Dirt Road, Paved Road

At the end of the ulcerated dirt road from our hotel complex, the dirt gives way to a crested paved road.  Used blue jeans hang from a make-shift bamboo rack on the corner.  The girl I buy hard-boiled eggs from every week, Mabenty, sits under a palm leaf thatched swath of shade on the side of the street.  Mohammed flanks her, selling dense white bread rolls the size of an iphone, and carries a jar of mayonnaise that for some reason obviates the need for refrigeration.  In case you want to parlay your purchases into a fine egg sandwich.  Across the street, miners from the nearby iron ore pit dismount from a large, open air transport truck wearing hard hats and bright orange vests.  Their faces look weary from working until exhaustion deep in the earth.  The gas station behind them has Nigerian pop music blaring out from somewhere and the tin of the treble is swept away like iron dust by the magnetic whoosh of passing land rovers, motorbikes, and ambulances.  I had the day off today and was heading north to a town called Makeni.

Makeni, during the civil war that ended just over a dozen years ago, was the base for the rebel group called the revolutionary united front (RUF).  They orchestrated a reign of terror that tortured and killed fellow Sierra Leoneans over more than a decade.  It is also the hometown of the current president, Ernest Bai Koroma.  It is a 40 minute drive from our town and has a small grocery store with a restaurant on top that is well known to ex-patriates in the area.  Judging by the absence of gaping potholes, the road seems relatively new.  Mud brick and concrete houses ensheath the road on both sides with baskets of oranges, bananas, plantains, and cassava for sale in hard-packed dirt front yards..  In the distance shirtless men shape mud bricks from a small clay colored pool of shallow water and line them up to dry in the sun.  Hand-held hoes glimmer and slice in the distance as fertile fields are prepared for the rain-squalls that will come in a few months.  I thought about the civil war here and how the landscape must have looked when villagers were running through it for their lives, having left their hands behind.  I thought about a painter we knew in Nashville who wrote that "all war is civil war" as part of a show he did with paintings he made from American Civil War photographs in a studio just behind the minor league baseball stadium.  Germain, a Congolese physician colleague, snored next to me as I stared out the window, the images all fusing together until we reached an area with wide open grasslands whose emptiness was swept by the wind of forgiveness.

We went through two checkpoints where we opened our windows and leaned forward to have our temperatures checked by thermal scanners.  Our International Medical Corps emergency response pass taped to the front window allowed us to pass through the other military checkpoints with only a glare from the armed guard in fatigues who pressed truck and bush-taxi drivers for proof of tax payments in a long, slow heated grind.  The outskirts of Makeni didn't look all that different from Lunsar, despite its claim as being the 4th largest town in Sierra Leone.

Avnad's was in a small African-style strip mall with a red dirt parking lot.  We entered through the glass door and were greeted by a Sierra Leonean who took our espresso order as a Lebanese man smoked out front and talked pressingly on the phone.  Most of the major stores in Sierra Leone, our driver told us, are owned by the Lebanese.  They have been long involved in the diamond merchant business here and are reportedly often the middle-men in diamond dealings, even now that restrictions have been put in place regarding the "clean" exportation of diamonds.  I drank my espresso eagerly.  I have been drinking Nescafe since I arrived and have had a low level headache I am coming to beliefve is related to the drastic drop off in caffeine consumption since my arrival.  That and the pound of salt that precipitates on my skin daily from being in PPE.  The aisles were full of sweets imported from Lebanon, wine and liquor from France, England, and South Africa, and even a solitary bottle of el Patron tequila from Mexico.  There were snack crackers from China in long oblong packages, brightly colored soups with Arabic characters scrawled across the front and many iterations of vienna style canned sausages and spam.  I bought Sierra Leonean cheese puffs, Thai potato chips, and a small bar of soap made locally to wash my clothes.  Others in our group stuffed their basket with Pringles, Skittles, and Argentinian red wine.  After we paid we went upstairs to the Lebanese restaurant that looked out over the hills of Makeni.  It was empty and rather formal with plastic over ornate table clothes and pleated upholstered chairs.  We ate Falafel and were just content to have a different variety of food, and a new view.

The driver needed to pick up a large toaster from a similar Lebanese owned grocery store down the road.   We waited for him in the van.  The still humid air made an invisible curtain of heat.  And then the suffering.  A little girl, probably my daughter's age and half her size, using a t-shirt as a skirt, and shirtless, peered into our van with the most beautifully sad eyes and held out her hand.  An older girl, perhaps 14, pedaled up in a home-made wheel chair that had a bicycle sprocket shaft drive she could turn with her hands because her legs were shriveled up and useless.  She too, held out her hand.  Soon a procession of blind men and women, with hands on the shoulders of children whose duty it is to shepherd them around begging for alms, crowded the open sliding door to our Toyota van.  I called over to a peanut vendor and bought peanuts for everyone.  And did it again for the next wave.  We sat there for what seemed like a heart-wrenching eternity, each silently under the hot spotlight of moral interrogation. As we backed out and climbed back up onto the paved road, a group of the children were gathering around an older child who was banging a coconut on a rock.  It may as well have been my head.