August 14th, Freetown, Sierra Leone

August 14th, Freetown, Sierra Leone

I have been treated to a night at Ray’s for my last night in Freetown & do I ever appreciate it! It is so nice over here, a real breath of fresh air. we’ll definitely have to treat Ray for our BBQ, he has been a godsend.

I made my was over, I have been thinking on how to tell someone what to expect if they volunteered at Rhema. I would say camp at the Cloverbar landfill for a week or so & that’ll give you an idea. On the way if I thought Thunderhill was bad, some of the places down town still leave me in awe & are beyond anything I could ever imagine. The conditions that these people live in I wouldn’t have thought existed. I was lying in bed this morning & I thought of one of the amputees, who’s translation in Krio was he wanted to go back to McKinney where his family was from since he has no one here to take care of him. This particular fellow has no legs or hands. I thought ‘I can do that’ (25 000 Leones, about 7-8 dollars). So out I went back to Grafton. I found him & he is not in good shape at all. He has gotten quite sick, I also brought him that biege sweater as he asked for something to keep himself warm, as he sleeps on the ground in what can only be described as a lean to covered in a tarp, they cook inside when it rains here so it can get quite smoky. Anyway, you know when you see someone who is so frail & sick you get the feeling that they won’t be with us much longer, well that was the case here. It turns out he is too sick to make the trip to Makeni, there he was no legs no hands on a dirt floor, I gave him the sweater & 20 000 Leones, which is not a lot for us but goes a really long way here.

I know that with so much human suffering here, it sounds so trivial, but seeing these dogs get kicked & so many in such horrible condition has been so hard on me. Today this poor cowering dog, all ribs & hips, then he turned around & he had puss coming out of both eyes like I have never seen before. I began going through my head what I could do & I know that there is nothing. It seems to me that you can judge the development of a country on the way the animals are treated. The dogs has disturbed me as much as anything here.

The internet is up & running at Rhema, or I should say it works, the computer they have is too old & sorry Len Macs don’t work anywhere in SL. I will send a few more care packages when I return to Canada. I was contacted today by the guy who introduced us to the amputees out at Grafton he had a huge proposal drawn up, The Spencer Sekyer foundation for War amputees. He put a tremendous amount of time & effort into it, I am not interested in starrting a foundation, I just want to help these people. I told him (& Marie) that he is welcome to whatever I send.

Thye trip home from Kono, was so Africa, I wish I could have video taped the entire trip, I got a front seat in a flat faced bus & was feeling much better. It is beautiful up in Kono, spectacular African beauty. The rest of it also encompasses Africa, having to push the bus everytime we started it, guys riding on the tops of buses or hanging off the backs of trucks, rough roads, they slow down for nothing here, we ran over 1 chicken ( I think at least it went under the bus) & hit a goat, the animals here though wonder the road like they own it, in fact the dogs sleep in the middle of the road!! By the end my knees were aching, we went through 3-4 police road blocks, no problems though (I guess there was a riot in Freetown yesterday)

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