I couldn’t quite understand the appeal of the books as a child since most of them were wrapped in a light weight brown paper to protect the covers and they contained no pictures. Now that I think about it maybe the brown paper was to keep us from seeing the torrid love scenes depicted on the covers. But I doubt it. My mom was not a great reader but I do recall her bringing home books from the library and telling us how they were such great novels, unlike the English novels my older sister was already reading. I believe many of them were Christian Romance novels of some kind but I have no idea who the authors were or if they had any fame beyond the borders of Holland and the Dutch language they were written in. It was like an early book club. I can still see the women trading books and recommending one over another. I wonder what happened to those books and the libraries.
I had this strange memory yesterday about the Lethbridge Christian Reformed Church Library in the 1960’s. I was recalling that every Sunday morning after church there would be a gathering of women in the church basement, various cupboard doors would be unlocked and opened and the women would bring back the novels of the past week and sign out new ones. There must have been a librarian who managed this and bought new books to add to the collection, catalogue the books, and put little white and red labels on the spines.
I couldn’t quite understand the appeal of the books as a child since most of them were wrapped in a light weight brown paper to protect the covers and they contained no pictures. Now that I think about it maybe the brown paper was to keep us from seeing the torrid love scenes depicted on the covers. But I doubt it. My mom was not a great reader but I do recall her bringing home books from the library and telling us how they were such great novels, unlike the English novels my older sister was already reading. I believe many of them were Christian Romance novels of some kind but I have no idea who the authors were or if they had any fame beyond the borders of Holland and the Dutch language they were written in. It was like an early book club. I can still see the women trading books and recommending one over another. I wonder what happened to those books and the libraries.
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“If you haven’t eaten rice today then you haven’t eaten.” So goes the saying in Sierra Leone. In South Africa it was, “If you haven’t eaten pap, then you haven’t eaten. Pap was the staple food of most South Africans; ground corn, cooked, cooled into a stiff porridge and then eaten by hand with a tomato sauce. It’s curious to me that in countries and climates where it is possible to grow almost any kind of crop, the range of food grown and eaten is very narrow. As standards of living increase the demand for greater variety grows. We in the West take for granted the enormous variety of food that we have access to and especially that we can refrigerate, freeze or otherwise preserve it. This is not possible for most people in Sierra Leone. We also have far removed ourselves from the amount of physical labor required to grow the food we eat and have taken out the worry of having a successful crop to feed our families. For many the day starts with reheated rice from the night before or some kind of sweet rice porridge. Very tasty and filling and certainly gets you started on your day. The big meal in the day happens around three o’clock and this will be rice with a palm oil and potato leaf sauce with maybe some small fish or a peanut sauce. The challenge in this country is getting enough protein. The day may end with a small bowl of rice refried and served with fried plantain or some other green. Many eat only two meals a day and in some cases only one. I visited several villages where World Renew has worked with Women’s Cooperatives to increase rice yield. The women work together in groups to plant rice swamps with some new high-yield rice seed varieties and if the cooperative grows they may receive a labour saving rice mill to process the rice. They have helped to build rice stores, dry, secure buildings to store enough rice for the season and save enough to start seedlings for the next year. This is proving to be very successful and the women are very proud of their production levels. As the success increases they add other women’s groups and thus increase the overall food security of a community or region. Clearly it was the women who did all the work but the men who wanted to get into the photographs. Give us this day our daily bread has a far deeper meaning in this part of the world. I remember growing up that it was someone’s job in my family to polish Sunday shoes on Saturday evening in readiness for church on Sunday morning. I also recall there was some complaining about that assignment. Probably from me. Today I might polish my shoes once in a month and the tin of black shoe polish must be ten years old. In Sierra Leone my guess is that the average family goes through a tin of shoe polish every two weeks and a shoe brush once a year or more. Shoes get polished every morning and I must say the job is rather satisfying though also frustrating. By the time I have walked to school my shoes were already red with dust and by the end of the day very much in need of their morning polish. When you pay your school fees for the year you usually buy a new uniform, a school bag and new black shoes. Shoes can hardly last a year given the cheap Chinese imports available and the hard wearing that they receive. Each year a tailor comes to school, each child is measured and a new uniform is sewn. Even a gentle wash would hardly make it through and given the dust and grime, by the end of a year the uniform is finished its earthly life. I love the morning and afternoon school traffic in Kabala. Hundreds of children walking to school and each can be identified by their uniform colors. Green and Yellow to Amadiya, Green and White to Loma Secondary, Blue and White to Kabala Senior Secondary and Pink and Blue to CRC. Every morning at school assembly you will see the rows of students in pink and blue, with white socks and polished black shoes. It is about nine years ago that I first met JT, James Tamba Koroma, the first person we hired for the CRC School in Kabala Sierra Leone, and the first and current Headmaster. JT had been working as the Headmaster of a large Muslim Primary School in Kono and was under increasing pressure from the Muslim Imam to convert to Islam. He did not have another job but felt that it was time for him and his wife Sunkarie to leave, given his own Christian convictions. Very shortly after the job for Headmaster of the newly founded Christian School in Kabala was posted. We all agree this was certainly the work of God. He began his work just as the construction was underway and has seen us through the steady growth of the school up to its current reality of a Senior Secondary school and campus. He is a tireless and faithful servant, loved by the children and community. When I visit I am often on the back of his equally faithful Honda XL and there is no place in Kabala you can go where people aren’t greeting Mr. JT. He is especially loved by the children and most lunch hours you will find him in his office surrounded by children and he is usually doling out 1000 Leones here and there for lunch to someone who likely didn’t have breakfast to start the day. JT has many little Koronko and other sayings, like “If you don’t let a child bring you a stone, she will never bring you a diamond.” And the children are often bringing him diamonds. I’ve watched him skillfully and politically manage parents at CTA meetings, always has time for them to meet and hear their stories and trials and whatever the future may hold, he will always be remembered for what he did for this community in building a school that has been a light in Koinadugu District, the poorest and most forgotten in the country, raising it to a standard that makes it the envy of Kabala Town. JT is a great story teller and you get a sense from his life story that though he may be small in stature he was born with a courage, strength, faith and determination well beyond his size. His stories of their time during the civil war are hair raising and amazing in their casual fearlessness. I was privileged to stay with his family again this time and I get to see close up that he is a devoted man of God who prays fervently and trusts deeply that whatever the circumstances, God holds the future in his hands and therefore, “all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.” In Sierra Leone and I’m sure in many countries in Africa, when children are orphaned for whatever reason, other families in the community and often the relatives will adopt the child into their family. Many of the families that I have gotten to know over the years will take in children who then become part of the family unit. Initially this was a response to the many children orphaned after Sierra Leone’s 11 year civil war but it continues today. These children are treated like family in most ways though I have also observed that they might over time take on greater responsibility for the household’s physical labour, such as doing laundry, hauling water and fetching whatever needs fetching. Over the ten years that I have known Joseph and Kumba Sesay the family unit is always changing and mostly growing. They have five of their own children and then a number of other children that have been adopted. About eight years ago it was tiny little Naomi whose mother had died in childbirth. Kumba just came home on the motorbike one day with Naomi strapped to her back, after having gone to her farm near her home village. Naomi is now in Class Three. Since I was there two and a half years ago they have also adopted Esther whose mother also died in childbirth. I believe Kumba's mother's heart cannot help but do this. When you hear of the arduous and often expensive process of adoption in North America it seems almost unbelievable that you could just come home with a new child after a visit to your farm to pick up vegetables. There are many challenges to take in another child, another person to feed and educate, but such is life in Africa. |
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