Here I am, sitting at the American Embassy. I’m helping out with a Fulbright workshop for Sierra Leoneans who want to come to the U.S. to study. It’s fuuuun. More or less. I am also in town to acquire some permits and permission letters to make things easy on my professor and another doctor who are comin in January to help immobilize pygmy hippos. They will be bringing in anesthetic drugs and dart guns so I gotta get these all squared away with the proper authorities (If I can figure out who those authorities really are). Lemme tell ya the story so far.
I came into Freetown Monday and had been developing some sort of vicious cold – chesty cough, sore throat, fever, light headedness. The next day I go to try to start getting stuff done. I travel to the Pharmacy Board (after getting routed a couple times from other offices) and wait for about an hour to be shown into a cramped office. This dude looks confused by my letters. I tell him that I had contacted the Tacugama Chimp Sanctuary to get advice on how to import drugs and they had told me to come here. So for the rest of the time he kept thinking I was from Tacugama, even though each time he said it I would correct him. So he sent me to his boss finally, who took one look at my letters and pronounced “There is no official stamp on these. Go get a stamp from your collaborators.” Even though they had signed them…The collaborator I had a letter for was in Kenema, so I went to my other collaborators and begged them to stamp their own invitation letter, which they did thank goodness (but that happened much later in the story). So then I take my chartered taxi and tell him we need to go to the Central Police. He drives for awhile and we end up at “Western Police.” I say “Um…Central Police. On George Street.” So then we drive another while and indeed end up at the Central Police. Unfortunately there are 2 Central Police – one is the Station, one is the Headquarters…So on we go to another location. I get out and a policeman gets right into my car. I try to explain that this is my chartered car but he refuses to get out. Finally he does and I go to enter the station at the front. They tell me I shouldn’t use that door but the side door. So I go to the side door and they tell me, no I need to use the front door. So then I go in and walk up 5 flights of stairs (coughing cuz there is phlegm in my poor lungs, and the escort cheerfully saying what great exercise this must be for me). I get to the office, explain the whole situation again, and the lady says, Nope I need to go to the Criminal Investigations unit, which is another part of town. Can somebody please shoot me by now?
At that point I am exhausted and hungry and decide to go get lunch. I eat some food (I don’t really even remember what I ordered) and walked to an internet café to print out new letters, because all my letters are addressed to the wrong units (it costs a pretty penny to print things here too). I print, then walk back to my guesthouse to rest. I reach my hotel room and reach for my phone. It’s gone. I remembered somebody especially jostling me on the street, so I’m thinking he was the one to take it. I desperately need a phone because I am supposed to meet a lady to stay at her house for the night (Embassy lady!). So I rush to the street and find a lil’ shop that sells cellphones. I purchase a phone and bring it back to the hotel. I turn it on and the screen is all messed up. So I bring it back. I go through all their phones, and they all have similar problems. They change my phone for a different type (I must interject here that my brain wasn’t functioning too well and I wasn’t making great decisions or being assertive when I should have. I could barely even talk by this point). I take it and catch a cab to go across town to meet the lady at a bakery. The taxi driver is nice, but doesn’t know where the bakery is, and keeps stopping at every bakery but the one I need to go to. I keep saying “You need to ask for direction.” And he would reply “Yes yes yes I ask for directions.” Traffic is horrendous and we reach the end of the road, where he finally asks for directions. We have missed the place but go back and find it. We get there, I go inside, and ask the servers if they have seen the lady. They say she has already come and gone…So I start thinking about having to go all the way across town again (over an hour) and burst into tears. I go back out to the taxi man and he tries to make me feel better, cuz he sees me crying. I get back into the taxi and one of the servers comes rushing out, saying the lady said she would return. So I go back inside the bakery, try to stop crying like a baby. The owner brought me a glass of water – somehow everybody being nice to me made me want to cry more. The lady came back, took me to her nice a/c house, I had a hot shower, she made me spaghetti, and we watched tv till late. Of course, the ‘new’ cellphone stopped working…
Got up the next day, met Charles from EFA to drop off all the letters to be stamped (it took an hour to get about 4 miles…), went to the Embassy, gave my presentation to Fulbrighters, then headed for town. Went back to the phone place, but the man who sold me the cellphone wasn’t there. A woman who had seen me the day before said she would take me to his brother. So we start to walk. A woman on the side of the road has a table she is moving and she bumps into me – there is a nail sticking out and it rakes my arm deeply. I am bleeding when we reach the brother. Somebody said “Get some spray for her” and they bring…perfume…and spray it onto my arm. Then mop it up with a cloth. Yay blood. So he changes out my phone and I go on my way (still bleeding). I finagle my way into getting helped quickly at the main cellphone shop to get my old phone number again. Then meet up with Charles to collect the stamped papers.
Things get much easier from then on because Charles has a car and amazingly drove me around town to drop off these letters of invite to get the permits. The Pharmacy Board told me to come back today to get the permit (crossing fingers). And he even dropped me back off at the lady’s place. Where I watched TV! And had an egg sandwich! So yesterday was a little bit better…
So that’s my story so far. Will keep you updated.
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