Hull photographer and author Lee Karen Stow has just returned from visiting Sierra Leone. She was there to work on a project producing a photo documentary on the life of women in the country.
Every day now, without fail, I think about those women. As I open the cupboard door in my kitchen to shelves of choices for breakfast, I wonder what they are doing and how they are coping. I know that a bag of rice in Freetown is now a fiver more (an average week’s wages) and bread is best bought at night when it’s not so fresh, but cheaper.
I flick on my computer, in my own home with running water, a hot shower and a flush toilet, and my only strain this particular morning is to find the right words for the captions to accompany the photographs of those women who are on my mind.
How can I, from the vantage point of my rich and comfortable life, convey the desperation and pain they feel, or even their joy and laughter that humble me so. I check my emails and it’s a ‘thought for the day’ from Cecilia, reminding me that God loves me and all will be well. Cecilia, an orphan with no home of her own and whose job as a switchboard operator is ending soon, is reassuring me that life will be kind and I should be strong.
Rebecca, a new mother of month-old Raymond calls me from a borrowed mobile and in jazzy Krio says ‘’ello, ow de morning?’’ If I close my eyes I can still feel Raymond’s tiny hand clasped round my little finger, hear the dogs barking in the village, feel the sweat slide down my skin in a house with no air, see the cockroach scuttle for the corner, and hear the clang of pots as Rebecca cooks, cleans and sees to the whole family, including her ill father and aunts. Her husband has been unemployed three years. ‘’God will provide!’’ she laughs. I try not to dwell on the fact that one in four children dies before the age of five.
It’s been over three weeks since my second visit to Sierra Leone. Last year, on behalf of Wilberforce Women, I went out to deliver basic photography skills workshops to a host of women who have since formed themselves into a women’s photography group and are helping to strengthen the links between our twin cities. Julie, Francess and Cecilia visited Hull last October for further photography skills, including a day at the BBC, and Francess spent a couple of days with me at Christmas (she still talks about her first trip to the cinema, eating popcorn and how we buy even our pet dogs presents).
On Christmas Eve, I sat with Francess in the waiting room at Hull’s Paragon Station as she prepared to return home. I bought a copy of The Independent which carried a front page report of Sierra Leone as the toughest place for a child to be born into and we read it together. Francess shook her head, ‘’it’s true,’’ she said, ‘’it’s all true.’’ I’ll try to help was my feeble reply, knowing that whatever I write or photograph might move a reader for a minute but in no way would it change a country, or lives, for sadly the pen and the camera are not that mighty.
So in February 2008, in the year when I would turn 42 years of age, I returned to Sierra Leone where life expectancy for women is just 42. I lived with the women, documented their average day and tried to imagine what life was like in their shoes. I watched them cook and clean, I visited their ill-equipped hospitals where wonderful nurses are losing the will to work, the maternity hospital that is forced to wash and re-use disposable gloves despite the presence of HIV, the school where teachers worry about attacks on their female students, the offices where wages are a joke, and the markets where crime and pick-pocketing are rife.
But I could not imagine what it’s like for those women who, quite frankly, exist in a living hell. The women of the filth and disease-ridden slums and the women doped up and forced to beg for their food as the country’s one and only mental hospital is unable to provide meals. I cannot forget the daughter hidden away because a doctor told her mother her floppy joints and flattened face proved she was down syndrome and there’s nothing else to be done. Or Kadiatu, whose legs were severed by a youth wielding a machete and is reduced to begging for money and food. Or Iris (she wouldn’t dare give her real name) whose cheating husband is beating her stomach until she bleeds.
From my desk I email Gladys, who baked a carrot cake for me on her coal stove and led me up a stairwell where the family chicken was roosting in a cardboard box, and into a room with a soiled mattress and a worn dresser. From a drawer she pulled out fading photos of her mother, Adeline, once the daughter of a former president. Her mother looks happy, as glamorous as Diana Ross in her 1960s mini dress, about to qualify as a midwife and return to a Sierra Leone that is safe, educated, prosperous and where tourists lounge on white powdery beaches. But that was another era, before civil war and corruption smashed the country to pieces and bled it dry, and before Adeline succumbed to cancer, leaving her daughters and sons to cram into one floor of a house with peeling paint and broken mirrors.
Gladys replies joyfully. She doesn’t moan about the price of rice or the fact that the chicken has yet to lay an egg. She says she loves the green tea I gave her and is looking forward to working on the second Wilberforce Women photography project which is called ‘Mothers’. In fact, she cannot stop scribbling down her ideas. When are you coming back, she asks … how about this Christmas? I sip my own green tea and reach for my diary.
The stadium was jammed to capacity with thousands of fanatics expecting nothing but glory and on another day that it mattered most, Leone Stars, the darlings of the Lion Mountains, delivered. They thrashed Equatorial Guinea 2-1 to edge closer to the second stage of the qualification series of the African Nations/ World Cup series.
