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How is your body?
Posted By Will on December 12 2009

Arriving in Sierra Leone involved an interview. Not with customs or the police, but with a group of porters, hawkers, street vendors and students. They stood there in the gloaming and showered questions on us. What is your mission? Are you army? How is your body?

My body? I shifted uneasily in my muddy shorts. We had just crossed Guinea is two days. I had not showered for four and my beard had finally awoken after ten years of no growth. Guinea had amazed us with its beauty. A giant pick n mix of mountains, rivers and forests. And dust. Red dust. It had infused the deepest corners of the car. My shorts were covered in it, my eyebrows clogged with it and my hairy plum beard infused with it. I looked like a dwarf Viking who had fallen asleep on a sunbed.

And now there was a girl waving a goat kebab in my face asking about my body. I shrunk backwards to hide behind the mudguard.

There is no doubt that Sierra Leoneans are friendly people. They also do good kebabs. But, rather like Guinea, the greatest secret of the country is its scenery. Freetown is a crazy mix of tumbledown houses tumbling down steep hillsides to meet the sea. Streams fringed with slums rivet these hillsides, and the corrugated walls and roofs crackle with the rain when it pours.

There had been a tourist industry. Once. Back in the 80s ,before the country was plundered by its leaders, ripped apart by civil war and then patched together again by the international community. The empty shells of abandoned hotels have been overtaken by squatters who dangle their clothes out of the windows like piratical flags on a seized ship.

But in amongst these ailing galleons are a new flotilla of buildings and people. Telecommunications companies have descended on the city. Spraying their signboards, shop fronts and advertising hoardings like weedkiller on the beautifully painted local signs that tell of Prince Charles Hairdressing, Lucky Charm Nail bar, Wayne Rooney Tyre shop. Mobile phones are ubiquitous and phone companies are the new Coca-cola and Fanta – shops are painted in their colours, people wear their t-shirts and it is difficult to listen to anything on the radio that isn’t sponsored by them.

Sierra Leonean television though is still far behind.

We encountered this firsthand when we contacted Harold Williams, one of Sierra Leone’s leading environmental journamists. As well as writing for Panos, the BBC and a number of SL newspapers, he also runs an environmental programme on SL TV called Enviroscope. And last week he decided to do a programme on us.

The first scene was a disaster. It involved me standing there as Harold spoke directly to camera – This is Harold with another edition of Enviroscope, and this week we are with Atlantic Rising. Say hi, Will. Hi. (awkward pause, fiddle with pen in hand, look at camera and look away, fiddle with pen, shuffle). Right! And now we are off to see the Minister of Climate Change. Let’s go Will. OK. (shuffle off sideways glancing at camera).

Minister of Climate Change was not in his office, so we made do with the head of the Meteorological Society. A small man with limited funds and less time. I asked a couple of boring questions about Copenhagen, Harold looked non-plussed, and then he asked for the air conditioner to be turned off so he could get better sound. The ensuing 30 minutes are a hazey blur of sweaty mayhem – the Met man seemed unaffected, Harold’s enthusiasm didn’t diminish, and I lost another shirt in the battle between my sweat glands and the clothing industry.

Things got a lot better once Tim and Lynn arrived, but our television enthusiasm never quite matched Harold’s. I don’t know whether the programme ever went out, but we won’t be invited to the awards ceremony. Let’s hope things get more polished by the time we get to Ghana, where we are meant to be on TV again.

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