I just got back from a 9 day trip to Makeni, the third largest “city” in Sierra Leone. I flew into Freetown on a small small World Food Program flight. There were 4 passengers and 2 pilots. I had the bad fortune of flying in the same day that Libyan President Gaddafi was flying in. One of the main roads was blocked, and we ended up sitting in 4 hours of traffic to get into town. On the drive to Makeni, villagers had lined up on the main road in their church clothes holding huge signs welcoming the Libyan leader. This seemed a little odd. Gaddafi’s visit was very controversial, partly because he trained Charles Taylor in the art of overthrowing governments, and Taylor funded the RUF, the rebel group that committed massive human rights abuses in Sierra Leone during the war.

Makeni was nice. The NGO I was visiting does excellent work, and they took me around to villages to meet with people and see the projects they are working on. In one chiefdom, a man told me that his chiefdom was the poorest chiefdom in the world. Someone explained that Sierra Leoneans are always told that their country is the poorest country in the world, based on the UN Human Development Index. And this particular chiefdom is the poorest in Sierra Leone. Thus, people had come to the conclusion that they were the poorest people in the world. I commented on how degrading I thought the rankings were, but people insisted it was probably true.

At each village we visited , a community leader would be told that a visitor was here who wanted to speak with some villagers. Within five minutes, consistently, a large crowd had gathered around me. Everyone dropped what they were doing to see who the “oputu,” or white woman was.

We visited a man who used to be a very prominent human rights activist who has been very ill lately. He was in a small dark room, in a seated fetal position. He shook as he talked, and it took him about 10 seconds to turn his head to the left to address me. The NGO that I was with offered to get a vehicle to bring him to a government hospital in Makeni, but the wife insisted that a traditional healer was helping him. She said that her husband had been cursed with black magic, and that everyday the healer removed “cartridges” from his body. The cartridges apparently look like grains of rice. At the time I visited, 24 cartridges had been removed. The guy I was with said: “It’s not easy being a human rights activist in Sierra Leone. We are not physically harassed, but you get attaccked with witchcraft.”

Creole was harder for me to understand than Liberian English. I had to use interpreters a lot. Some fun phrases:

“Me no sabi” = “I don’t know”

“Who si’ it happen?” = “Where did the incident take place?”