Sierra Leone trip

Trip Summary (by Steve)

The Sierra Leone team (D-Lab SL) worked in six villages near Lunsar in northern Sierra Leone with the Idaho-based NGO, Village Hope. Jon Bart, founder of Village Hope, was present along with his Sierra Leonean employee Stephen Gibateh. D-Lab SL was housed in a convent at the local Catholic mission.




Narrative

The inaugural D-Lab SL trip began with an inauspicious start---the check-in line for Northwest airlines wrapped half-way around the airport, delaying our take-off by 20 minutes we didn't have to spare. By the time the team arrived in Amsterdam reaching the connecting flight was a lost cause, so it ended up stranded in Amsterdam for 2 days. Flights to Sierra Leone are rare, so the team ended up being sent through Nairobi and Accra before arriving in Freetown late on January 8th.

D-Lab SL got off to a quick start the next day, with Jon leading it on a tour of Robonka's school, gardens, and rice fields before bringing it back to Lunsar for tours of a vocational school and the renowned Catholic schools connected to the mission. After lunch the team was given a brief orientation focusing on Temne, formal education, health issues and agriculture. The rest of the night was calm and relaxing until Nadia put her candle on her sink and ended up burning down her vanity mirror and setting the bathroom on fire. Fortunately, the fearless leader stayed calm, beat back the flames with a towel and no one was harmed.

The second day turned into a whirlwind tour of five villages: Rogballan, Rogbarren, Bouyah, Robanka, and Rokholifa. At each, Jon discussed his microfinance program of loans and the team described each project to the villagers. Despite getting back after dark, the team rose early in the morning for the two and half hour mass. Afterward, Ben and Lucy discussed working on the latrine with Paul while Swetha and Steve talked to Mr. Jalloh, from the Ministry of Agriculture, about peanuts and the Moringa tree. Several members of the team went to Robonka later to discuss charcoal, education and peanuts, but the villagers iterated several times that their greatest needs were chain saws and seeds.

The workweek began the next day with a slew of projects in Rogballan including observing the education system, sampling the soil, starting a census of the community, testing the borehole's water quality, and gather resources for constructions. The following day, at the mission, Steve began constructing the first peanut sheller by poured the concrete mix, while Yi and Nadia did most of the assembly for the charcoal crusher. Skyrich, Joseph, and Lawrence helped with these tasks and they learned about their educations and interests. Yalu and Swetha went to Robomp with Susan, Jon Bart's wife, to observe the schools, and Lucy and Ben hired a carpenter to make the form for the rammed earth wall. Jacob and Elizabeth, agricultural engineering students from the University of Illinois, spent their first day assessing a potential site for irrigation.

Early the next morning Swetha and Steve set off with Jon, Mr. Jalloh, Father Francis, Joseph, Jacob and Elizabeth for Njala agricultural station, arriving in time for a tour of the farms and to learn about the college's work on improved seed varieties, infrastructure for technology dissemination, and interest in post-harvest processing. Steve talked to them about the peanut sheller design and promised to get them in contact with Jock Brandis, while Swetha discussed the Moringa tree. Back in Lunsar, Ben and Yalu went to a pineapple farm and managed to bring back several despite Ben's notoriously dropping one on the road.

Because Jon wanted to a visit a small irrigated farm near Bo, the team took a different route on the return journey, collecting 4 toxic chemical drums along the way and stopping in Makeni to send an e-mail to our parents. Steve checked who won the BCS Championship Game (Florida, of course). In Rogballan, the town, under Ben and Lucy's supervision, was hard at work cutting rebar and pouring the concrete slab for the latrine until dusk.

The next day the team split off in a number of directions with Nadia going to Freetown with Jon, Ben and Lucy traveling to Robomp to assess a site for latrine construction, while Yalu and Swetha went to Robanka to do an educational assessment. Yi and Steve went to a metal working shop to get their toxic waste drums cut for their projects. By the early afternoon the team was together again in Lunsar without Nadia's supervision, so they played soccer with local kids and ate up most of the snacks. Let this be a lesson unto future trip leaders. Around midnight Joanna, a course 4 student gathering information for her thesis on school building, arrived from the airport and shortly thereafter Nadia returned with a harrowing tale of how she survived a traffic accident on the way back from Freetown.

