Not for what I’ve written in past columns – I don’t apologize for anything I said so don’t hold your breath waiting.
I apologize for losing my faith in you.
According to the European Network on Debt and Development, “Sierra Leone is very dependent on aid and nearly one half of the government budget being financed by international grants and loans.”
Officials from the Guma Valley Water Company said they wanted to construct a second dam, but only if they could find investment from the Chinese or the Israelis.
Various NGOs, such as Medicins Sans Frontieres and Catholic Relief Services, send foreigners to temporarily offer their services throughout the country. United Nations workers from other countries are riddled throughout the country, doing one thing or other to make a difference here. Many of the prominent retail businesses in Freetown are run by Indians or Lebanese.
One of my colleagues even admitted to me: “Sierra Leoneans don’t like to run businesses. We like working office jobs with weekends off.”
It made me ask the question, “Can Sierra Leoneans run Sierra Leone?”
For a majority of my time here, I firmly believed the answer was no. Please understand that I didn’t want to lose hope. Someday, Sierra Leone will become a developed country and finally move further up the ranks of the United Nations indexes. But that golden period is in the distant future. I doubt it would happen during my lifetime. And I doubted Sierra Leoneans could do it themselves, without further outside assistance.
I am well aware that the war continues to have devastating effects, despite having ended seven years ago. Many people I’ve spoken to say that Sierra Leone would have hot running water, reliable electricity and developed roads if the war had never happened. When I see a showerhead that fails to work, an air conditioner that cannot run or a toilet that is unable to flush, I realize that those things would not be there if they had not worked at one point in time. And I realize just how tightly the war still grips Sierra Leone and how it left this beautiful country in a backward state.
I recently traveled to Kabala, an undeveloped rural town about 185 miles north east of Freetown. It was there that I met Dr. Amada Sesay, one of only two doctors in the community and the only doctor at the Kabala Government Hospital.
He is an overworked man who typically works 60 hour weeks or more. A long line of patients often wait to see him everyday. Some even go so far as to visit him at his home, he said.
Dr. Sesay received his medical education in China. My mouth dropped at this. “Why on Earth would you come to a place like this with an education like that?” I asked. And he said it was because he felt he was obligated to help the people of his home country.
Meeting people such as Dr. Sesay has restored my faith in the people of Sierra Leone, if only slightly. Sierra Leoneans are indeed capable of doing things for themselves. It happens everyday, but I had chosen to be blind to it because my pessimism consumed me.
When I walk into NGO offices – such as Amnesty International and the Society for Women and AIDs in Africa – I see that the staff is comprised of Sierra Leoneans. Favorite restaurants of mine that I frequent, such as D’s Bazaar, are run very well by entrepreneurial Sierra Leoneans (perhaps my colleague wasn’t completely right about Sierra Leoneans only wanting to work Monday through Friday in an office). And I see the hard work that the staff right here at Awoko put into this very newspaper you are reading right now.
It shows that Sierra Leoneans are, indeed, capable of running things for themselves. I firmly believe in that now. But I sincerely hope that, one day, you can do it without relying on the aid of the Chinese, the British or the United Nations to help you along the way. That is something I still have my doubts about. I hope that you, the people of Sierra Leone, can one day prove me wrong.
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