It was evening and Amara Kamara and Sannie Swaray were
sitting on my veranda flipping through the pages of a thick Maryland public
schools Language Arts textbook. The 900 page volume with its glossy cover had
been donated to the Peace Corps and ended up in my possession. Really, it should
be in my school's “library,” but since Kankaylay doesn’t even have a spare
room that could be used to store books in, I keep the donated books at my
house, where they get a decent amount of use from students. Primary school
children are particularly fond of looking at the pictures, so they will come to
my door and command in Mende “Waa bukui.” (Come with a book).
Sannie read aloud as he turned the pages of the book.
“Do you know why that woman is sitting there?” I asked,
pointing to a picture of a homeless woman, bundled up against the cold, sitting
on a street next to a cardboard sign and a plastic tray with a few coins in it.
“No. Why?” Sannie and Amara ask.
I explained that she was homeless and she was sitting there
in hopes that someone would help her and give her money.
“So she can buy a house?”
“No, so she can buy food.”
“Where does she sleep?”
“There,” I said, pointing to the picture.
My students looked at me aghast. I have never heard of
someone sleeping outside in Sembehun. Certainly, such a thing would never
happen in a Sierra Leonean village. Here, if your friend has no food, you
invite him to eat. If he has no house, you spread a mat for him on your floor. Things
don’t work that way in the United States. Not everyone has family and friends
to turn to when things get bad, I explained.
“Here, we would never let someone sleep outside,” Sannie
said, affirming my comments. “Everyone’s trying to get to America, but they don’t
know that it’s not easy for everyone there. I have more than people in America.”
I wanted to capture Sannie’s words and impress them on the
minds of all my students. I wonder if he knew how true that statement really
was. It is not simply a matter of having a clean bed to sleep in and a place to
store your things; it is about family and community and a boundless optimism
that I cannot understand. I wish more people knew the truth about Sierra Leone.
While on paper, it is one of the poorest countries in the world, it has a
wealth that no economist can measure. I wish that instead of escaping to the western
world, the best and the brightest would stay and carry out their successes
here.
