On the first night I fainted, on the second I danced, and on the third day I shook hands with the president of Sierra Leone. Who needs training with progression such as this? A week has passed since I awoke in New York City on a Tuesday morning hoping my ATM card was still sitting under the till at Ryan’s Daughter from when I’d been Saturday night after the barbecue/Bapple-Schleg seven-hour jam (with Coco on the fiddle). Of greater concern was whether the place would even be open. Thank God for the Irish-only a pub run by such a quality race would be open at nine-thirty AM, with punters getting the early start, no less. “Where ya headed?” an old man in a cabbie’s cap drinking a Guiness inquired after I expressed my relief, my card being one of twenty or so left over from the weekend. I mentioned the continent. “Have a pint first?” The barman asked. I'll miss my old gig. Rarely do teachers get to ask questions of such pertinence. I paused, thought thrice, shook my head and hit the road for DC. While in town I made Wa, Wigs, J, and Maddy watch Blood Diamond with me so we could practice some Krio. All I could discern was “dem guvment trups” when Leo was getting saucy with an arms dealer. I didn’t know whether I’d want to see dem guv trups or not. Not sure I’ll ever quite be sure.
“I hate that movie,” ranted Joseph Opalo, while explaining to the future volunteers of Sierra Leone just what exactly happened here, things that few Americans actually know, or can fathom. “There wasn’t really a civil war, it was just civil chaos.”
He would know, having lived in Sierra Leone from 1974 until 1997, when he escaped to Guinea on a boat loaded with refugees. That was six years after rebel fighting officially began with a Coup d’Etat led by 27-year-old Captain Valentine Strasser; and twelve following the start of disintegration into failed statehood. This condition is rarely not an intricately layered web, vulnerable in the wilds, but it is best explained by the Britain’s intentional suppression of education during their colonization following the 1880’s Scramble for Africa and subsequent summer-school crash-course in how to run a democracy before high tailing it in 1961. That, and the seventeen-year dictatorship of Saika Stevens. “What happened wasn’t because of DeBeers, the diamonds, or any exploitation of mineral resources for that matter, that’s a natural result of a complete governmental collapse, which becomes inevitable when the leader of a country steals everything that isn’t nailed down.” Stevens came into power in 1968, a year in which three military coups occurred to replace Albert Morgai, the 2nd president of Sierra Leone. Stevens had been a labor leader promising the end of corruption. He wound up building himself the biggest house in the world with government funds. Selling all the x-ray machines, trucks, antibody vaccines, anything he could get his hands on. He sold fishing grounds to nuclear waste companies, made a mockery of his army by giving his soldiers one bullet per year, and systematically dismantled every institution and civil service in the country. Then he made jokes about his corruption as part of his celebrated charisma. “I went in to meet him, and after ten minutes wondered if I was being drugged, the man was that charming,” said Mr. Opalo. His genius was in destroying organizations, not people. He didn’t kill many political enemies, he rendered them powerless. He ran his kleptocracy by seeking out criminals, the uneducated, drunks, and drug addicts to reek havoc when necessary. They were classified the SSD (Special Security Division), or “Palace Guard.” He turned the national newspapers into tabloids with headlines such as “MAN THROWS SHIT AT JUDGE” or some such thing you’d see on the New York Post (how I miss you), thus he could claim the right of free speech was lawful, yet there was no place for it to be heard or read. This former labor leader eliminated unions, outlawed student governments, and gave jobs to civil servants whose positions he’d eradicated. He’d essentially left the country without an immune system, and on a continent where 12,000 new cases of HIV are diagnosed a day, Magic Johnson Sierra Leone was not.
