Why does everything taste like Freetown supermarket?

I have been in Sierra Leone for over three months now. The rains have come and stayed - yes I know it is sunny most of the time but it still rains at least once a day (mostly at night). It is the middle of November and still the rains are heavy with hurricane type winds that force me to shut the windows which I truly hate, even more than the mosquitoes. Last night I shut the windows only for the winds to open a few of my not so good windows and my dining room got soaked, good and proper!
Speaking of dining rooms. I have notice a phenomenon here in Freetown. By the way I say Freetown simply because I haven't used any supermarkets outside the city. In the past few months I have been trying to recreate meals I have in the UK - spaghetti bolognaise, fish pie, pizza, stir fry with noodles etc. This has meant that I MUST shop at one of the many supermarkets in the west of Freetown - Select, Monoprix, Atsons (why did I even go in there?), Essential, Freetown, St Mary's and so on. Everytime I buy flour or pasta or biscuits or bread from any of you these supermarkets, these products taste of the supermarket I bought it from. I can't explain it to you but if you live in Freetown and shop in any of these stores you know what I mean. Is it that these things take so long on the shelves that they have absorbed the smell of the place? But then that means that the packaging itself is poor. Is it the heat? All of these places are air conditioned. What is it? Somebody scientific please explain.
By the way Freetown Supermarket, we know that you erased the best before date off the big Thousand Island dressing bottles. I do hope no one buys them!!!

I'm Going Home

I woke up this morning with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. You know the mixture that brings on nausea. I used to get this feeling around my birthday every year until I was about 10 years old. I was always too ill to enjoy my birthday parties. After a while, my parents stopped having them. No one wants to watch their child wretch while other people's children are eating the expensive birthday meal you've prepared.
It's funny. I was born in England. I have spent more time outside of Sierra Leone than inside, I have only ever carried a British passport (until recently) but I'm going around telling everyone that I'm going home. People understand me. Before I explain, they know what I'm talking about. After all they can see Sierra Leone inside and out.
I am talking about going back to Sierra Leone. And everyone seems to understand why I have chosen now to go back to a Sierra Leone without electricity and water and roads and hi-speed broadband and Sky TV and NHS and Tetley tea and Jones the Bootmaker and MAC and so much more. But yes, I have decided to go home.
So I'm packing my possessions and I'm buying more. Where am I going to put them all? I don't know. In eight days I will be on a flight to Sweet Salone. But I'm going to miss organic broccoli.

Blood, Sweat and Nonsense from the BBC

This post has nothing to do with health (or maybe it does) and it has nothing to do with Sierra Leone but it does have a little to do with globalisation and development. I have put up with the constant crap that TV executives have been doling out to us over the past three years. Since Bob Geldof and his posse decided to 'make poverty history' there has been a mob of people making money out of the poverty of others in one way or other.
Last night recovering from a bout of poisoning (which I suspect was tuna-related), I settled to watch a couple of TV programmes which had been billed as educational. Firstly, there was Blood, Sweat and Takeaways a BBC documentary which claimed to expose how workers in developing countries are exploited so that Westerners can have their exotic meals. Six young Brits - four white and the two obligatory ethnic minorities were sent to Indonesia to work in a tuna factory. Olu, the black boy is expelled from the programme after a violent episode which involved breaking glass at the factory. I fully expected him to be thrown out mid-programme as production staff seem to have found a way to weed out the best young black people out of their programmes so that only the stereotypes remain. The rest of the programme continues without him and these young people proceed to catch, clean and can tuna for two days. I was hoping the education will come but it never did.
This programme failed to educate. What the programme did show us however, was how spoilt and ill-educated British youngsters are. It was sad to see that even the immigrant children had no cultural education, whatsoever. The programme left me with the feeling that I had just wasted one hour of my life which could have been better spent playing Solitaire.
Here goes BBC execs:
1. Poverty is everywhere.
2. Poor people are being exploited daily. You needn't have sent those young people to Indonesia to show that poor people are being exploited daily. All you needed to do was send them to a vegetable processing plant in the UK where illegal immigrants are employed and paid below the minimum wage because they cannot cry foul.
3. Having a toilet that flushes is not what makes you a human being. Some of what makes you human is overcoming adversities and learning to live with other people.
4. If you really want to make a programme about what it is like to live and work in a developing country, use the people of that country to show it. Unfortunately, sending 'white people' to a developing country to show injustice somehow feels like injustice.
5. Next time think about how you can help the viewer make a difference. Don't just tell her what you know that she knew already, tell her how she can make a difference in that situation.
By the way, I don't think I can be bothered to watch the episodes on producing rice and processing prawns. I'm bored already.
That's all folks. Next time, I will tell you a little about A Place in the Wild, the other programme I watched made by ITV. Another patronising pile of .....

