Our first volunteer, Haley Howe, has been with us for a month here in Kabala, and it has been a wonderful month learning and growing from her expertise and experiences. We are so blessed to have had her here working with the youth, helping develop the programs, and offering another opinion into the development work here. I hope you enjoy her last blog post, and please keep us in your thoughts and prayers as we prepare to go to Freetown on Thursday, and as Haley's flight leaves Sierra Leone Sunday night. -Krissi Bucholtz
Last night I facilitated my first mentoring session. The mentoring programs of The People’s Foundation of Sierra Leone are a way for youth to connect and help themselves. How it works is that an older youth is paired with a younger youth and together they help each other to plan and reach goals and to offer each other support. This relationship is useful because it gives both people someone to turn to outside of their family and peers for support and help with problems. The younger youth can learn from things the older youth has already dealt with and the older youth gets a chance to offer guidance and support to the younger one. This is a small but effective step towards development taking place for the people and by the people.
By asking broad questions about Sierra Leone and the challenges it faces the mentoring session succeeded in generating maximum participation and discussion from the youth. The main thing I saw was the frustration in the youth due to a lack of services and opportunities available to them. Services such as education, health care, electricity, roads, and industry are either lacking or not existent at all. This is especially true of the villages. The sources of these problems are mainly traced back to a corrupt and ineffective government and the lack of infrastructure due to the war.
It’s really important to get information from the people and not assume that after a month or even a year of living here that you would understand what’s actually going on in the country. What I’ve found so far in Sierra Leone and in most countries is that there’s a huge difference between how things look on the surface and what’s happening on a deeper level. For example every morning I see piles of children washed and walking to school dressed up in their uniforms. They greet me with huge smiles and a loud, “Hello White man!” Coming from Canada I automatically assume that everyone ate breakfast that morning and that they are going to a school that employs qualified teachers who get paid a salary for their work. What I don’t realize is that many of the children haven’t eaten that day nor the previous one and that a single classroom can have over 100 students with only one teacher. The teachers are often not qualified and unpaid by the government and sadly some of the students find themselves in the terrible position of having to have sex with the teachers in exchange for grades or school fee payment or are simply just abused. These are the types of things that are uncovered after years of working with the youth through programs like the mentoring one. It’s so important that these issues are brought out in the open so that they can begin to be addressed and changed.
On the positive side many of the people here have a resilience that allows them to remain hopeful and proud of their country. Heartbreaking and hopeful is the only way I can describe the situation here. The fact that youth have the ability to come from such a place of poverty, and all the problems that come with that, and realize that the changes they need must come from them gives me the strength that is necessary to do this type of work.
When I asked the youth to write down what they would tell the world about Sierra Leone they wrote, “Sierra Leone has just come from eleven years of war which caused us to suffer a lot with the loss of property, life, and relatives. We are now trying to develop our country by improving the standard of lives of the people. We now have a peaceful country and we love one another and the strangers who come to our aid.”
A month has gone by already, and as I prepare to take my leave here and face the culture shock that will come with returning home I will strive to remember the grace and gratefulness that these people live out every day of their lives, taking little for granted and having so much appreciation for every opportunity that is presented to them no matter how small it is. I will also look for ways to continue to help this country from Canada. –Haley Howe
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