SIERRA LEONE

I want to start this post by saying we are fine, and Ivy is fine. The things in this post happened around four weeks ago. It’s not been easy to write this. I’ll recount these events in the order they happened, which isn’t the order of importance. Please be warned that there are quite a number of distressing details in the second half.

--

After six weeks in the Freetown area we were finally heading for pastures new. We shopped in the market ahead of a long drive east. Just outside the peninsula town of Waterloo, a huge sand truck was chuntering along the outside lane. Trucks always hog this lane around the peninsula because they can’t be bothered to weave around the kekehs and minibuses constantly pulling over on the right. So, people just overtake them on the inside. We waited ages for an opportunity to get past. Oh, how I wished we hadn’t bothered.

Just up ahead, there was a checkpoint. The police had pulled over a lorry in the right lane and were talking to the driver. As we slowly passed it, the police officer put his hand up to stop us in the left lane. I braked. Then, slam. The sand truck, around 15 tonnes of it, smashed straight into the back of us.

All I can really remember is a confusing sound, and my head hitting the back of the seat. Then Jeremy’s horrified face and the ear-splitting noise coming from his mouth, consisting mostly of words beginning with F and C. He leapt out. It was a busy place and a crowd gathered quickly. I went into preservation mode, collected the wallets and phones, and locked all the doors as I got out.

There was so much shouting. The truck driver and his passenger, the police, Jeremy, me, the bystanders. In cultures like these, everyone has to pitch in, loudly. At least there was no shortage of witnesses. Jeremy was taking a photo of the offending truck. We had no clue what should happen next.

I could hardly bear to look. Ivy’s back doors were an absolute mess. The spare tyre rack had taken the brunt, partially caving in the left door, denting the right one, and smashing the locks. There was a big gap and lots of bent metal. One leg of the tyre rack was folded in.

Things settled down enough for me to be able to film another terrible video.

We were panicky and stressed. We couldn’t get the bent doors open or see inside, where we have the water tank, a filtration system and lots of tools and gear.

Jeremy went inside from the front and saw that a metal pole that helps support the bed frame had been rammed forward and smashed through the wooden bed base.

We were beyond livid. We were shouting at the truck guys: “You’ve ruined our truck, this is our home, that’s our bed, what shall we do now, we can’t use it like this.”

The truck driver was, in turn, furious at the police for stopping us in the middle of the road (a fair point, perhaps? But he should have seen the checkpoint coming up and given himself space to brake).

A traffic officer went in their truck and one came in ours, to drive to Waterloo police station. The police at the station were trying to get us to pull into this insanely awkward space full of broken metal and glass. I was refusing: “I’m not going in there, we don’t need a f***ing puncture now”. He kept saying, “nothing will happen”. People say this kind of thing all the time here. I shouted, “you don’t know that; something did just happen”. He shut his mouth and let us leave it there, sticking out of the space.

We went into the ‘investigation room’, a dank, grubby, computerless office full of people. The police officer took my licence. He was scribbling my details illegibly in an old jotter. It was clear this information would never go anywhere.

We said, “where is the truck driver?” They said he’d gone to drop off his load of sand on the way. We went absolutely spare at the rudeness of it. I asked for my licence back, but the officer slipped it under his paper.

They asked for our address – for the first of many times we explained that we live in the truck. “But where are you staying here in Sierra Leone?”.

“In the truck!!”, we said again. This concept usually takes a while to sink in.

We didn’t like the smell of things. We were worried the truck driver had just paid off the policeman and disappeared. I didn’t like the fact that the police had my licence as they have an appalling reputation for corruption and extortion. No one seemed to be doing anything.

We texted Mem at Yankai lodge, and our Airbnb host in Aberdeen, where we’d just left that morning. No one was claiming we were at fault but we wondered if we needed a lawyer or a local to help us. It felt like things could get out of our control. Our host called and advised us to run away from the police! “They just want money, they will act nice but they are not there to help you,” he said. He offered to send a lawyer but said it would cost more than just walking away and paying to fix the truck.

Just then the truck driver and his passenger arrived. The air was blue. We could have throttled them for keeping us waiting. We all sat down inside again. A different officer started the same questions again about our details and address.

The driver was going ballistic at the police, they were shouting back, and loads of other people were getting involved. It was chaos. We couldn’t believe the police were not only letting it happen but were joining in.

We had to reiterate that we lived in the truck. I explained again to the room that this was why it was such a nightmare for us. We could not just put the truck in the garage and go home. This was our home. We needed an urgent solution so we could sleep in it and stay safe and dry. We couldn’t even park it and sleep in a hotel with the doors gaping open for anyone to break in.

Finally, the policeman asked, “what do you want?” I said we wanted the door to be fixed now, so we could use it and be safe inside, and for the driver to pay for it.

A new man had appeared who it turned out was the owner of the truck company. He was more reasonable. He said, “why don’t we just do the repairs and let these people continue travelling?” He obviously didn’t want the hassle of the police, and maybe he sympathised with our predicament.

