Our entry into Holy Week was as bumpy as a camel ride. The desire for worship to be as loud as possible, be it from the organ, the drums, the Singspiration leaders, or the amplification system, ensured that in the Palm Sunday service we attended, liturgy, listening and learning were diminished, with destroying the reverence of the first Sunday of the Passion. In Holy Week the theological college activities take a break as a good number of the students are in leadership roles in many different churches. This provided the opportunity to broaden our understanding of what is happening in parallel to our lives and deepen our appreciation for both cultural events and professional endeavour in Salonean life.
The following day we were able to listen to a friend Baindi, as she recalled the week long mourning ceremonies for her grandmother, Bintu Amara, in the family’s home in Kenema. Whilst ‘Mama Bintu’ was a Muslim, her husband, their children and her husband’s second wife and their children were all raised as Christians, so that the extended family only accompanied, where possible, the Islamic rituals held in both the home and the Mosque. What Baindi described, confirmed what is widely known, that in rural Islam and Christianity, the rite of passage for death, includes elements from traditional culture providing a rich syncretism in prayer, vigils, music and dancing, and endless meals involving slaughtered animals and huge quantities of rice.
Some weeks ago we met Michael Fielding, the founder of the Extra-Mile initiative, who we had learnt of before arriving in Freetown. Focussing on the needs of primary education in Salone, ‘Extra-Mile’ involves placing skilled and experienced volunteer teachers from the UK, in Salonean classrooms working alongside the appointed teachers for short periods, often two to three weeks in length. This results in a period of professional in-service and significant moral support for hard pressed teachers who struggle with inadequate resources, large class sizes and all too often delayed monthly salaries. To provide the volunteers with rest and relaxation ‘Extra-Mile’ has built a retreat house a few miles along the Peninsula Road at Baw-Baw beach, and Michael invited us to use it. A house with no running water and no electricity doesn’t sound too inviting at the end of the dry season, with temperatures hovering around 30C day and night and humidity approx 70%.
However, as the house is located on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, with rocks at the edge of the land and mature trees adjacent, it is a stunning location from which to watch birds and monkeys by day and listen to the orchestra of the sea by night. Sadly we could only manage a one night stay.
Maundy Thursday evening in Freetown may not be Jerusalem on the eve of the Passover but dense traffic on Campbell Street and the broadcasting of the Benfica vs Liverpool football match, would surely have rivalled it for noise as we started the service in Grace Brethren Methodist Church. With a familiar, ‘power outage’ on the city’s electricity supply, the church generator provided sufficient light for Peter to see the water turn a rich coffee colour after washing only a few feet. His perspiration on a very humid night quickly added to the water level in the bowl as he and colleague Alpheus Karoma shared the task of bathing hundreds of feet. Small and large, neat and knarled, they are a very poignant reminder of where people have travelled and continue to walk.
We had driven to the Good Friday morning service and had witnessed several effigies of Judas on the roadside . They provide an opportunity for children to demand a coin or two , however unlike the “Guy Fawkes” of the British bonfire night on November 5th, it is probably most unlikely that they are burnt at the end of the day, but are thrashed to pieces. Just how they became a feature of Easter in Salone we have yet to discover how, though it may have arrived with liberated slaves from the Caribbean. The only other place we have witnessed a similar practice, is in the fishing villages in northern Portugal where the effigies were hung and burnt in a central location and the charred remains left for several days. For once, controlled heat from the usually problematic bottle-gas fired oven allowed Janice to complete the baking of a quantity of hot crossed buns, which were distributed to our neighbours and the seller of our daily bread. Not surprisingly, the explanation to both Christians and Muslims of the buns significance made little reference to the goddess Eostre!