After ’85 the country fell apart,” Opalo claimed. “The country could no longer afford petrol, I’d offer someone a fifty and couldn’t fill my bike’s tank. When someone was breaking into my house I called the police and they told me they’d come to my house but I’d have to walk over to the station first and bring money for gas. I started sleeping with a gun under my pillow. They stopped paying teachers. They stopped paying the police. Then they stopped printing money.” You get the picture. “Finally when Strasser wanted to get the US government to recognize his legitimacy he called me into his office, ridden with bullet holes, windows shot out. He needed me because his people couldn’t understand English well enough to negotiate for themselves, so I walked over to the US Embassy, banged on the front gate amid all the turmoil and madness in the streets, went in, and eventually got him his recognition. It was a crazy day.” I looked out the window from the conference room where we sat, the late afternoon sun causing Opalo’s sunglasses to be not merely for effect. Freetown climbed up mountains behind our backs and around our shoulders. It looked like the Hollywood Hills after a small earthquake, thousands of smaller, more colorful, leaning towers of Pisas, homes clutching the earth. I’d been there four days, drinking star beer, playing basketball with kids, meeting the country’s politicians and diplomats, congratulating us for work we hadn’t done. It was now sinking in what had happened here.
When I stepped off the plane at the country’s only international airport, across the harbor from Freetown’s center, the first thing I noticed while looking out the window a bus hurtling through nameless villages was the darkness. That African darkness. Because of the rain the stars did not light the sky and the moon seemed a bit intimated, too. I had my hand out the window waving to the people whose feet I saw at the bottom of a flashlight’s teepee, until an oncoming bus nearly slapped me five. I did not want to join the over 1,700 hundred young men left mutilated by the war the first night. On the ferry to Freetown they gave us our first dose of Malaria medicine. As I swallowed it I noticed a long slash along my forearm. I didn’t remember being cut. AIDS. Not here an hour and I was one of the twelve thousand new African cases A DAY. I’ve become a Billy Beane-like stat freak. I drank some water, stood up, and fell down. I felt vertigo for the second time in my life. The African heat, the medicine, the cut and blood, twenty hours of sleepless flying, five glasses of wine, four beers, two glasses of champagne, a shot of whiskey and United Airlines cuisine had done me in. I thought they might throw me overboard.
Fortunately it started to rain as it has every day since I arrived. The warm clean sky water and long deep breaths revived me enough to get back on the bus and I began to drift off. I looked out the window first at Freetown at night but it could not resonate for me the state I was in. I couldn’t tell if the other volunteers were pissing themselves because everyone’s pants were wet. The streets were packed with waving hands and scowling faces. Rain struck the ground like lightening. The darkness was lit by the streaking flash of motorcycle lights. Brandon, the second oldest volunteer after yours truly, sat next to me, his head out the window telling every kid on a bike. “Hey, we’re teachers with Peace Corps!” They did not look impressed. I was surprised to find that Sierra Leonean drive on the right side of the road. Perhaps a subtle fuck you to their former colonizers (though most football fans here are supporting England in the cup..). It seemed though that no one told our driver this little fact, as he sped up the left lane, making power moves, but only causing a twenty minute long eight car honk. The left wheel of the bus teetered on the edge of some five-foot deep pothole that might have been a Jacuzzi in better days. Somehow I fell soundly asleep, for what felt like seconds because then we were at the hostel. I brought my bags up stairs and climbed into my first night of sleeping in a net.
When I woke up I felt like I was camping. Nine straight hours of sweaty sleep and I was a new man. The hostel was next door to the national soccer stadium and a playground with a full court hoop and lots of tall African men. I was in my element. During the first break from orientation, this kid from Brooklyn, the only Jew in this Peace Corps crew, and I went over the court with a driver we befriended that morning. Whenever traveling to any new country, your first friend should always be someone with a car. Or a Jew. Four hours and I had both. By the end of the day I was talking recruitment with the Sierra Leone national basketball coach. Coach K this was not. Sierra Leone does not have one indoor basketball court. Good thing it barely drops below seventy. Of course, guaranteed rain from June until November puts a damper on player’s cutting abilities. Guys were slipping like a bear on skates, and not from my stutter step. But the connections were good. Now it was time to drink with the locals…