We drove to a panel beater’s place. The only place to work was on the street, in the boiling sun. The panel guy tried to open Ivy’s back door, but couldn’t. We have a vertical locking bar that was all twisted and wedged in by the force of the impact. They soon realised what we’d been saying all along – it’s not a normal car that you can just hammer into shape. These are special, heavy doors for a military truck. They needed some power to force the door open and suggested we go back to the police station and use the sand truck, which was still parked there, to lash to ours and pull.

I asked again for my licence back. The policeman patted his pocket and said I couldn’t have it yet as I would have to sign for it, which was almost certainly bullshit. I was so angry and worried about how to retrieve it.

We went back to the station and they started hammering the hell out of poor Ivy. They tied her to their truck and eventually yanked the door open. Listening to all the banging and crunching was agony. For the first time we could see that the water tank and filters inside were intact, thank goodness. The truck passenger kept saying how happy this made him, and I wanted to punch him – it was a relief, but ‘happy’ wasn’t a word in my current vocabulary. They spent ages hammering the door, and managed to close the gaps a bit. They took the tyre rack off and got it straightened and welded.

The locking rod mechanism had to be dismantled in order to extract the rod from the base. They got the door back into a closed position but we had no way to open it without a crow bar. He tried to re-fix the locking handle but couldn’t work it out. They used a crank strap hooked onto our tyre to try to close the gap where the back right corner of the truck had popped out.

When everyone calmed down a bit, we all agreed that our spare tyre has saved us, and them, from a lot more damage. We were lucky that nothing below that had been broken, such as lights or anything at chassis level. Also, it was amazing that our back windows were intact. However, we were still incredibly stressed and angry that these doors would clearly never be the same again.

I was furious about my driving licence. I went back to the station and found the slimy officer. I interrupted him as he was laying out his prayer mat and said I need my licence back now. He said, “oh you still need your licence?” I said “YES”. He reached into his pocket and gave it to me. It was obvious he’d be working up to a little scam, but I just don’t think he could be bothered with me.

The guys worked until after dark to get things fixed but there was too much to do. We were all tired and fed up. We agreed to reconvene in the morning. We decided to drive back to Yankai lodge – where we’d been camping recently for a month – as we felt safe there. It was so scary driving there in the dark, something we never do here. Mem and Abdul were waiting up for us, worried. It was like coming home. We ate crisps for dinner and tried to relax a bit before bed.

This is such a long story and, had it not been for what happened next, I would probably bleat on for another 1,000 words. I’ll try to keep it brief.

Next day the truck guys and panel guy spent hours trying to fix some more bits but they’d reached the limit of their skills, and were messing some things up, which had left the doors way too slack. We decided to call it quits and let them go – the police were holding their licences until we said we were satisfied, so we lied and said it was fine. The doors worked but looked terrible and were still far too baggy and gappy to be secure, watertight, and mosquito-proof.

We drove back to Yankai, feeling so down. That evening, we had our first rainstorm in about eight months. The timing SUCKED – you really couldn’t have made it up. Water was pouring into the back of the truck. We sat there holding towels, trying to keep the bed dry. The truth is, it wasn’t just the wrecked doors that were causing the leaks. We hadn’t got around to re-sealing the roof yet as rainy season was, theoretically, still a couple of months away. We went to bed feeling utterly foul (and not a little damp).

We turned around and went back to the Airbnb in Freetown. Our host had suggested their friend David to act as a ‘fixer’ to help us get everything properly repaired. We also took the opportunity to get the rainproofing done while we were at it. It was a long, at times frustrating, four days of going around workshops and going round in circles to think of ways to keep the doors tight. They are not easy to straighten without special equipment that just doesn’t exist here. The vertical lock system that had been crudely dismantled by panel guy was reinstated. Ivy was slathered in silicone as well as new bits of rubber to fill in some of the gaps. Endless hammering kept happening – as one bit got straightened, another bit went out of line. Bolts were fixed and added to keep the doors together. Existing locks had to be realigned. The bed was roughly repaired.

David was a lifesaver. As a local, he sped things up that would have taken us three times as long to do, even driving us across Freetown one day to renew our expiring vehicle insurance (basic liability only - no one is covered for stuff like this). In the end, we got it all done to the best level we could.

We were ready to leave again. One last job – get a mechanic to double check there was nothing else amiss after the crash. There was nothing accident-related – phew – but he did spot a damaged bushing on one of the shock absorbers. When they took them out they realised they were completely dead. Cue another whole day of hanging around while Jeremy and the mechanic scoured Freetown looking for a replacement pair. Aaaaaargh! The tedium of this week seemed to have no end. In went the shocks, and off we went, for a third and final trip to Yankai lodge to calm the F down before taking off again toward the east of the country.

We said our final goodbyes and headed towards the city of Bo. After everything, we were looking forward to a tranquil Sunday of driving. It was the final day of Ramadan and we passed many mass outdoor prayer ceremonies.

WARNING: Some distressing details below.