Health was the focus of the next morning as several team members met with the local CHO (community health officer) and visited the local hospital. Steve shopped for peanuts and tested his peanut sheller. It became clear that the stator was breaking and not going to last so he made plans to produce a new one. Yi lead her first charcoal burn late in the night after burning the chemical residue off a drum earlier in the day. The latrine construction continued in earnest. The following day provided a brief respite as the team went to the Mengebureh mission and met Bomba, a cute little 4 year old. His foot was badly damaged so the sisters took him back to Lunsar for treatment at a local hospital. The team took a trip downriver by boat together and some of the team members toured a local town and jumped off a platform into the river nearly 20 feet below, which seemed like a good idea at the time.

The team got back to work early the next morning, with Yi doing a charcoal burn in Rogballan, Steve working on the new peanut sheller, latrine construction continuing and Yalu and Swetha weighing children and doing a small health assessment. Dave Peckham, head of the Village Bicycle Project, arrived that night and discussed his NGO with the team. The day after Yalu and Swehta got a quote on the cost of making blackboards for the local schools, while Ben and Lucy did their own cost estimate for the latrine including zinc for the roof and then checked out termite-mound plaster in Mephira. Steve watched Obama's inauguration with dozens of locals at the canteen.
The next day, the Village Hope's container of tools and school supplies finally arrived from Freetown. Yi did a charcoal burn at the mission, crushed charcoal by hand and made a few briquettes while Lucy, Swetha, and Yalu unknowingly met the Archbishop of Freetown at a ceremony. Ben continued to lead work on the latrine, pouring concrete for a support beam.
A meeting with Alpha Savage, dean of Fourah Bay College in Freetown, was on the agenda for the next day. The team arrived at the college early in the afternoon and discussed the projects briefly. Unfortunately, some miscommunication had led Alpha to believe all of the MIT students were civil engineers, so all the students he invited to the meeting were civil engineers. The MIT students and Sierra Leonean students discussed school life and discovered, to Yi's surprise, that fund raisers were not a big part of life at Fourah Bay College. Otherwise, college life was very similar. Later that night the team enjoyed a dance session at the canteen during a going-away party for Susan.

Swetha was quick to work the next day, joining with Mr. Jalloh to plant some Moringa seeds in Rogballan with the permission of the chief. Steve assembled his sheller back at the mission while Yi made a new concrete piece for the charcoal crusher in the morning before visiting the local hospital with Lucy. Ben, Steve and Swetha visited the local eye clinic, and Swetha fainted during the surgery because of nasal congestion and the mask constricting her air supply. It was certainly not the image of a man shoving a knife in a man's eye for 10 minutes that was to blame.
The next morning was a mad scramble for supplies for the teacher workshop. Lucy and Steve shopped in the market with Skyrich while Yalu and Swetha organized the workshop. The workshop lasted most of the day as the teacher's discussed their needs and methods and shared their pedagogical techniques. Meanwhile, Ben chilled at the river with Paul and George before attending a concert that night with a few other team members.

Steve did a demonstration of the peanut sheller and got feedback from Robonka the next morning, giving the villagers a pound of peanut seeds as a sign of thanks. Everyone helped pack and then the team took the bumpy ride to Rokholifa where the guys played soccer and the girls cooked before sharing dinner and singing songs with the locals at a campfire.

A chicken woke Ben up the next morning pecking at his arm and driving him from the head teacher's home. It proceeded to rest in a corner near Steve's legs before Lucy drove it from the room by prodding it with a flashlight. The team left early in the morning, returning to Lunsar in time to do a soil infiltration test and head to Rogballan for the final CDT meeting where Jon was named Paramount Chief and Yi did a charcoal-making demonstration. The villagers insisted on doing a scary Bondu (secret society) dance which was as frightening as it was bizarre.

We packed that night and made the trip to the airport the next day with Stephen driving one truck to the airport and Pa Hassan, a man who will always be remembered for his willingness to accelerate directly into potholes, driving the other.