By Kemo Cham
Life for many of Freetown’s residents is a tortuous daily struggle.
No one embodies this experience like city’s slum dwellers, who have to put up with an avalanche of issues ranging from poor sanitation to lack of services like safe drinking water, education or healthcare.
For people like Adekali Sesay, a resident of Susan’s Bay, it’s altogether a life of uncertainty. In April 2017, a fire incident raised down a large part of the community and Adekali was one of over 500 people who lost properties as a result. Besides the cloths on him on that day, he could save nothing else from the inferno.
Two years later, in March 2019, another fire swept through the same community. Again Adekali lost all what he managed to gather after the previous incident, including a TV, a freezer and other expensive household appliances.
This is the reality for many of Susan’s Bay’s residents who seem to have resigned to an avoidable fate.
Located in the east end of Freetown, Susan’s Bay is one of dozens of slum communities dotted along the coastal edges of the Sierra Leonean capital. It is ranked among the top five largest slums in the city. It’s population is thought to be at least 20, 000.
Overcrowding is an understatement in describing this community, a situation that gives rise to the risk of disasters, especially fire outbreaks, which are frequent in the dry season, and flooding during the rains.
Fire outbreaks are the most common occurrences, happening almost every year, according to residents.
Adekali was one of 25 other victims hand-picked to participate in a psychosocial session designed to help the community cope with this recurrent experience. The participants were selected to represent all categories of the population, women and men, the young and the old, the employed and the unemployed.
For a community like Susan’s Bay, poverty is the hallmark of the residents. Most of them live from hand-to-mouth. While the men serve as laborers in the nearby markets and at the nearby sea port, the women hawk stuff like bananas, mangoes, cups and spoons on the streets of the Central Business District.
Isatu Kamara used to sell cakes in one of these streets. She said she lost all the little savings she had from the business, along with all her belongings, when the latest blaze erupted.
Isatu has six children: five boys and one girl. Her husband is a ‘businessman’. He sells caps. When the business is bad, he goes to sea to serve as laborer in the foreign fishing trawlers, she explained.
Isatu had gone to buy disposable nappies for her baby when the fire erupted.
“I just made sure I got my children. That’s all we could do. Life is more precious than material and we could not rescue any material, so I went for my kids,” she said.
Despite the occasional help victims of the fire incident have received in the last three months after the incident, Isatu and many others still struggle to get back to normal.
“We have no bed. Even when we want to cook, we have to borrow a pot from neighbors,” she said.
SWSL is a group of volunteer social workers who provide psychosocial services to deprived communities across Sierra Leone.
Hassan Koroma, National Coordinator of the group, is one of seven volunteer social workers who took the participants through about a dozen sessions designed to help them deal with the trauma of losing everything.
“It’s all centered around building resilience, to help them manage their feelings, from the recovery stage. They have lost a lot of thigs. That experience comes with tension and frustration. So we prepare them to see the future ahead of them,” he said, explaining the rationale behind the sessions.
“We know that some other people have aided them with material support, but with a disaster like this, we believe they need emotional support to deal with such crisis,” Koroma added in an interview, in between sessions.
This is the second fire outbreak SWSL has responded to in Susan’s Bay alone. In both instances, it was supported by the US-based charity, Lemon AID Fund.
Lemon AID, a Not-for-profit, supports locally developed programs geared towards promoting access to healthcare, education, psychosocial and economic development for people in difficult situations.
Psychologist Dr Nancy Peddle, Founder and CEO of the charity, presided over some of the sessions during the over five hours engagement held in the Port Loko Warf Community Center, a popular suburb of the Susan’s Bay community. Her first session was on forgiveness. She used about five of the participants to enact a scene designed to demonstrate the need for forgiveness - the fisherman analogy.
For about five minutes, a woman tried unsuccessfully to catch a human fish. She tried a few more minutes, with helping hands from fellow villagers, and she was still unsuccessful. Eventually she gave up.
Dr Peddle explained that that session reflected the whole idea behind the Forgiveness, Gratitude and Appreciation (FGA) campaign of Lemo Aid.
“It is a good example of cutting the cord with somebody that is a problem that you have. When you cut that person [fish] you can be a whole again; you let the ‘fish’ go on with their life and you let yourself go on with your life,” she said.
“We find that analogies are easier to understand what we are telling about forgiveness,” she added.
The idea of Lemond Aid was based on the experience of Ms Peddle working in Sierra Leone during the war period. This is the 23rd year since the charity was established, throughout which period it has consistently focused on helping people attain psychosocial wellbeing.
The Susan’s Bay activity was part of a growing global campaign called ‘Forgiveness, Gratitude and Appreciation One Million’, which Peddle said is geared towards multiplying happiness and peace in the minds of the world’s population. All beneficiaries of psychosocial training sessions conducted by Lemon Aid or its partner organizations are trained to go and train their family members and other people in their communities about forgiveness.
“We believe that the ripple effect could be exponential. And we could potentially get peace globally,” she explained.
The one million target started this year and Peddle said it has since been replicated in 14 other countries and, in total, they are getting close to the first 100, 000.
“Lemond Aid is the visionary behind the Forgiveness, Gratitude and Appreciation One Million campaign. But we are only kind of helping groups that already had that mind, and SWSL is a perfect example. Their work is about helping people, keeping them resilient and we think the approach is one of the best ways to do that,” said Peddle.
© 2019 Politico Online
