KATHMANDU BABY

7/5/08

So I leave on a jet plane, a BMI flight, not very full.  BMI are flying to Sierra Leone from London Heathrow three times a week now. It’s hoped it will bring tourists to this country recovering from the civil war that ravaged it.

 The Country; better  known in the west as the film setting for Di Caprios role in ‘Blood Diamond’ , the movie about the stone over which the war was fought.    Most Sierra Leoneons are like Emmanuel and have never set eyes on the stone themselves.   More recently David Beckham could be spotted in Freetown on a flying visit for UNICEF.  Sierra Leone s children face the highest rates of mortality. He played football with some of the victims who had had their limbs severed during the conflict ‘how will you vote now?’ the rebels asked them as they hacked off their hands, ‘short sleeve or long sleeve’?  they enquired.   The victims I saw had a short sleeve, the arm hacked off above the elbow.     

Perhaps Ironically or more grotesquely as David Beckham was touching hearts In Sierra Leone his wife could be seen photographed on the cover of vogue dripping in diamonds.   War, poverty, diamonds.

Arrive, fast exit from airport: Emmanuel seems convinced we will be robbed at any time

Wait one and a half  hours for the ferry to Freetown. Ferry music videos accompany our journey. ; ‘feed the world’, ‘ la is la bonita’, ‘diamonds on the soles of her shoes’. 

Lungi to Freetown:  a happy , relaxed, warm.  There is definitely a good vibe awaiting any visitor here.

Arrive in a B and B, no running water but a bucket.  ‘Nyan den goh’ , (mende for its fine a language I will discover I should have learnt before).   Emmanuel barricades the door with some chairs, what is he expecting to come through the door?   I sleep: some kind of insect munches on my knee.  I notice the remnants of the feast a few days later, when my knee is a huge red blister, my temperature is soaring and I realise that there really is no health care where I am staying.