{"id":2697,"date":"2010-06-24T10:17:47","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T09:17:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/?p=2697"},"modified":"2010-06-24T10:17:47","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T09:17:47","slug":"emily-spry-being-pestered-is-part-of-being-a-foreigner-in-freetown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/bmj\/2010\/06\/24\/emily-spry-being-pestered-is-part-of-being-a-foreigner-in-freetown\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Spry: Being pestered is part of being a foreigner in Freetown"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PikinTwo young boys once helped me when my bicycle tyre was ripped right open by a bit of metal in the road.\u00a0 I spent an hour or so sitting with one while his cousin, who also had a bicycle, took my wheel to the repair man.\u00a0 When he came back, I tipped them both as thanks \u2013 they had been really helpful.\u00a0 Then the older one, Abdul, said, \u201cEmily, give me your number, so that I can call you at any time.\u201d\u00a0 I felt obliged and, I reasoned, as he was a school kid, he was never going to have access to enough phone credit to call me \u201cat any time;\u201d it was just a turn of phrase.<\/p>\n

How wrong I was.\u00a0 He immediately gave my number to his mother and father and, by the evening, the entire family was calling me to tell me how much Abdul missed me and how they must come and visit me.\u00a0 They really did call \u201cat any time;\u201d when I was at work, late at night, throughout the weekend, and often very early in the morning. The family visited us (the father eventually asked us to give him a job, which we were not able to do) but it was clear that we didn\u2019t have much in common and Abdul himself was, unsurprisingly, not actually interested in being friends with a couple of 30 year old Britishers.
\n\u00a0
\nFor weeks after this unsuccessful visit, his father \u201cflashed\u201d me regularly.\u00a0 This is the ubiquitous practice of calling and hanging up quickly, in the hope the recipient will return your call, thereby saving your own precious phone credit.\u00a0 When I had saved the whole family\u2019s numbers as \u201cdo not pick up,\u201d they called from other numbers to try to catch me out.\u00a0 The words \u201cat any time\u201d began to ring in my head.
\n\u00a0
\nBut other pests can be rather fascinating.\u00a0Perhaps due to the absence of any mental health services in Freetown, there are a number of familiar faces around town whose behaviour extends beyond the bounds of eccentricity or cultural misunderstanding.
\n\u00a0
\nThese men (they are usually men) are often decked out with a huge arrange of found objects, which they attach around their necks or in their hair.\u00a0 They pace the main streets in town, staring or ranting.\u00a0 Most look well-fed, if not clean, so someone must be providing for them, but it is awful to think that they are condemned to a life without any hope of treatment for their severe mental health problems.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure that many others don\u2019t do as well.
\n\u00a0
\nThere is one thin quiet guy, without any shoes, who has so many years of street dust ground into his clothes that it is impossible to see what their original colour was.\u00a0 He has a profound squint and has something funny about touching things.\u00a0 He often walks up quietly when we are stationary in traffic, looking away, and wipes the heel of his hand across the bonnet.\u00a0 Then he turns and walks away, touching a metal pole by the side of the road in the same deliberate way, indicating its significance to him.
\n\u00a0
\nAnother is an animated young man with thick rimmed glasses, bright clothes and a huge fake plastic mobile phone, which he talks to loudly when he wants to look busy.\u00a0 Whenever he sees us, he hands me photocopies of significant pictures, such as the US flag, ripped from magazine adverts.\u00a0 On these, he writes long letters about JFK and Queen Elizabeth, listing UN agencies and urging immediate action (\u201cThe American Embassy must be whitewashed\u201d).
\n\u00a0
\nAfter one incident where he grabbed my arm when we were driving away and shouted \u201cI love you, I love you\u201d, I have stopped accepting his letters, just to be on the safe side.\u00a0 He puts them under the windscreen wiper instead now.
\n\u00a0
\nI am coming to the end of my time in Sierra Leone, and I\u2019m not sure how I feel about it.\u00a0 Freetown very much feels like home now.
\n\u00a0
\nLondon seems like a fantasy land, a vaguely comical far-away place where everything is grey and clean and cool and smooth and clean water gushes from the tap at any time.\u00a0 A place where supermarkets, with their shiny floors and endless rows of varied products, are normal.\u00a0 Somewhere where it is not normal for a person to live at the side of an unpaved road under a piece of zinc or to only have one item of clothing or to be floridly psychotic in the middle of town.<\/p>\n

Emily Spry<\/strong> is a doctor from London who has taken a year out of her General Practice Specialty Training Programme to live and work in Sierra Leone, West Africa. She is working for the Welbodi Partnership, a charity which supports the main government Children’s Hospital in a country where more than one quarter of children die before their fifth birthday.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two young boys once helped me when my bicycle tyre was ripped right open by a bit of metal in the road.\u00a0 I spent an hour or so sitting with […]<\/p>\n

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