Post Campaign

I have spent the past few days traveling up country with Hlin, our finance delegate, to Makeni and Bo for regional meetings with the field officers from all of Sierra Leone’s 12 districts. We went primarily to gather data, consolidate finances and conduct debriefings, but also to listen to and gather any feedback on the campaign.

The core responsibility of the Sierra Leone Red Cross before, during and after the campaign was social mobilization. This required organizing 4,000 volunteers to sensitize their respective communities to the issue of malaria, to bed-net use, and to ensure they came out during the campaign to receive vaccinations and nets for their children under five.

The Hang-Up portion of the project finished last week with volunteers circulating house-to-house across the country to ensure nets were received by all under fives and that they are properly hung and being used.

It was great to hear the enthusiasm of the field officers as they explained how successful the program has been so far. Most felt that because of the program, there is now better recognition of the Red Cross in their communities and more interest from volunteers to continue to work on community based health initiatives.

These are encouraging signs for a country rebuilding from conflict and struggling with a myriad of health issues. Local communities now have a base of volunteers willing and able to continue with not just malaria prevention but other community-based health care initiatives, and community members are now more aware than ever that the Red Cross can provide such care.

Returning to Freetown, it reminded me again of the stark contrast between it and the small rural villages up country. There you find no more than two dozen mud brick homes with thatched palm roofs between which women pound grain, lay out laundry or cook on open fires. Children, when not balancing bundles of wood or buckets of water a top there heads, are either playing barefoot or are part of a seemingly endless procession of those dressed in crisp bright school uniforms on their way to or from school.

By contrast, Freetown is a jumble of decaying concrete buildings and corrugated tin shacks. There is garbage littered everywhere, sometimes in huge piles on the side of the road. The streets of Freetown are crowded with taxis and mini buses and people carrying oil, coal, wood, tires, everything you can imagine.

Christmas decorations and small artificial Christmas trees have even appeared amongst the street vendors over the past few weeks. You can find almost anything here, but without knowing where, you might think that all that can be bought are used clothes and mobile phones. What an amazing phenomenon that in a place with little or no electrical, water, or sanitation systems, almost everyone here has a cell phone.

As a good friend recently reminded me, it can be easy to be lured into romanticizing rural village life, especially in contrast to the chaos of urban centres, but there is nothing idyllic about the poverty in which people live. In both Freetown and the rural villages, life is hard, even putting aside the atrocities faced by most during the war; daily life is a brutal grind. There are few opportunities for employment and most people struggle to make more than a dollar a day.

In spite of the difficulties they face, people are extremely resilient. One of the dangers in trying to describe (or to understand for that matter) a place like Sierra Leone is the tendency to describe (or see) only what is different from home. The most important things often go unnoticed like the playfulness of children, the love of their parents, and the camaraderie of friends.

Here, as everywhere, there is life in all its tragedy, joy and complexity.