About 60km short of Bo, it looked like something was obstructing the road up ahead. As we got closer we could see, to our horror, that it was a mangled taxi. We parked and Jeremy ran over to help a couple of guys who were trying to force the door open. The taxi driver was trapped. As I started to approach, Jeremy initially told me to stay back. He didn’t want me to see inside the car. But then we realised there was also an overturned minibus in the ditch. There were at least 12–14 injured people either lying in the ditch or starting to emerge onto the road, looking stunned. We don’t know if everyone made it out.

There was a lot of blood, crying and wailing.

Jeremy shouted to me, “bring everything you can”. As it turned out, we were the only people there with any first aid equipment.

He helped some men who were dragging a passenger out of the window of the taxi.

I sprinted over with our first aid kits. A man immediately ran towards me, looking hopeful. I said repeatedly: “I am not a doctor, I am not a doctor”. We’re not trained in first aid either, but at least we are carrying quite a lot of stuff. I asked him if ambulances were coming. He said: “There’s no answer from the emergency number”.

Emergency services in Sierra Leone are woeful, to say the least. One of the most terrifying things about this horrific scene was that we knew there was no cavalry on its way.

Just then a man – another passer-by who had stopped – came up to me and said, “what do you have there?” He had an air about him. I said, “are you a doctor?’ He said “yes”. I could have cried with relief. We spread all the first aid kit out on a clean towel on the road.

It was absolute chaos and is all a blur now. We were shaking and didn’t know where to start. It was a nightmarish scene. We mainly focused on helping the doctor with everything he asked for, running back and forth to the truck to get more things: bandages and dressings, tape, alcohol wipes and gel, gloves, water, soap. Some people were in a very bad state, including a little boy. There were lots of head and facial injuries, huge open gashes and broken limbs. The walking wounded kept coming up to ask us for help, and we did what we could with dressings and reassuring words.

The taxi driver was eventually pulled out, but he was dead. He lay on the road as people ran around trying to help the injured.

No police or ambulance came. Then a guy in military uniform, another passer-by, started to take charge a bit. He asked us to take some people to hospital in Bo and, of course, we agreed.

It was absolute mayhem. A group of men crammed three people onto our floor in the back, with broken bones and gashes. One woman looked only semi-conscious, but she was making sounds. Then they tried to lift in a fourth woman. Her lower leg was snapped and hanging at a right angle. There was no space for her. They were using a scarf to tie her broken leg to the grab handle of our side door and proposing to leave her like that, with her leg sticking out and the door flapping open.

I was shouting that there was no way we were driving like that, but it was bedlam and no one was listening. I felt terrible for saying no but it was an insanely dangerous plan. Just then, thank god, one ambulance came and we persuaded them to get the poor woman out of our truck and lying flat in the ambulance.

I drove for one hour to Bo. I was absolutely rigid with the stress of it. Jeremy kept checking on our three passengers and reminding them to stay awake.

The hospital was already full with accident victims from other places. I spoke to the semi-conscious lady to say that we were here and not to worry, and she groaned. After a few stressful minutes of persuading the hospital to take us, finding out where to go and having to reverse Ivy into a crowded waiting area, they manhandled the injured out of our side door.

I’m so devastated to say that the semi-conscious woman died as soon as she was lifted out of the truck and put on a trolley, right there in front of us and the gathered crowd. They didn’t even try to resuscitate her. Some people in the crowd were crying. We were shocked to the core. We’d done the best we could. We got there as quickly as we could.

People were asking lots of questions about the accident and who the woman was. But we only had a little information. A man was saying to Jeremy, “how are we supposed to register this death? Where did it happen and who was she?” It was utterly distressing.

No one else seemed to have shown up from the scene of the accident. We said they should call the police and we would tell them what we could.

In the meantime, we moved the truck away into the shade. We were literally soaked through to our underwear with sweat and needed to breathe.

A kind member of the hospital staff came over. I kept talking about the woman who had died; we just couldn’t process it. I had spoken to her moments before. He said she had perhaps died of internal injuries. We will never know.

He said we really should deal with our truck. There was blood smeared all over the place inside. Despite the state of us, something kept us going to just get on with it. There was no way we could even be in there with it like that. He brought water and gloves and helped as we spent the best part of an hour disinfecting everything.

The police didn’t come. There’s just no joined-up system here. It’s terrifying.

There was nothing else we could do. We were so shaken but, in the absence of another obvious option, we decided to continue to our destination, which was a jungle camp at a place called Tiwai Island, a nature reserve on the Moa river. It was a really difficult journey. The last hour was a rough track that we’d normally categorise as ‘a bit tricky’ but which seemed petrifying in our current state of mind. It was starting to get dark. At every turn I was convinced we were going to have an accident.

It might not have been a rational decision to keep going, but we needed some peace and quiet in nature to process what had happened. We stayed for a couple of nights in a local community camp, where the people were kind and gentle. They fed us lovely food and we went on a canoe trip on the river and walked on Tiwai Island.

But that beautiful place will always be tainted in our minds – forever associated with trauma and mental playbacks, and thoughts of the people who didn’t make it home that Sunday.

Leave a comment

Share