Africa Blog with Mackay Taggart - blog

Sierra Leone Ranked as the "World's Second Most Dangerous Place to be a Journalist"

Sierra Leone gets more then its fair share of bad press.  It seems that nearly every week a new study, list or statistic is published that places the country at or close to the bottom of the “ranking du jour”. 

Striking Parallels

At times it feels like a challenge to find two places in the world more different then Toronto and Sierra Leone, yet for a brief period last week news and politics in both locations ran oddly parallel.  The reason being, that last week both Toronto and Sierra Leone were hit by brief, but nevertheless crimpling transit strikes.

Things that make you go NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Things that make you go NOOOOOOOO!


Yesterday morning I arrived at my local radio station around 10:30am.  My plan was to get in and get out; taking a couple minutes to finish editing a story I had been working on with a Sierra Leonean reporter.  Upon initial approach I could see a small huddle of people just inside the building's glass front doors.  From far away it looked like something wasn't right, the blurred bodies were conveying a sense of urgency that's rare in this part of the world. 

Opening an Account at the Canadian Bank of Inexperience

It’s been sometime since I last posted a blog entry on CFRB.com.  Over the past couple weeks I’ve had the chance, for work and for pleasure, to travel more of the country.  I made it to Sherbro Island off Sierra Leone’s South East coast for an Easter hiking trip and to the small town of Mile 91 last weekend for an anniversary celebration commemorating the birth of a local NGO. 

3 minutes that will change your life....

 

Passport photos, waits on subway platforms, microwave popcorn.  These are things, which back home, generally take about three minutes.  Last week in Makeni I witnessed spans of three minutes that carried the weight of a lifetime.

On the ground and on the air......

I’ve just surpassed the two-week mark here in Sierra Leone.  I haven’t decided if the fact that it feels like a lot longer is a good thing or a bad thing.  Last Saturday we departed Freetown, after a week of training, for the three hour drive to our new home in Makeni.  Makeni is a small centre. I hesitate to use the term “city-centre” for fear that it will invoke misleading images of electricity, municipal sanitation services,  paved roads and buildings that reach higher then two stories.  These all being things that Makeni lacks.

Arriving in Sierra Leone

I arrived in Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown early last Sunday morning, a full 24hrs after departing from Pearson airport. After stops in the UK and Senegal it was a relief to finally be done with a sense constant movement, not to mention airplane food. Freetown is not the easiest city to access from it’s airport; the region’s mountainous coastline forced the facility to be built on the area’s only flat piece of terrain – across the mouth of a wide river. This means travelers have only one of three options to choose from; ferry, helicopter or hovercraft. While the latter two are undoubtedly the most exciting modes of transport they are also the least reliable and most dangerous. Thus from the airport we hopped in taxis for the short ride to the nearby ferry dock. The first thing I noticed upon leaving the airport was the total lack of electricity, while it was a bustling late Saturday night/early Sunday morning and there were dozens of people walking the streets it was the headlights of passing cars that provided the only illumination. It was enough light however to get at least a small sense of the level of poverty that dominates this country. A recent survey completed under the auspices of the United Nations identified Sierra Leone as the poorest country of the 177 it examined. It is impossible, from the moment one arrives on the ground, to ignore this fact. Getting on the ferry was the first truly frenetic experience I had in this new country, and seems after only a few short days here, that it may come to define my experience. Everything here seems to move too quickly and, at the same time, not at all. We boarded the boat surrounded by dozens of young men hungry to carry our bags and move us swiftly onto the shotty vesicle. The boat departed after only about half an hour waiting at the darkened wharf. Our hurried departure was apparently due to the presence of the nation’s Vice-President, who, incidentally, was also on our flight from London to Freetown. Past visitors have noted much longer waits at the dock.