Till then, Amiex

What Being a Sierra Leonean Really Means

This weekend you will find that there are Sierra Leone Independence Day Celebrations all around the world whereever you find a group of Sierra Leoneans. Sierra Leoneans like to party and don't really need an excuse to do so. 27 April 1961, Sierra Leone won its independence from British colonial rule. I can understand the celebrations in the first two years after we gained independence but what are we celebrating now? Before I lay into the waste of money that Independence day celebrations are, let me give you a brief look at the life of the average Sierra Leonean. Here are links of what Sierra Leoneans go through everyday. This article http://tiny.cc/Zbg2Z or this http://tiny.cc/SBWPe give you an idea of the state of healthcare in the country.
Then you have the statistics which are: Nearly 6 million people but only 168 doctors. Which means 1 doctor for nearly 50,000 people.
70% of adults can't read or write and the same number is unemployed. The average life expectancy of a Sierra Leonean is 42 years.
70% of people live on less than 50 pence a day (anyone living on less than 50p a day is classed as extremely poor by the World Bank). This means that 36% of people cannot meet their daily food needs and 60% of children are chronically malnourished
Not forgetting that Sierra Leone has the highest rate of children dying and pregnant women dying in the world. It is also ranked the poorest and most under-developed country in the world. So I ask you again. What are we celebrating? Would life under British rule be as bad as life is today? Would we have had the 11 year civil war?
Given the choice I wouldn't want to be under British colonial rule with its rascist policies and unfair actions. And perhaps that is what we celebrate - the freedom to make our own mistakes. Shame we can't seem to do anything else.

Better Antenatal Care for Sierra Leone

I have just come back home from looking after my friend's three children. She was in hospital for two weeks after having a baby. She developed complications during pregancy which meant that her baby had to be delievered by caesarean section and she spent a week in a High Dependency Unit. It made me think. Had she been in Sierra Leone where 1 in 8 pregnant women die during pregancy and childbirth, she certainly would have died. It is true that most pregnancies go without a hitch and only about 15% of women develop complications during pregnancy. But the problem is that in Sierra Leone not many women have proper antenatal care. So those women who are at risk of developing complications are missed and also because there is a critical shortage of trained/skilled birth attendants, many women are giving birth in dangerous situations. Of course we at HealthySalone do not just point out problems, we also plan to tackle them.
We are launching our Buy a Brick Campaign to raise £2 million to build a state of the art Women and Children's Centre in one of the biggest hospitals in the capital city. The centre will have an antenatal care unit, a fetal medicine unit, a delivery suite, post natal care suite, specialist care baby unit and a community midwife service. We will train needed maternity and paediatric staff. In fact this will be the first time in a long time that will Sierra Leone will have trained paediatric nurses.
The future is bright for healthcare in Sierra Leone. If you want to help us please go to www.healthysalone.org.uk or email kushe@healthysalone.org.uk for more information.
Together, we can change the future.

Here's to prove to you that Sierra Leone is a beaut!

That's the Atlantic you can see Sunset on Lumley Beach
That strip of yellow you can see between the blue and the green is Mama Beach. Did I hear you say unspoilt, deserted....

I think Lakka Beach (shown here) is the best beach in Sierra Leone and possibly West Africa. I know about River No. 2 and all that but I won't change my mind. Lakka doesn't have quick sand, so I am sticking to it.

Life Gets in the Way

If you read this blog and were waiting for something to happening last year, I am sorry. Life happened and then I didn't have time to write so much. Well maybe I did have time to write but I didn't have the strength to do so.
Anyway, I intend to make an effort this year to post something every week. Here's this week's post.......
Well this time last year, I was busy working on my African food products, finding markets, looking at packaging etc. when I was rudely interrupted by life. First I was in a little car that was hit by a London taxi (and those are really heavy!!!), I had chest pains for a mighty long time and couldn't really work. Then my father was diagnosed with lung cancer (well that wasn't a surprise because he was a very heavy smoker for most of my and his life, but had quit though) and then he died. That was a surprise. Firstly, I didn't think he would die so soon and secondly, I never thought my father would die. I had never thought about my parents dying, never. Anyway, my father's death took me back to Sierra Leone. That is when my life changed. I saw people and places that broke my heart.
Thanks to Leonardo DiCaprio and his friends, everyone knows about Sierra Leone. And before you ask, the war ended in 2002 and no I haven't seen it. I won't bother telling you about Sierra Leone about how beautiful it is and how warm the people are. Suffice it to say that war destroyed most of the country and now we struggle with electricity, water, health care, everything that you probably take for granted. Sierra Leone is positioned 177 on the UN Development index...oh, alright then...we are last. Worse than Iraq and Afghanistan and Congo who still have ongoing wars. Which means that we are regressing and we are one of a few countries actually called underdeveloped. Hospitals don't work, there are not enough doctors or nurses and here we have my interruption. I felt like I had to do something.
So here we are, I have taken a sabbatical from business and I am now working full-time for HealthySalone, a charity organisation that I set up to change the face of health care in Sierra Leone. Our aim is simple - to reduce the number of Sierra Leoneans dying from treatable and preventable diseases. If you would like to support us, you can go to www.healthysalone.org.uk and you will find all the details there. If you want to volunteer, yippee!! come join us. We are working to change one hospital at a time. If you are a Sierra Leonean health care worker who lives abroad, watch out for the official launch of our Desperately Seeking Talent Programme.
I will continue to update this blog but you won't hear about Simply African for a little while. Sorry.

Amiex