[Africa] Return to Africa: Haunted by poverty, writer travels to Sierra Leone to 'give back'

from The Miami Herald

BY LEONARD PITTS JR

Anatomy of a mid-life crisis.

You grow up a welfare kid in a bad part of town.

You study hard and go to college.

Your career climb is long and slow.

You keep working.

Then one day, a few decades gone, you look up and see that things have changed. You no longer drive a car that sprays gray smoke. You go out to dinner a few times a month. You buy books in hardback.

You have, as the commercial used to say, come a long way, baby. And yet . . .

You catch your own eye in the mirror sometimes, feel yourself convicted by the whisper of a still, small voice that is not impressed with you. That says there is more you could do, should do, need to do to earn your space on this ride. That reminds you that none of what you do in life matters if it accrues only to the benefit of you and yours.

You've got to do more. You are supposed to do more. You know this in the very pit of you. But you don't know what that more is. You ponder this question without answer for months turning to years. Then you go to Africa for the first time. It is the summer of 2004.

THE MOTHER CONTINENT

Writer, sons experience

'difference' of Africa

It is a dark and stormy night in the summer of 2006, and I am back in Africa for the first time in two years. Sierra Leone, to be exact. I have just survived customs and baggage claim and am now on my way into town. This requires a helicopter ride.

There's no sensation of leaving the ground as the copter rises from the airport, no sense of being in the air as it ferries us across Lungi Bay, no bump of returning to the ground as it sets down minutes later at the jetport in Freetown. You simply close the door on one night dark view and open it on another.

My traveling companions -- two of my sons -- and I collect our bags and get a ride from one of the drivers who crowd the jetport, jockeying aggressively for fares. Our bags are smashed into the back of a small, ancient hatchback. The hatch won't close. Our driver waves us into the car anyway.

We pile on top of each other. Marlon, 24, is concerned about the bags. He wants to know what will happen if they fall out. I tell him we'll stop, pick them up and put them back in.

You're in Africa, I say. Things are different here.

I have brought Marlon and his 32-year-old stepbrother Markise here in order that they might experience that difference. Two years ago when I got back from my first-ever journey to the mother continent, they and everybody else I knew kept asking the same questions: Did you have a good time? Did you have fun?

And I kept trying to tell people the terms did not apply. Those are questions you ask when someone gets back from Las Vegas or Honolulu. Going to Africa, at least the poor and ragged parts of it to which I have gone, is not fun. It is transfiguring. And saddening. And centering. You come back knowing you have heard a paean to the resilience of human soul.

Two years ago, I came seeking heritage. I had contracted with africanancestry.com, an online service that matches your DNA against a database of African tribes and nations to tell you where your ancestry traces to. The results came back showing that I am of the Songhay tribe of Niger on my mother's side, the Mende of Sierra Leone on my father's. I came here seeking to understand what that meant.

Spent a week and a half traversing the cities, villages and countryside of West Africa. Passed an afternoon in the Nigerien village of Tera watching the crowds go to market. Sat with the maimed at a Freetown camp for those who lost limbs in Sierra Leone's brutal civil war.

Everywhere, there was need. Need so immense it crushed you just to see. A woman in Niamey, Niger crawling across a floor, her limbs twisted by polio to angles that legs do not go. A man with no arms reaching out, begging, at the Freetown jetport. Children playing by open sewers filled with brackish gray water.

And then, there was this woman I met in Kroo Bay. That's a shantytown, a maze of corrugated metal shacks in Freetown, the capital city of one of poorest nations on earth. She was a ''petty trader,'' meaning that she sold little bags of rice and containers of palm oil from a table in front of her home. We spoke in the front ''room'' if you want it call it that -- a dark, unlit space not much wider or longer than the average sofa in the average American home.

Her name was Kadiatu Sesay. I have not been able to get her -- or what she told me -- out of my mind for two years. She is the main reason I have come back here to the other side of the world.

