Today the gods took favor on us and we had an hour of electricity - the first in 10 days. You can always tell when the power comes on because there is a collective cheer around the neighborhood and the sound of frantic scurrying as people dive desperately for the nearest electrical outlet.
We went to the market where Ide searched for a chicken for Haja for her birthday, and a goat for a goodbye present for his school (much more adventurous than me). Instead of taking the podapoda home I caught one of the thousands of motorbikes that swarm through the city like angry locusts. As if being a pedestrian wasn't precarious enough, dodging cars on all sides of the road, the motorbikes make it even more nerve shattering as they will materialize from nowhere, zipping around the sides of slowing cars, and come from every direction - not just front and behind - but left, right, diagonal and occasionally from above when they get airborne. Ishmael warned the driver to drive very slowly and in fact he was very responsible. I felt completely safe. We were in a relatively low traffic area and my biggest inconvenience was swallowing dust on the rocky potholed road.
More fish again for tea. Delicious, but the huge eye and leering, dagger-toothed grin was a little disconcerting. Haja gave us some history on the war in the town where she grew up, and how they would run from area to area to escape the rebels. As the Sierra Leonian army crumbled, local militia groups formed from secret hunting societies. The most notable of these were the Kamajors - formed to fight the rebels and protect the civilians, but who ended up slaughtering civilians themselves. The war is very complicated and I have difficulty figuring it out:
Sometimes the RUF fought against the AFRC (Armed Forces Revolutionary Council); sometimes they fought together. The Kamajors sometimes fought against not only the RUF but also the soldiers with whom they were supposed to be allied. They later fought against the AFRC, and later still fought for some AFRC remnants against the RUF.
Despite the complexity the war had two constants: the similarity of the fighters, many of them poor young men made angry and desperate through poverty, a sense of injustice, abuse, and drugs - and the fact that civilians rather than other combatants were overwhelmingly the targets.
[quoted from "Sierra Leone, Katrina Manson and James Knight" - not Haja]
9:06 Ye gods! Power again. Must desperately scurry to nearest electrical outlet.
9:11 Oh crap, scurrying wasn't desperate enough, power just went off again.
9:12 Oh joy. Now it's on again.
9:32 Off.