Congratulations to the soccer warriors of the land of gold and diamonds who have brought pride to our nation. It is a competition in which the Leone Stars have lifted the green, white and blue national flag of Sierra Leone high with magnificient and dazzling soccer against the power-houses of Africa, Nigeria and South Africa. Underrated as unlikely to make it in this group which also includes Equatorial Guinea, Leone Stars proved the sceptics wrong by humiliating South Africa and after yesaterday’s victory, Nigeria could be Leone Stars’ next victim, if they are not over-awed by the reputation of the Super Eagles.
Now, the battle facing Leone Stars is to continue to be among the nine best second placed teams , which would definitely guaranteee them a place in the next stage of the series. A draw at the most in Nigeria against the already-qualified Super Eagles should ensure that .
Congratulations too to Coach Abu Kanu, who has won the laurels where once famous names like Christian Cole and Jebboh Sherrington failed. Where those coaches were dismissed for poor performances by Leone Stars, the relatively unknown Coach Kanu has succeeded in hammering out a Leone Stars squad that Sierra Leoneans are proud of once again.
Sierra Leoneans should also be indebted to professional player, Mohamed Kallon, who enabled Leone Stars to play yesterday’s match by providing $ 45, 000 after the Sierra Leone Football Association( SLFA ) and the government failed to provide the needed support to the national team . Kallon’s gesture shows that there are still patritic citizens in the land. Though out of work himself ( No team yet to play fo, though that problem would soon be solved by one of the most talented footballers in the world ), Kallon placed the national interest above his’. That was highly commendable.
A royal navy ice patrol ship HMS ENDURANCE and the British High Commission will today commence a joint seminar on climate change and environmental protection with key UK representatives and the government of Sierra Leone.
The interaction between government ministers, key members of the British scientific community including the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Met Office, the marine and fisheries agency, department for international development and Eco-Securities.
Captain Bob Tarrant Friday told journalists in Freetown that the seminar would be chaired by Dr. Hazell Shokellu Thompson from Birdlife International which would be held onboard the vessel because of its world class platform for climate and ecological research.
He said while in Sierra Leone they would be undertaking important survey work which could be of great benefit to future developments of the maritime economic prosperity of Sierra Leone.
“The visit of HMS ENDURANCE to Sierra Leone encompasses a number of roles for the ship including coastal surveying, training with the Sierra Leone navy and ministerial sea days to promote the importance of fishery protection,” he said.
Captain Tarrant hoped the West African seminar would provide an opportunity for the Royal Navy to create an enduring relationship with its West African colleagues and to promote environmental protection.
Freetown - While the 2007 Hollywood movie Blood Diamond still pulls big crowds into Freetown’s movie halls, Sierra Leone’s new promotion agency would like nothing better than to see it banned.
“This Blood Diamond film is sending bad signals to the world about Sierra Leone,” the state-run Sierra Leone Investment and Export Promotion Agency (SLIPA) said on Thursday.
The agency is urging the government and other partners “to ban the film with immediate effect”, SLIPA head Adeyormie Sandy told AFP.
Set at the height of Sierra Leone’s 1991-2002 civil war, the movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio as an unscrupulous diamond trader. The film shows gruesome scenes of fighting in Sierra Leone and details how rebels force civilians to mine diamonds for them to fund the war effort.
While the movie awakened the world to the problem of conflict diamonds, the promotion agency argues it hampers its efforts to rebrand Sierra Leone to lure new investors.
FREETOWN - Women carrying corn on their heads and children selling peanuts stop to stare as a leggy model in a tiny blue dress strikes a pose outside a steel-doored clothes shop in Sierra Leone’s capital.
Adama Kai, a fashion designer trained in New York and Paris, organized the photo shoot to promote her new store and company, Aschobi Designs. The 25-year-old has eschewed job prospects in the developed world to come home and follow her dream.
“Maybe I have more opportunities as a designer over there, but I’m making a bigger statement over here,” said Kai, who was born in New Jersey but moved to Sierra Leone shortly afterward and lived there until she was 4.
“In the same way that Ralph Lauren stands for America, Chanel for France, and Versace for Italy, I want Aschobi to stand for African fashion,” she said.
Her store is tucked between a small printing shop and a newspaper office in hilly Freetown’s hectic downtown.
“I know this is the last place you’d expect to find haute couture. But I want to replace all of this darkness of the past with beauty,” she said.
Sierra Leone, ranked the world’s least developed country by the United Nations, is recovering from a 1991-2002 civil war that shocked the world with images of drugged-up child soldiers hacking off villagers’ limbs with machetes.
An estimated 30 percent to 50 percent of skilled Sierra Leoneans fled the conflict, in which 50,000 people were killed.
But slowly some of those people are trickling back - mirroring a continent-wide trend that has seen educated Africans return to take advantage of business opportunities in fast growing economies.