FLASHBACK

Americans don't care,

local people tell him

Summer, 2004.

You step out of the hired vehicle into Kroo Bay. Your driver calls you back, motions you to tuck your pendant inside your shirt. It is a modest cross on a modest chain and it surprises you to think anyone would consider it worth stealing. But you're in Africa. Things are different here. So you do as he says and then enter Kroo Bay, notebook and tape recorder at the ready.

One of the first people you try to talk to turns you down. His name is David and he is a handsome man with an attitude. He has no interest in doing an interview for an American newspaper because he doesn't believe it will amount to anything, doesn't believe you will do anything with what you learn except forget it the moment you return home.

You explain that the stories you write will tell Americans what it is like here. Americans don't understand, you say. You are here to paint the picture so your countrymen can help.

It is a weak answer. He lets you pass anyway.

You interview a man who worked as a janitor before the war. Now he has no work. Now he spends his afternoons sitting in Kroo Bay with his grandfather.

You interview a man who says he wants to be an artist. He shows you some of his work. His dream is to go the United States and make his fortune.

Then you ask Kadiatu Sesay if you might have a moment of her time. She agrees to talk with you about her life, but like David, she is wary of you.

She says people tell her Americans don't care about places like Kroo Bay. For Americans, they say, the wretchedness of a place like this is something to joke about once they are out of earshot.

``They take their pictures and laugh at them, you see? So now, I've given you my name. So I want you to take this deep into your heart.''

She drills you with her eyes. ``I want you people to help me, me and my children.''

She has four girls. Her dream is that they will go college, then escape overseas. ''Education comes first,'' she says. Her voice and accent are heavy.

As a petty trader, she earns the equivalent of $1.65 a day. Her husband makes roughly the same. ''In Sierra Leone now,'' she says, ``we, the women, we are the men. Because we can do more than our husbands can do, we the women. Now my husband have no job. So I am the husband and the wife.''

Her husband Ahmed is sitting right there. He doesn't speak. You feel sorry for him.

You ask her if she really believes people in America will laugh at her. ''That is what people are saying,'' she says. ' `When they go, they will just forget about us. They will not help us.' So now, we want to get them to help us. We need your help. It's very, very hard for us.''

A CRAZY BET

Shantytown family:

can you find it?

Summer, 2006.

Morning dawns rainy gray. I get dressed, then spend a few minutes standing on the balcony of my room at the Hotel Kimbima, the West African equivalent of a luxury hotel. The carpet on the stairs is threadbare and the shower water iffy, but the food is good and from nearly every room the building offers majestic Atlantic views.

From my balcony, I can also see the skeleton of an unfinished building maybe four stories high. There are many such structures in Freetown, places where the money ran out before the building was done.

Families squat in those places, cooking over open fires. This morning, a little girl plays hopscotch under a ledge that shelters her from the rain.

I have a daughter a few years older, a pouty teenager who requires hours on the cellphone, frequent trips to the mall and tennis shoes in every style and shade in order to be minimally happy.

The little girl below me has no hopscotch grid, no one to play with. It doesn't seem to matter. She hops and skips in a dry, quiet place out of the rain.

The deluge has let up by the time we plunge into the city. It dawns on me, not the first time, what a task I've set myself here. I've spent thousands of dollars of this newspaper's money and thousands of dollars of my own, brought my sons to the other side of the world, all on a crazy bet that I can find one particular needle in this bustling haystack.

To go into Freetown is to be mugged by sights and sounds. There are no sidewalks. Open sewers are laid across with planks to bridge the gap between streets and doors. You pass block after block of tumble down shacks, stalls, shanties with corrugated metal roofs leaning wearily against one another. Crudely painted signs hawk the Club Zanzibar, the PlayStation 2 parlor. A billboard shows a couple -- the guy looks like Will Smith circa The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air -- hawking pineapple soda. You can't extend an arm in any direction without hitting someone. The streets seethe with people, girls walking about with trays of peanuts balanced on their heads, boys in western style tees and jeans, women, sharp in professional wear going to offices, boys and men darting in and out of traffic hawking biscuits, cell cards, candy bars, sticks of gum, anything. A blind albino walks through chaos with confidence and no cane, his step certain, his face a high beam of serendipity.

