text messages to myself

***

Flying up the hill to Fourah Bay College on a motorbike in that moment after sunset, blue grey city below, and water sheeny shiny out to the limits of the earth, leaning in close to the bike driver to keep from falling off the back, thoughts flying, spinning off into the blue, the road before us steep and wet and black and I feel like bursting, like this is where I live best.

***

7am the sun sits on a shelf of sky like a fluorescent orange over Freetown

***

Night smells along the open road, The lovely smooth freshness of dark skies swooping past, arm out the window, palm against the wind. Worry Free. The night speeds past and the world seems like it might survive us,. Like maybe, after all, it knows better.

***

sunset

kola nut

23 May 2011

Gay Talese writes about failure. And what about failure? Why can't we celebrate it?

*

We woke up and half the tree had fallen. Not just a limb, but a massive branch with its own limbs and foliage, a mini tree lay on its side like a sunbather looking up at us. We had coffee on the porch and watched John chop it up with a machete.

It's raining now and the air is crystal. From the porch, through a picture frame of tree branches we can see the pastel colours and sharp outlines of downtown Freetown across the bay.

On the speakers, PJ Harvey is scratching out an angry nostalgia about England and I wonder if I will ever be at home there. Will it always be a surreal mix of sunny childhood and family stories, mixed-up with memories of TV shows and old songs. Will I always have to pretend?

I spent last week in Makeni, a town in the middle of Sierra Leone where a huge iron ore mine hopes to level the surrounding mountains and develop the country with smiling promises. Photographing for an NGO, I take pictures for people who will never come here, to show them how the project is changing lives. We intrude on the project's 'beneficiaries', people just busy going about living their lives. We make them do things they were not in the middle of doing. Can you sit over there and wash some clothes? Can you chop up some food? Can you look sad? Can you look happy? Can you give us your story? Can we feed your story to our hungry donors?

*

Operation Raise Millionaires

Resurrection Outreach Ministries

presents:

Operation Raise Millionaires

This operation will make you become the next millionaire. The surgeon of all - Dr Jesus Christ - will do the surgery on you. You're therefore INVITED to ATTEND this special operation that will but off Poverty from you life.

Theme: Power for Wealth

Venua: Fatta Rahman Municipal Secondary School
Behind Baycon Field off Fergusson st.

Ministering Rev Ade Beckley and others

Host: Mrs. Augustus J. Bryant

27th February 2010 @ 630pm

Deut 8:18

big bellies and little babies

snippet of a freetown evening

at about six pm just as the day begins to darken at the edges, a group of white birds swoop past our third-floor verandah. Every few minutes I catch the flash of their white swooping shape out of the corner of my eye as they circle around again and again.