Saturday 21 May 2011

And, THAT’s why there is a policy!

Last week, I finally got the chance to get out of Freetown with work and travel up-line. The Sierra Leone Nurses Association runs an annual conference and scientific symposium to celebrate International Nurses Day, to which this year’s event was to be held in Bo, the second largest city in Sierra Leone. I was quite excited and got packed without delay, once I heard that we would be going on the Wednesday, which was great, because the conference started on Thursday morning and there is nothing worse than having to wake up at 4am to attend an 8 hour conference.

I arrived at the Faculty of Nursing to meet with my line manager, where she was busy organising the bus loads of students and nurses, making sure everything ran smoothly. I quickly settled into her office, getting things ready for my recruitment sessions, which I was to manage at the conference. Time quickly flew by, as I waited to depart from Freetown. Looking at the clock, it was 13:30pm. I thought to myself, there is still time. There is not need to worry about going beyond the time set in the policy…

See, there is a VSO policy which states that a VSO volunteer should not travel in the dark, therefore should avoid travel which exceeds 17:00 and no travel must be begun from Freetown past 16:30pm.

It was now 15:00 and one of the large busses had lost a tire somewhere up-country and was currently at a garage being placed and as I was travelling with the person tirelessly trying to organise the situation, I was still seated in the office twiddling my thumbs thinking, ‘Gosh, its getting late.’ Finally at 15:53pm, the Admin Assistant from my office comes in and tells me its finally time to go. I breathed a sigh of release as had it gone past 16:30, I would have had to refuse to go…

Now, I had been advised that it takes 2.5 hours to get to Bo, so by my calculation, we should reach Bo before it got dark. But forty minutes later, we were still stuck on Kissy Road, tailing a funeral procession on its way to Kissy Cemetery. Luckily, not too long later, we pulled out onto Bai Bureh road and picked up speed. For the next few hour I alternated between humming along to my ipod and reading ‘The Constant Gardener’ by John le Carre. We even stopped by the Salone Tesco (below) to get drinks.

DSC04572The tip here is to never listen to those who say it takes 2 hours to get to get to Bo, because its 19:31 and I’m still sitting, front seat and filming the hills and trees, and I realise its almost dark. And then it starts to rain and it gets even darker. But at this point, its still exciting… you know, the return of the rainy season, going further up country than I had been before…

But then a few miles after Makonde, it became really hard to see. It had been raining heavily during the second hour of the journey, and this combined with the intense heat of the tarred roads meant that steam began to rise off the road; up to 2 meters off the ground. Now, in the daytime, this is all quite exciting, watching condensation at work, however at almost 8pm in the dark, I am starting to freak out a little. It felt like we were travelling through the vortex of space and time; our car lights reflecting on the almost ghost like wisps rising well above our heads. Being in the passengers seat of the car, I had the benefit of the same experience as the driver, so I was very worried – in fact at the edge of my seat – because I couldn’t see past 2 metres on the road. What’s worse, because our lights reflected back at us, there was no way to tell whether we were on the right side of the road, or even worse weather a car was passing in the opposite direction.

The wisps would appear and disappear almost as unexpectedly as seeing another car on the road, so the car spent almost a half hour accelerating and jerking to a slower speed. Then my mum called and I explained the situation to her in Yoruba. Since Yoruba can be more direct at times than English, my explanation that we were in the dark and in the middle of nowhere did not inspire any confidence of how OK I was actually feeling. I managed to giggle and set her mind at rest (not really), and by the time we got to the outskirts of Bo, I was seeing the funny side of it. As I tumbled out of the car and walked tiredly into the hotel twenty minutes later, it occurred to me that a lot of Sierra Leoneans do this kind of journey in the dark all the time (some busses don’t leave the capital till 12 midnight!), but this was not a risk that I was ever willing to take again. It was not anyone’s fault, since many unavoidable factors played into our delay, however I know fully realise why there is a VSO policy on travel and will not be taking it for granted again!

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