Cut Slippers

I bent down to take a battery cap – those blue plastic rings that people pull off of Chinese-made double D batteries – from the ground. Those battery caps are easy to find, particularly in the wet season when rain sweeps them across the sandy ground. Children gather them and tie them together on pieces of string to make rattles or jingling bracelets. The battery caps are also useful for mending broken flip-flops, or slippers, as they’re called in Sierra Leone.

My slippers were worn thin, the soles too flat and the strap that fits between your toes threatening to pull loose, or ‘cut’. I fixed the battery cap around the bottom of this strap so that it wouldn’t break away from the sole of the shoe. People may call slippers ‘toilet shoes,’ but they will still go through great lengths to preserve them. Even my slippers that had been mended with battery caps were not to be thrown away.

“Yu no de gimme da wan de?” someone asked if I wouldn’t give him my old slippers, seeing the new ones I had just purchased in the market. I was skeptical, wondering if he really wanted the old mended slippers, but he thanked me happily when I handed them over.

Normally, when slippers cut, you can slip the torn strap back through the worn out sole and continue to “manage” them, as they would say here. However, there are times when the strap severs completely and they cannot be repaired easily. In such instances, the only option is walking home barefoot. Once, as I walked to the Old Town junction to retrieve my cell phone from the charging station, the rubber stopper on the end of my sandal snapped off, thus rendering it damaged beyond the battery-cap-repair method. I was conscious that Sierra Leoneans believe it is shameful to walk barefoot, but I didn’t really care as I continued the last few steps to the junction.

Two of my students, however, happened to have witnessed the breaking of my slipper. Abu Sedik pulled off his own slippers and told me to take them. He said he would go home with the broken ones. “No, no!” I tried to protest, but Abubakar Bockarie gave me a horrified look and informed me the ground was cold from the rain. Clearly walking across cold ground with bare feet is dangerous to your health and highly unadvised. . . What could I have been thinking?