Bo, part 1

Anna and Mattu

It started over 6 months ago when Anna asked if I would join her in visiting a World Vision sponsor child. Of course I said yes, enthusiastically jumping at a chance to adventure with Anna and see a bit more of Sierra Leone at the same time.

"Really African road"

After a smooth ride to Bo and a relatively uneventful (except for the spontaneously exploding lightbulbs) stay in a hostel overnight, we set out for a butt-numbing land rover ride that sent us careening through what our driver termed "really African road." Although the constant and violent rocking over deep ruts and vegetation in the road threatened to throw us through the windshield if we didn't hang on, we were able to enjoy a really fabulous view of the surrounding mountains and greenery and little villages filled with people.  Almost the opposite of Freetown, where trucks and poda-podas and motorcycles threaten to run over the thousands of pedestrians...here we were the only car out there for miles.

They greeted us with dancing and singing, enthusiastic chatter, and a whole troupe of uniformed schoolchildren.  Because this village had a school, and a well, and a clinic - here a luxury and a blessing rather than an assumed necessity.

It was a humbling thing to tour the clinic, with its three maternity mattresses and mosquito nets, the stenciled "drug store" sign for just a few medications, the one nurse with a baby tied on her back who proudly pointed out their exam tables and beds and almost bare cupboards of supplies.  It can be so easy for me even now to see something as a medical "need" or "necessity" until I realize just how many clinics make do without.  It's easy to look through the hundreds of barefoot children who walk for miles to go to school, and see only the bare concrete of a building and the mud outhouses.  It's only now that I start to realize what I have not seen.

What is poverty, and what is wealth?  Overlaid with a richness of community and culture, this village and our patients challenge the ideals of the American dream just by their lives.  Individualism, health, wealth and possessions are not all they promise, and they were never something that was promised to us.  I have seen contentment despite monetary poverty, and it makes me wonder what it is that so much of the Western world is missing.  Are we the ones who lack understanding, the ones who are impoverished?

Ecclesiastes 5: 19-20 Moreover, when God gives someone wealth and possessions, and the ability to enjoy them, to accept their lot and be happy in their toil—this is a gift of God. They seldom reflect on the days of their life, because God keeps them occupied with gladness of heart.