The Protected Hole

I posted this photo on my Facebook page a few days ago, but on reflection, I thought the image needed fuller treatment.

What is amazing about the hole in question is that it has endured for so long. One would have thought that the person responsible for filling up holes in roads would have noticed it by now and done something about it. Or, if it had managed to escape his or her keen eye someone else must have brought it to their attention. For crying out loud, the thing is located on a “FO-RODE”, the intersection of four roads, all major, and through which traffic passes into and out of central Freetown.  So, one has to conclude that it is a marker of some purpose. It is obvious that a thing of beauty it is not, unless our Master or Mistress of The Roads comes from an aesthetic that is uniquely different from yours and mine. 

Is its purpose functional? I would have thought not. It is difficult to see what use a 2 metre-diameter hole could serve in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. I know. You say it slows down the traffic and prevents reckless speeding. But there are other ways in which traffic is slowed down throughout the city, but which we won't bother with right now. So, I can’t buy that. Nor can I buy a proposition that it serves as a drain  to take the run-off from Freetown’s famously extreme downpours. That definitely does not wash because, if it was one, shouldn’t it have a grill cover to prevent the unsuspecting from being washed in as well?

I can’t think of any other purpose, try as I might. Except, perhaps, that perennial, ever-lurking about in Salone. The one staring me in the face all along, hidden right there, in plain sight. But here, I have to lower my voice an octave or so: It could be a “Debble Hole” (Devil Hole). And no one dares touch it. Even talking about it is risky enough and one may have truly exceeded the bounds of caution by actually photographing it. The mere thought of the transgression makes me quite nervous now.

Meanwhile, the thing stays in place. Till Doomsday, one presumes.

We just have to learn to love it.

Tell Fren Tru

Cleaning up our Act

I just came back from holiday to find Sierra Leone grip(p)ed by a cholera epidemic.

Why I am not surprised? Cholera has had a lurking presence in the country for as long as I can remember and, from time to time, depending on the intensity of the rainy season, emerges and runs through the population like a dose of salts. I can recall, as a freshly-minted doctor, my first epidemic there. Bursting with knowledge about the way cholera and other waterborne diseases spread, I readily remembered lessons taught in med school, about how an astute physician, John Snow, had sussed out cholera by merely observing how the infection clustered around a street pump in the Soho district of Victorian London.

I recall also how I was immediately conscripted into teams managing cases desiccated almost to extinction by the diarrhoea and vomiting that are typical of the infection. We fought valiantly then, but the epidemic took its course, regardless, and faded away only at the end of the rainy season.

Yes, we have come a long way since Victorian days. Most of us no longer invoke mysterious forces when an epidemic rages. We know that a physical element is involved, and that in this case, if we keep feces separate from the food we eat and the water we drink, we will not catch diseases that have a fecal origin and die from them.

            And yes, we also know that the more crowded the environment, the more likely it is, when the barrier between excrement and clean food and drink is breached, that epidemics will occur. And yes, even in towns and villages that are not so crowded, run-off from heavy and persistent rain will enter pit latrines, cause them to overflow and discharge their contents into the environment, contaminating everything. This is what happened forty years ago and this is what is happening today and what has always happened.

Yes, hand-washing is crucial in breaking the cycle during epidemics and even in more settled times. But where do you get the clean water to wash your hands with when everywhere is contaminated?

The answer to this simple problem is beyond politics or ideology. Neither political posturing nor the dialectics of ideology can stem the tide. Germs will do what germs do. We know how the disease is caused, how it is transmitted. So all we need is a plan. I mean an actual blueprint of the future sewage systems in our main cities and towns.

Did I say beyond politics? I was wrong, of course.

I just read that the President of Sierra Leone recently signed a massive memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the government of China, in which they agreed to cooperate in a whole raft of activities including huge engineering projects. But, significantly, there was no mention of how to deal with sewage in the country’s towns and cities.

I know, I know. Such documents are drawn up months in advance of their signing, and yes, yes, the epidemic burst upon us in the last six weeks (surprise, surprise, it only rains torrentially every year from May to November). But here, we have an urgent, urgent public health priority that must be handled as urgently, even if it means adding a paragraph or two to that MOU. It would give us the chance to revisit the plan that imperial Britain proposed for Freetown more than a century ago, a vantage from which we can begin to talk meaningfully about how we can get this doo-doo out of our face.

Tell Fren Tru