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Monday, may 31, 1976, - Day 125
Last Saturday I started reading "Fever", which is a book about the discovery of Lassa fever in Nigeria. It is a true story and much of the surroundings and happenings in it can be seen here in Sierra Leone. There is a place just about 20 miles east of Daru that is known for its cases of lassa fever and is supposed to be mentioned in the book, but I am not that far yet. I tend to forget that disease is all around and don't pay as much attention to all of the health-safety precausions as much as I should. This book should help to remind me. If you don't look too closely, then the Sierra Leone people look pretty healthy. But on closer inspection you find some people with missing fingers and deformed feet from leprosy, and the records show that 40 to 50% of the childeren die before the age of 5 years old. I was in Biawala last week with my supervisor when a funeral procession just happened to come by. All of the school children were there because one of the students had died, and they were carrying his wrapped up body on a stretcher to the grave yard. My supervisor said that they were getting about one child a day dying there.
There was a party last Friday night in Moyamba, which is a town between Bo and Freetown. we all went down to it. It was good to see the Moyamba crowd again, most of whom I hadn't seen since the middle of training last February.
Friday, June 4, 1976, 4:00 pm - Day 129
Its getting harder and harder for me to sit down and write in here. I always seem to get side tracked before I have a chance to finish what I want to write. Then, when I come back I don't want to write on that anymore. Just on today's session I wrote down the date and then got to thinking about cookies and should I bake 500 of them for our upcoming party next weekend. I started looking at what kinds I should make and how much ingredients I should stock up on. After I got over that I kept looking through the cookbook and had a terrible urge to make some brownies, which I did. I baked them in my frying pan oven and they are already cooked and out of the oven. They look okay, but there seems to be a burnt smell lingering in the house. After all of that I didn't settle down to write the first line of today's entry until 5:30.
Those chocolate chip cookies that I made last week are long gone now but they were delicious. I finally decided to just buy 5 times as much as the ingredients that I used last week and then buy extras such as oatmeal and peanut butter. I also hope to stock up on some granuts (peanuts).
I inspected my watermelon plants yesterday. For awhile there, the situation looked pretty dismal because the watermelons were turning black and disintegrating when they were no more than two inches in diameter. There is only one large one so far and it is about 5 inches across and seems like it might be ripe but I can't tell. If it is growing, then it is too slow for me to tell. One of these days I will have to cut it open just to see if it is ripe. I hope I have solved the black watermelon problem. I cut out alot of metal rings and put one unde each watermelon. this gets it up off the ground and hopefully away from the water and the bugs. I think the ground might have been too wet for them and they were just rotting out. I probably have about 20 watermelons out there now and 8 of them were big enough to put the rings under (2" or more).
I finished "Fever" a few days ago. That place in Sierra Leone turned out to be Panguma, a town about 20 miles northwest of Daru and there were 64 cases of lassa fever with 23 deaths in the summer of 1972. Not long after I arrived in country, a Peace Corps volunteer (in her 60's) came down with lassa fever near Mobai, which is a town about 7 miles east of Daru. They shipped her back to the US and she survived.
Work is coming along slowly but surely. Mr. Bangura's crew has yesterday finished the high fill section on Biawala Rd, which has kept him occupied for over a month. That high fill section has caused me alot of problems and has created alot of static between me and my bosses - both above and below me. Mr.Sesay's crew should finish the double 4 foot culvert, which he has been working on for the past 2 or 3 weeks. It would be completed by tomorrow and then he can work on backfilling the single 4 foot culvert which we have also. I designed the headwalls for these culverts and they came out looking fine.
I passed out raincoats to all of my workers today and about two minutes after I finished, it started to rain and I didn't have my raincoat along so I got wet, but at least my workers stayed dry.
Last week or maybe the week before, anyway, one day awhile back I got my 5th and 6th flats on my motorcycle. Both were on the back tire and both were at the nozzle, where I already had two flats already. I decided it was now time to get a new tube, which I did (CARE has some on stock). Since then the motorcycle has been okay. I washed it yesterday so that it looked like new, but today after the rain, it could use another washing again. You can't win, riding on dirt roads when it rains.
