see my elation as i parked my car next to the once mounting pile of garbage that the inhabitants of Cuckuil Bay in freetown complacently live beside. Men were standing around, some sitting and watching into a non-existent far distance and some were bending down cleaning the remnants of a very large and i assure you, very large pile of "doty" that once served as a landmark for the area. I begin to take pictures, and the man sitting down asks me to introduce myself and my reasons for snapping the scene, he the self-proclaimed leader of this initiative must know my intentions. The man must be out of his mind, the fact that i was even standing their with some form of glee should be enough. Ha! i explained that i was happy that the community was finally cleaning the space up. He said the government gave them some money to do so. My smile disappears, it would have taken the government for me to want to get rid of that pile of pure and undiluted rubbish that was lazily sitting there for months on end. I leave the scene after some displays of vanity (see photos below) disappointed.
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| Post-Elation | Cukuil Bay, Freetown |
St. Marys supermarket over-charges me again, this time for a cold sore cream, and so i decide to buy the newest business africa magazine, heck i might as well wallow in my deepening misery (evidence of my high fever coupled by malaria still visible + been overcharged consistently and continually for everything). i leave the store and begin reading, the 3rd page of the magazine, "summary updates on Africa", reads Rwanda's move to a green economy. I look around me, Sierra-Leone should and could successfully become a very green economy and before going through all the reasons of why and how, i remember that a. at a very micro-level people still use poverty as an excuse for a lack of sanitation and then wait for the government to fix the problem-classic example: Cuckuil Bay. b. we specialize in opening our markets, our land, our iron ore, our resources to extremely greedy multinational corporations that couldn't care less about Sierra-Leone. I don't care what anyone tells me, but we are successfully allowing our country to be raped and pillaged as we complacently stand by and watch....or complain to our friends and 'like-minded' people. I must say that i recognize the complexity of these issues and perhaps the lack of deeper critical analysis that my point may raise....but, really now.....where are the checks and balances?
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| Clean Up Guys | Cukuil Bay, freetown |
my cousin has typhoid. How you may ask, she drinks water straight from the tap and doesn't boil it. To contextualize, we live in Imatt where we buy water and live off generators, thus one must know drinking water straight from the tap is not an option. Her situation is a simple case of laziness.
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| Cukuil Bay, Freetown | Black Brillian Pants & African Inspired Top Kimono-Marzyo Designs |
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i want to be green and: live off solar panels, recycle more, drive a hybrid car, stop running dogs on the streets down, be kind to stray cats, stop burning piles of trash in random areas start a campaign that would shed light on how hospitals dump their waste into the water, clean lumely beach up, stop a 'nor piss na ya' campaign.....WOULD THAT MAKE ME COOL?
fambul dem this is how we do....
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