Despite the day’s activities it was almost 8pm before we sensed the death and burial of Jesus of Nazareth as the Tenebrae service, (Office of Shadows) reached its conclusion with a loud bang, signifying the closing of the tomb. This was our first experience of a liturgy from the 8th century which is so familiar to Lutherans and Scandinavians. The service was led by Kate Warn, a Lutheran minister from the USA, and held on the premises of Mercy Ships, a medical organisation, which usually functions on a boat and not on land. As we left in silence, we sensed that we were not the only ones in the largely expatriate congregation who were deeply grateful for such a richly expressive, yet simple liturgy. Later as we headed for bed, the National Stadium was welcoming those who desired a night-long vigil for an event billed as the “Transference of Power” by a Charismatic movement that attracts several thousand people to their periodic gatherings that are led by a Nigerian Team of Pastors. So as the night passed we heard intermittent singing and shouted responses, from our house a mile away, and not for the first time considered if a noise abatement society will ever be established in Salone!
The City Mission Circuit, has only two churches which are both well attended and also supportive of working collaboratively. This includes the preparation for the confirmation programme which is held annually at Eastertide. Despite the regular service of infant baptism, there are a surprising number of teenagers and adults who have not been baptised and for several years these have been conducted by full immersion in the sea at Lumley Beach.
So on Easter Saturday, 28 children, teenagers and adults and their supporters met for a service which included the challenge of being beneath the waves of the sea, if only momentarily and with nostrils firmly pinched. Three of the children were brothers and sister and had all been born in Germany but their Salonean parents had waited to be back in Freetown for the baptism with relatives and family at their “home church”.
Some weeks ago we had accepted the invitation of a college colleague, Rev Randolph Spaine, to visit the Methodist Church in Hasting where he has pastoral responsibility, and for Peter to preach. The origins of the village lie in the settlement of disbanded soldiers and liberated Africans, with the church, Lycet Memorial being built between 1864 and 1869. Its tall, deep stone walls are still in good order, whilst the original timber trussed roof has been replaced by one with steel trusses as part of a total refurbishment. Scaffolding poles, open windows and a generous coating of construction dust didn’t stop a large congregation turning out in their Easter best for a service with some good music and an adventurous choir. At the close of worship a report on the building scheme and some energetic funding raising ensured that the event lasted well over three hours. At which point the bar across road began to receive its first customers. We hadn’t appreciated just how popular Guinness is among the women’s fellowship. Having sunk our Maltina, we said goodbye and returned home by the mountain route, so inappropriately named the by-pass, as at present it requires four- wheel vehicle to drive through the deep red road dust on its steepest sections.
A Sunday evening pot-luck supper of SLIBS (Sierra Leone International Bible Study) in The Lutheran Church’s compound on the edge of Aberdeen Creek, at sunset, provided an opportunity to see what birds were feeding in the same location where Janice had an Osprey pointed out to her a few weeks ago. The event was well attended and as usual we learnt more of the amazing work being addressed in economic development- poverty reduction, infant welfare, children’s and women’s rights etc which are provided by international organisations.
The average age of the group is around 30 years of age and their length of stay is relatively short whilst some of those who are nearer 60 have spent several decades in Salone.
We have acquainted ourselves with many of the major road systems in the west of Freetown but our knowledge of the names of the communities and their inhabitants which lie to either side of the those roads is minimal. Therefore the invitation to have lunch with Baindu’s family, and to visit a community known as Simaria Town was most welcome. Located close to the steep and winding Hill Cot Road, the house sits high on a hillside which provides some stunning vantage points of the city. The houses, which hug the hillside, are small in scale and low in height and are built in a mixture of mud and concrete blocks and often on various levels. Most of the families draw water from a communal well, cook in the open air and though individual hamlets have their own pit latrines, they are often clustered in twos and threes and at some distance from their owner’s homes. It would be interesting to know the population density for such an area though it is in marked contrast to the spaciousness of the compound on which we live. For this reason we regularly consider how the land could be better utilised for a greater number of people.
We have received comments from a number of people, who said that they would anticipate our Easter to be very different from the ones that they are experiencing, and this is indeed true.
