Another day, another adventure on board National Geographic Explorer. This morning, we woke up to the sun shining in busy and bustling Freetown, Sierra Leone, the capital and largest city in the country. While some of us ventured in for a tour of the city, a visit to the chimpanzee sanctuary and a tasty of urban life, others of us chose to visit an eco-tourism resort called Tribe Wanted, located in a village called John Obey.
Tribe Wanted is an organization that aims to go into impoverished areas and work closely with the locals in order to create a higher standard of living, higher wages and a sense of ownership for the area they live in. Educating them to compost their waste, recycle and grow their own vegetables achieves this. They also learn how to make eco-huts that visitors can pay to stay in and volunteer on the property.
After driving through Freetown and the neighboring suburbs, spending the day at John Obey Beach was literally a breath of fresh air. Freetown, like a lot of capital cities in West Africa, is teeming with culture. It is also teeming with people, taxis, trash, noise and traffic. John Obey Beach, on the other hand, has recently been named the cleanest beach in Sierra Leone.
Walking through the village, we saw local men making fishing nets by hand to catch the fresh barracuda we ate for lunch today. The women were tending to the children but also participating in the village activities; preparing food, tending the vegetable garden, picking up trash and composting the waste. The children, depending on their age, help out with different chores and activities in the village. Some of the little girls help tend to the younger children and I saw some of the boys helping their fathers out with the fishing.
One of the most exciting things to happen during our visit to the village this year was recognizing the faces of locals that we met last year. Two staff members who were on the trip last year and visited John Obey Beach printed out photographs of some of the villagers they took and sought them out this year. In a place where owning a camera is a rarity, documentation of what someone looks like from one year to the next is not common. Imagine the surprise and the excitement, especially from the children, when presented with what is most likely their first self-portrait! It was indeed a wonderful sight to see.
After leaving John Obey Beach, we visited another, much larger, fishing village. Shawn Davis, a staff member who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, chatted with a local woman. The dialect was a bit different, but it was obvious the local women were pleased and excited that Shawn could communicate with them. Colorfully dressed women and local fishermen were selling everything from ripe mangoes to fresh fish and beautiful fabrics.
When I visit Sierra Leone, I am reminded about what is important in life. The look on a child’s face when you play with them, the wave of a woman sitting outside her mud hut, but happy as can be, or seeing men collecting rocks by hand to pile up and be sold makes you see the world a bit differently. Compassion, understanding and a smile go a long way, everywhere in the world. These are languages that everyone speaks, no matter where you are from.
