights went out because the power was late coming on, we weren’t sure if we were actually going to get power tonight, but we did which is good. We met with some kids that we are going to be working with at the Ashers house at night, I have them for literature on Monday night and for Biology on Tuesday night. I seem to be teaching everything but Chemistry which is what I really liked, though I liked Organic and Biochemistry far more than the general chemistry stuff I’m supposed to be teaching. I had a little spider scare, there was this big spider in the bathroom when I went to brush my teeth. I saw it and thought oh that’s cool, so I got my camera, and I was taking pictures when Karen came in and told me it would bite, so I backed of and Abdul came in with bug spray, well he started trying to spray it and it started running all over, which made me a bit nervous, then Abu came over and he pointed at the wall and went, Ryan look out there’s another one which scared me and then he started laughing. He got me, Mr. Gullible. Anyway, apparently tomorrow morning I’m going to the market in Kamakwie with Abu at 8am to get some phone units, some t-shirts because the ones I brought (stupidly) are good shirts that I want to have for a long time and the washing process here is very hard on fabrics and maybe to look for a cross necklace for Abu. Then at 9 I’m going to visit the agricultural project near Kadigidigi, I’m not sure why but the guy in charge wants me to go. Anyway I miss you all and look forward to seeing your faces again.
Blessings from Africa
Ryan Brooks