Wednesday, June 9, 1976, 8:00 am - Day 134
Last Sunday I spent most of the day making a cake. The first thing that i had to do was to figure out what to use for a cake pan. I ended up cutting the metal off of some empty cans and putting them all together to make a square cake pan 7.5 inches each way and 1.5 inches deep. It is just the right size for our oven. The cake was a two-layer chocolate chip cake with butterscotch filling and chocolate frosting, and i made it all from scratch and it came out pretty good. It was all gone by the end of Monday, and I ate most of it. I baked cookies last night. They are coconut-sugar cookies and I just sort of made up the recipe. They taste pretty good and I am going to save them for the party this Saturday. I will also bake some peanut butter cookies and some chocolate chip cookies for sure and possibly some ginger snaps and some oatmeal cookies also. With all of these I don't think that we will run out of things to eat for awhile. We are planning to roast two goats for the party and a few people are going to make potato salad for us.
Yesterday afternoon I went out and picked a watermelon. It was about 6 inches in diameter and was the oldest one there. It was from the first batch, all the rest of which had turned black and died. There are plenty of other watermelons out there now, the biggest being about 4 inches wide, but they have just recently grown, so it should be about 3 or more weeks before they would be ready to eat. That watermelon I ate tasted good, but it was sure small as far as watermelons go.
I cut my hair Monday morning. I set myself up in my room with a mirror in front of me and one behind so that I could see the back of my head, and took a pair of scissors and cut away. It wasn't as hard as I thought, and 20 minutes later I was finished, and it came out pretty good. It was my first haircut in Sierra Leone, so that means that it was 4 or 5 months since my last one. My motorcycle helmet was too small before, but now it is too large. I think that I was overheating in the sun because of all my hair before, but now I feel better.
During the last week we finished backfilling both the double 4 ft and single 4 ft culverts. That leaves Mr.Sesay's crew with only alot of little projects left to do, so things should seem to move quicker now.
Monday, June 14, 1976, 8:00 am - Day 139
We had our party last Saturday and I would have to say that it was a success. I started preparing for it the week before by making cookies. I made 100 coconut, 100 peanut butter, 200 chocolate chip, and 200 oatmeal cookies, and they all came out tasting delicious. It was hard to say which was best because you were always inclined to say that the one that you were in the progress of eating was best. My cookies held out through the main part of the party, but were finished after all of the other food was gone. All of the food was good. We had many different kinds fixed by the volunteers and they were all good. They say the goats were good, but I didn't get any, but didn't miss it because I was completely satisfied with just eating the other food.
On Friday afternoon I got out my rake and machette to cut the grass on my volleyball court. It had been a month since we last played and during that time the grass had grown to about 2 to 3 feet tall. Working by myself I managed to bring half of the court under control on Friday. On Saturday we finished the rest, but I let the bobos (little boys) do most of the work. We didn't have a volleyball so we used my soccerball, which worked pretty good except that after a while your hands got pretty sore. For awhile there we were using a ball that someone had brought which was the same type as the volleyball that we used last month. It only took a couple of times landing in our orange trees to put it out of commission. That's the worst things about my volleyball court, it has three orange trees which are just a few feet from the edge of the court. The bad thing about them is that they have millions of thorns, each about 1.5 inches long, which make short work of a volleyball. Even my soccerball is starting to get some thorns sticking into it. So no ball is safe on that court until the thorns are removed from the trees, which might be ab impossible job, except by removing the trees completely, which I can't do because they go with the house. Anyway, we got about 4 hours of good volleyball in on Saturday. By then the goats were cooked and we were ready to eat.
Someone had a tape player and alot of people brought tapes so we had music. The drinks were plenty also. At 6:00 it started to rain and at 6:30 a pickup truck arrived, packed with people from Bo and Moyamba, the crowd from the party 2 weeks ago. They were all soaking wet but didn't seem to notice too much because they all had about 5 or 6 beers each already before they even got to the party. All in all, I think we had about 30 volunteers, about 10 Sierra Leoneon CARE workers, and 10 to 20 uninvited local people who just sort of dropped in. The last of the people finally got to bed at about 3:30 am and we had about 15 people spend the night at our house. We collected all of the bottles the next day and came up with 16 cases (24 bottles per case) of beer and 5 cases of soft drinks. That was the most that anyone could remember being consumed at one party. At the Moyamba party two weeks ago we used up 7 cases of beer. For this party I only had one beer and all the rest were soft drinks. It has been quite a long time since I have had more than one beer in any one day, and oftentimes I would go a week or more without one.
By 12:00 noon Sunday everyone was up, but most of the people were up and about at 8:00 or 9:00 am.
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