Christmas Day

I wake up for my first glimpse of the base. Our room is basic but comfortable with a shelving unit, double bed and mosquito net. There are three other bedrooms, a central area with a large table and food store and a (cold) shower room. The electricity is powered by generator so only gets switched on for a few hours a day. This is enough to ensure the freezer works like a fridge. At the back across the courtyard is the toilet block featuring two local toilets and what they call the ex-pat loo. We refer to it as the nettie (a word we accidentally picked up from Dr Mike’s Kambia journal). It is tiled white on the floor, painted a beautiful azure blue, and features a concrete cube with a toilet seat on the top with a long drop to the pit below. It could be very much worse.

Christmas day starts with chocolate pennies sent from home (thank you mum and Kittens) and some cracker hats and jokes. James makes some pancakes and we meet the rest of the base and look around. The base is a large compound with a woven fence around it. It has two dogs (who are bonkers), many scrappy looking chickens, Lucky the goat (who may or may not be eaten) and a Toukel. I am still not sure of the spelling, but a toukel is a large circular, open-sided hut with a thatch roof, this is our hanging out and eating area.

We meet Moses who is the project Manager for The Kambia Appeal. A former top civil servant and head teacher, he is amazingly driven but unfortunately had fallen off his motorbike yesterday and not feeling or looking his best. We also meet Abbas, Moses’ adopted son who is currently revising for exams but will also help us with cooking and washing, and Said and Alhajie the base security.

FT takes us to Christmas mass, which we attend out of interest. The service structure is normal but the congregation seem more joyful and celebratory than a UK church. They sing traditional hymns and dance under a painting of an African last supper. I make friends with Marion, FT’s very cute adopted daughter. Many people here have large extended and adopted families as the war left many orphans, FT has ten. Like all churches, the sermon goes on forever, though it seems to be more catholic than most – its wide ranging themes take in Galileo and the H bomb as well as the traditional baby in a manger stuff, in a hybrid of English, Krio and Italian.

 

We return home from church to cook Christmas dinner. James and I go to the kitchen, a dusty unused hut, to discover the cooker has no gas. We can’t get any more in Kambia so we will have to cook all of our meals on a single fire bucket. All things considered our dinner of roast potatoes, stuffing, carrots, green beans and gravy is a bloody miracle. The day finishes with a youth choir singing carols in the Toukel. Very enjoyable but I do learn a valuable lesson – do not hand over a whole packet of sweets to Kambian children. The choir fell on a packet of jelly babies and stuffed them as fast as they could. Sadly, distribution from now on will be on a sweet by sweet basis.