Fourah Bay College sits on a quiet hill overlooking all this. There, administrator David L. Coomber listens patiently as I describe my mission. I met a woman here two years ago, I say. I want to send her oldest daughter to college. When I'm done, he asks me a few questions.

Do I know the girl's name? I do not.

Do I know what her grades are? Sure don't.

Do I know if she's taken her placement tests yet? Beats me.

Do I know what she wants to study? No.

Do I know where she lives? In Kroo Bay. Somewhere.

He is nice enough not to laugh at me. Yes, he says, it is possible for a foreigner to sponsor a Freetown child at Fourah Bay. But first the foreigner must find the child in question.

HAUNTING THOUGHT

$700 can change

a child's life

Summer, 2004.

Do you know how much it costs to send a child to college in Sierra Leone? A year's tuition at Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827 and considered one of the finer institutions in West Africa, costs about $700, give or take. A little more with books and living expenses.

Back at home, you keep staring at the page on the computer screen, keep doing and re-doing the math, trying to figure out what you've misread, how you've misfigured the exchange rate. Seven hundred dollars? Some of us spend more than that each year on going to dinner and buying hardback books. Surely that little bit cannot be all that separates a shantytown child from opportunity. Surely it can't be that easy to change -- maybe even save -- somebody's life.

Seven hundred dollars.

That number haunts you. You share it with audiences who've come to hear you speak. You share it with people who ask if you had fun in Africa. You share it with strangers. Seven hundred dollars.

Something else haunts you, too: Kadiatu Sesay pinning your eyes with hers. ``We need your help. It's very, very hard for us.''

You realize she was talking to Americans in general. ''You people,'' she said. But you find yourself taking it personally.

Women like her are a staple of newspaper and magazine stories about Africa. How many times have you read it, the woeful tale of some woman trying to survive on $3 a day? It's an existence you can't even imagine. After a moment, you stop trying because doing so only depresses you. So you turn the page. You move on. It's not like you can do anything about that woman's problems.

It is a conclusion that is only reinforced when you get to Africa and find nearly every hand is wanting. You draw up defensively. What do they think you can do? What to they expect? You cannot help everybody.

But -- it strikes you all at once -- maybe you can help one. Maybe, instead of being paralyzed by the immensity of the need, you break it down to a number you can deal with: One. So maybe you can just send this one woman's kid to school. How hard can that be?

Common sense keeps trying to talk you out of it. You don't know exactly where the family lives. Don't know if they have moved on since you met them. Don't know if they will have reasons of their own, reasons you can't begin to guess, for saying no. Can you really go back to the other side of the world on a maybe?

THE RIGHT TURN

'The gall of me' --

and a rare opportunity

Summer, 2006.

We drive down into Kroo Bay searching for two landmarks: a road that takes a sharp turn and a tall, pink building that showed up in the background of some of the pictures taken two years ago. This is literally all we have to go on.

The streets are narrow. We nose slowly through crowds of people. They stare at us. We are exotic. An oddity.

We have been driving maybe five minutes when the road turns. Not as sharp a turn as I remember, but still . . .

I tell the driver to stop the car and I get out. Glancing up, I note that there's a pink building overlooking this valley of shanties. But otherwise, nothing looks right. Nothing feels right.

I draw a crowd just standing there trying to get my bearings. I do my best to ignore them.

The shack that sits where Kadiatu Sesay's shack would if this were the right place looks nothing like hers. False alarm. This isn't the place. Close, maybe, but not the place.