“Everybody thinks I should be in Paris, London, or New York,” said Kai, who attended the same fashion school as designers Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan. She worked in New York as a styling assistant on Flaunt magazine and later handled creative portfolios for a management agency.
“I’ve given up a lot to be here and I miss Paris and the fashion life in America. But this is really important to me,” said Kai, who launched her business in January. “This is my only job. This is my life, actually.”
Most of Sierra Leone’s diaspora, estimated to be between 750,000 and 1 million, is still abroad, and the remittances they send home are worth around $250 million a year. An estimated 50,000 have returned since the war ended.
When she was 4, Kai moved with her mother, who worked for the United Nations, to Ethiopia. At 13, she went to a boarding school in the United States. She later studied fashion for two years in Paris and one in New York.
Dressed in a brown suit with her hair twisted into dreadlocks, Kai knows she stands out in the Freetown crowd.
Her designs are even bolder - a profusion of greens, oranges, yellows, and pinks in bold shapes, the clothes combine expertly draped African prints with modern design influences.
“It’s like all of it was inside waiting to burst out for so long,” she said.
Her dresses cost between $30 and $100 - a princely sum in a country where average gross domestic product per capita is $216.
In her shop, also called Aschobi Designs, middle-class Sierra Leoneans and expatriates browse the clothes hanging from wooden racks, surrounded by stacks of international fashion magazines, including editions of Vogue from all over the world.
“I think what I am doing is in line with anyone coming here to open a school or a hospital,” said Kai. “I know it is enriching this country.”
The government of Sierra Leone has with immediate effect lifted the ban imposed on the operations of the Diamond Airlines hovercraft. The operations of the hovercraft MV Prince Michael were immediately suspended following a sea accident involving 34 passengers while en route to Aberdeen from Mahera Beach on 13 November 2007.
A Ministry of Transport investigation into the accident revealed negligence on the part of the management of Diamond Airlines. The management thereafter embarked on maintenance and repair works carried out by a team of engineers from Hoverworks of England, the manufacturer of the craft.
According to a release from the Ministry of Transport and Aviation, the management of the Airlines invited the Sierra Leone Maritime Administration to conduct a thorough inspection of the hovercraft so as to ascertain whether the repairs and maintenance work had been completed satisfactorily.
The campaign to end all forms of slavery has taken an historic step forward.
The United Nations has appointed a special rapporteur to investigate, report on and recommend solutions to contemporary forms of slavery.
The appointment acknowledges the urgent need for international action to tackle slavery which affects at least 12 million men, women and children worldwide.
Although the British Slave trade was abolished in 1807, today there are still millions of people from across the world who are forced to work through coercion, deception or the threat or use of violence.
They are denied freedom, dehumanised, treated as property or bought and sold. Even though slavery is illegal under international law, no region is free from this abuse and slavery is found in every region and most countries.
Anti-slavery International’s director Aiden McQuaide said: “Anti-Slavery International commends the United Nations for putting greater priority on combating slavery and the United Kingdom Government for tabling this resolution.
“It is vital that all governments around the world respond to this initiative by extending an open invitation to the UN Special Rapporteur to visit their countries while providing full co-operation as they carry out their mandate. “
During the Hull Wilberforce 2007 commemorative year Hull City Council and its partners have been working to collect signatures alongside Anti-slavery International to carry on the work of campaigner William Wilberforce who led the fight to abolish the slave trade.
The figures from the two campaigns will be merged before the end of the year with an overall target of 50,000 signatures.
The Digital Citizens learning programme was developed in collaboration between Hull-based multimedia innovators Cafésociety.org and Creative Partnerships Hull.
The programme was set to forge a creative exchange between children and young people in the twinned cities of Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Hull, UK. At the heart of this programme was the desire to provide a platform for the views and creativity of its young participants.
The programme was designed specifically to excite and engage through a dynamic, cross-curricular and multicultural approach with the strong use of film making, photography and innovative use of ICT.
This conference at Guildhall, Kingston upon Hull, will bring together community-based groups and individuals in the UK who have links with partners or an interest in West Africa. We are holding this conference in collaboration with Freetown Society and Hull City Council.
Hull City Council has a long standing link with Freetown in Sierra Leone which involves many of Hull’s schools, churches and community groups. This conference will be part of the Wilberforce 2007 celebrations around the abolition of slavery. We are also delighted that John Prescott MP has agreed to open the conference on Friday 26th October.
The purpose of the conference is:- To learn more about each other, to promote and develop community-based links between West Africa and the UK for mutual benefit § To explore slavery in today’s world, focusing on slavery in UK and West Africa.
The cost of the conference will be £50/head or £10 for students. This will include attendance at the conference and meals during the two days but not accommodation or travel costs. For more information please contact Pepi at UKOWLA email: pepi@ukowla.org.uk
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