Sierra Leone Sojourn

A sojourn is defined as "To stay for a time in a place; to rest." Such is a mission trip to Sierra Leone. For all the work, all the lack of comforts, all the strain being on "Africa time," and all the food issues, each a story unto itself, it is still a sojourn.

This time around, my third trip to Sierra Leone, I spent time on the farm and in the Pharmacy. Pharmacy time is, for me, a simple effort of counting pills and packaging them up for whomever is acting pharmacist. In most cases, the pharmacist was my friend Robert Hill. He is given the task of reading the short hand of the doctors prescriptions and calling out what needs to be filled. That is the hard part. Anyone can count pills, and when you put your head down and just do the job, the time eases by proportionate to your energy level dropping. I took this picture one day as things were beginning to ease up in the pharmacy. With a point and shoot Nikon Coolpics, it isn't bad. A little better framing and a little better handling of the light and it would have been fabulous. Aren't these girls just beautiful? They were quiet and not very engaging, sick I suppose. But their mother struck me deeply. She is a typical Sierra Leonean mother, young, pretty, and quiet. I see her quiet suffering in her gaze toward her daughters. There is a story behind her eyes; a story that we may or may not want to hear. Maybe she is normally an energetic, engaging, funny, or gregarious, but today her countenance is showing the wear of living in a hard, poor society. Today she is showing what life is really like in the most impoverished nation in the world. Today, she is Sierra Leone.

Hopefully in the days and weeks to come, I can blog about the days I sojourned in Siera Leone. So many stories to tell, and so much left to decifer in my mind. Certainly a lot of enlightenment yet to come. So, I will leave it here for now. This picture is of a decaying mural painted on the outside wall of a girls secondary school where one of our Sierra Leonean friends, Samuel Kangaju, is a teacher. It is just a glimpse of that culture and how difficult things are to change.