i take a breath

...further excerpts from my journal the past few days...

I am standing at the front of this little cement building, one room filled with plastic lawn chairs.  About twenty or so faces stare back at me, half of them children.  I am the only white face.  It is the end of the service at Wilberforce Christian Church.  We have sung, clapped, prayed and praised the Lord with Alleluias and Amen’s!  The children are a bit fidgety in the front row, but they are quiet.  The baby suckling at her mother’s bare breast hasn’t made a sound the entire three hours we have been here.  Now all eyes are on me.  The only white girl, the only visitor.  The pastor’s wife (who has presumptuously taken over the role of pastor) introduces me and praises the Lord that I am there.  She prays and then proceeds to make the entire congregation come up row by row and shake my hand.  I am an outsider.  But I feel welcome.

Letty takes my hand as we walk outside.  Gwen (my house mate) helped round up the neighbor kids she has been trying to get to come with her to church.  Gwen had another church commitment this morning, but the children knew where to go.  Aminata, Katiatu, Letty, Elizabet, Salina, Isaac and Tomba.  Isaac and Tomba I knew already because they come to our compound to work on their homework with Mohammad, the day guard. But the others didn’t seem to mind that this was our first meeting.  I feel so much more comfortable walking down the road hand in hand with them.  It is as if I have been accepted.  As if I am known.

We come back to my house as has become the routine after church with "Auntie Gwen," as they call her.  The children sit and read the only books most of them ever get to hold and read themselves.  Old, ripped, discarded and donated.  Books kids in America deemed unfit. 

Me and some of the neighbor kids.

***

Right now I sit and am mesmerized by my surroundings.  I am on the balcony of my home, a palace in comparison to the many small tin and dirt shacks that paint the hill side brilliant shades of yellow, red, and blue—nestled between the lush deep green collage of the rainy season.  I am not in the only palace on this hill, the west side of town, and not a palace by any stretch of the word in western terms—but a palace, nonetheless, in this country.

The sun is setting out over the expanse of ocean beyond the foliage collage.  Caribbean music is playing from somewhere below me and I can smell something cooking over an open fire.  The thermometer reads a pleasant 83 degrees and a nice cool breeze sways the branches of the tree that hints a smell of lavender.  It feels good on my cool, freshly showered skin and wet hair.  I do not mind having no hot water, I wouldn’t use it if I did.  Especially after the run Gwen and I went on this evening.  Living on the hill creates a beautifully breathtaking view, but makes for a killer hill to run up.  The people we pass give greetings of kushe or how de bodi? Kiro for hello, how's your body? Some even join in for a few steps.  The cars passing by come frighteningly close, giving only a honk as fair warning as to evade any responsibility if they swipe you with a mirror.  I will learn this community.  The faces.  The names.  The lives.

The view from my balcony...this picture does not do justice - I will take another

***

I am taking a breath.  Slow and deep, after a wonderfully full four days.  My spirit is overwhelmed, maybe overflowing is a better way of saying it.

I have already seen many faces of Sierra Leone and I am basking in the warm glow of it. Friday was filled with the joys of children singing, contrasting the harsh noisy reality of life in the city of Freetown.  I will not officially start work until Tuesday, after Ramada, the Muslim holiday.  My housemate Gwen, a women who has committed her young adult life to the mission field, seeking to bring transformation into the lives of Sierra Leoneans through transformation of their education system (her organization is called Transformation Education), has introduced me to this life, to the city, to its people.  But she is more than a guide, she has become a friend.  

I traveled with her to Freetown proper and the east side of the city.  This is where the ex-pats do not live, or at merely a few at most.  Where the famous cotton tree stands, the once symbol of freedom.  Where industry meets primitive living just as the hillside meets the coast, tumbling over itself and spilling into the murky depths. 

The streets are filled with cars and busses.  People selling anything and everything they can balance atop their heads. As we leave the main road and head up into the hills, we enter into village life.  Children bathing in the natural spring, rejoicing in the cool water that will soon dry up forcing them to seek another water source at the bottom of the mountain.  The sounds of joyful splashing will be muted by the long treck to the bottom and an even longer treck back up with full buckets of waters balanced a top the heads of women and children.  A bucket to wash, drink and cook.  A bucket to sustain life.  The ground is littered in trash, runoff from those living above.  As we climb, the road becomes less road and more pot hole, the area between the holes getting thinner and thinner.  Gwen’s 4x4 bounds along until we can go no further, so we get out to walk.

We are visiting Mother Ester’s Preparatory School, one of the schools Gwen works with.  We are greeted by a welcome of praise songs and chants as the children open their day with an “assembly.”  Each one can steal my heart away with a simple smile or touch of my hand. 

I taught in Prep III.  Just a simple book and song about storms.  They love to sing and to raise their hands regardless of whether they know the answer.  Mother Ester is an incredible women who has transformed this community.  She and her husband pastor a church and have started this school.  They are beautiful pictures of hope and of promise. 

***

As I sit and think back over these last few days, it sinks in more and more that this is the lifestyle I have always found myself daydreaming about living.  A lifestyle I have felt both excited and fearful to live.  Not admittedly fearful of the lack of amenities, the color of my skin, cultural differences, political instability, safety risks or any of the unknown—but under the surface, fearful of these very things which excite me.