I'm ready to go, but the driver suggests I talk to the ''counselor,'' apparently the man in charge in this area. He is a tall, thin guy. I tell him I'm looking for a woman named Kadiatu Sesay. He doesn't know the name. I hold up a 2-year-old copy of the travel section of The Miami Herald with my story and her picture. He takes it, looks at it, walks away with it. I follow him to the shanty I passed on the way in, the one that sat where Sesay's would have sat but didn't resemble it.

And there she is.

She looks up in surprise to see me at her door, half of Kroo Bay behind me.

We sit together in the tiny room. A crowd of people presses at the door. She is smaller than I remember. She is pregnant. I ask if she remembers me. I remind her of what she said. I tell her that it stayed with me. I tell her I am going to send her daughter to college.

Through all of this, her face has that look of confusion, inability to take it all in, one sometimes sees with lottery winners. Except that after a few moments, lottery winners usually start whooping and cheering and celebrating like, well, they just won the lottery. Sesay does not. She barely smiles. She looks stunned. Overwhelmed.

A few hours later, we gather in Coomber's office. Me, Kadiatu and Ahmed Sesay, and their oldest daughter. And we get answers to the questions he asked me just the day before.

The girl's name? Fatmata (pronounced Fatima) Sesay. She is 15. Her grades are good. She hasn't taken her tests yet. She wants to be a nurse.

Coomber explains to her parents the deadlines she'll need to meet and the papers they must fill out. Then he begins to lecture Fatmata. He speaks sharply to her in Krio, the local dialect, and I am only able to make out a few words. But I get the gist of it.

I hear him tell her that she has been given a rare opportunity, but opportunity is fragile like glass, so she must safeguard it. I hear him tell her she must apply herself and continue getting good grades. I hear him warn her not to fall prey to the temptations that so often run young lives off the rails. And I hear him say that in the three years between now and when she is ready to begin school, he is going to be keeping an eye on her -- ''persecuting'' her -- to make sure she does well.

The poor child looks persecuted already. She looks as if she might cry, standing there at attention. Can you blame her? She woke up this morning and it was just another day and suddenly she's here in this office with her mother and father and this strange American looking on and a photographer taking pictures and this man she never met before threatening to persecute her.

She swallows hard and promises to do her best.

I feel sorry for her. I feel a lot of things, in fact, including remorse at the gall of me, playing God with the life of this child. But I feel good, too. Paradoxically, good.

I ask her to make me a promise. Twenty or 30 years from now, when you're able, I tell her, please find somebody you don't know and do something good for them. She says she will.

Each one reach one, reach one, teach one. That's what the pop slogan says.

Whoever saves one life saves the whole world. That's what it says in the Talmud and the Koran.

Outside, the photographer takes more pictures. At one point, Kadiatu Sesay stands next to me. She smiles. ''I am so happy,'' she says.

That's all she says, but it's worth an hour of lottery winner whooping and I know that I'll be hearing it for a long time. Her heavy voice, her accent flattening the ``a.''

So heppy.

In a few days, I will buy stamps at the Freetown post office and give them to Fatmata with the instruction to stay in touch with me. Coomber promises that he will be in communication as well. But for now, we say our goodbyes there on the hill overlooking the city. The taxi bearing the Sesay family follows us down. At the bottom, our car turns, my sons and I returning to the West African equivalent of a luxury hotel. The Sesays continue straight, heading for Kroo Bay. Filthy, crowded Kroo Bay. But three years from now, I remind myself, Fatmata Sesay will leave that place, will climb back up this hill to begin her studies.

There is chatter in the car, but I pay little attention. I am somewhere else. The still, small voice that brought me here is quiet, but I know I'll hear it again. I'll always hear it, I think -- periodically, inconveniently, nudging me. And I think that's a good thing.

But now I hear nothing, feel nothing except a rare contentment, an unusual sense of being, for once in life, at peace. With everything.

The sun is high. The streets are crowded. We nose through traffic in the land of my fathers.

I am so heppy.