Echoes of War

Nina’s making me look bad by posting so regularly, so I guess I’ll dive in. 

I’m finding it hard to know what to say about our time here.  I’ve been coming to Sierra Leone intermittently since 1987 when I first arrived as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  Since then, I’ve seen the country during the tail end of the war and during the decade long reconstruction afterwards.  As we move around Freetown, I keep experiencing moments of déjà vu.  Shops are locked and streets are empty after 6PM due to government decree, and it reminds me of times during the war when the streets were empty because of fear. 

We stopped by NERC (National Ebola Response Centre) Headquarters today to attempt to pick up our passes to travel through the quarantined districts next week.  It’s housed in the complex that used to be the Special Court for Sierra Leone.  An echo of the post-war period was the fleet of NGO vehicles outside the compound.  The driver commented that they are all circling around, looking for contracts.  That felt a lot like the post-war NGO-ization as well.  As happy as people are that international experts are here battling the virus, we also heard some stories of grumbling that expatriates were enjoying themselves on the local beaches.  I remember exactly the same story with the UN peacekeepers fifteen years ago. 

I am not the only one making these comparisons.  Several of the people we have interviewed so far have said things like, “this is just like the war” or even “this is worse than the war.”  One woman said, “during the war, if you needed to, you could run to your neighbors house and beg for a few cups of rice.  But now we all sit at home, afraid to even go to our neighbors.”  This war is about an invisible enemy, and perhaps the hardest part for Sierra Leoneans is that they have to fight it isolation from each other.  On the other hand, a professor friend told us today, “the war was worse than this.  Maybe people don’t remember, or they were in Freetown throughout so didn’t experience the worst of the war.”  People are also invoking the resilience they learned during the war, saying things like, “we survived the war, and we will survive Ebola, by God’s grace.”

I'm so glad Nina is here with me.  Not just because she is better about remembering the Clorox wipes than I am.  I think it would be easy for me to be distracted by my decades' long ethnographic project, and want to spend all my time thinking about what aspects of Sierra Leone's culture are changing or not as a result of this crisis.  Nina keeps me on track, always bringing it back to the question:  how can this knowledge help.