AVO WRITES: Market in Bunumbu, Sierra Leone
Written by: John Babbott
Photos by: Jeff Hall
Bring your two dollars and get to the market at Bunumbu for all your perennial needs as a resident bush dweller. I’ve never been any place in the world where you can get more for less. The equivalent of a dollar loads you up with a pile of sixty-two plumped up oranges, spackled orange and green and sweet, the closest thing to candy available besides pineapple. The pineapples, grown on mountainsides in plots, are cutely alien when they’re young, grotesquely adorable little spikeballs that turn into beautiful monstrosities when they’re ready to be chomped.
Greasy plastic sacs of groundnut paste, i.e. peanuts ground up into natural peanut butter to use in sauces or on bread, palm oil rendered from the berrylike palm fruit that’s used in sauces, cooking or lamps and is the vermillion blood that sustains the diets and economy of the region, multicolored hot peppers, gaunt and nondescript fish shedding their silverleaf scales, their eyes bugging dryly in the blistering heat, nervous, clucking chickens swaddled in plastic bags with their heads sticking out, their eggs in bowls, soft baby goats bleating at the ends of their ropes, Mende rice (nut-brown rice, thick husked and nutritious, but make sure to learn how to sift the rocks out first, the only dentist in the area exists 40 miles away in a four-by-four foot shack, his marketing scheme is a sign that reads ‘DENTIST’) heaped dusty and cool in pilfered burlap sacks that read ‘USAID’ or ‘A Gift From The People Of Germany’ or whatever denomination of dead-ended aid effort gave a lucky or savvy family 50 kilos of rice, the bags now doling out the Mende variety for 400 Leones a cup (about 13 cents), engorged yellow grapefruit (ask for ‘grapes’), mangos if they’re in season, sweet papaya with their little caper seeds, the split fruit smelling like a groin but tasting, well, like papaya, little sweet yellow onions, dessicated husks of flaking white-flour bread in baskets, long cassava root gnarled and earth-encrusted like the severed fingers of giant gardeners, bulbous yams laid out on mats and blankets, low-grade iron pots and lids, spoons, knives, machetes and hoes, water pans, buckets, and the miasma of color that’s the swirl of it all.
With the dust, heat, hawking and haggling and tugging towards different stalls, it’s like taking a drink from a fire hose. Which is roughly equivalent to the experience of living in the jungle in Sierra Leone. Thirsty as hell and the only way to quench it is to take too much – in going to a market, any market, you see the end-of-the-line evidence of what it means to live in and to know a place. Two dollars for a weeks’ groceries – the reason for this can’t be encapsulated except through an understanding of the local economy, the debt cycle that keeps the farmers (a farm, by the way, looks like untamed jungle to someone who doesn’t know any better…the corn fields of Nebraska and Kansas are distant cousins to the hills of Joki at the very closest…they don’t know each other) at starvation level while produce buyers receive their crops in return for paltry loans that further the serf-like system of dependence and exploitation. The flies covering the bread, the pot-bellied little kids with intestinal worms, the scrabble for survival and subsistence evidenced by this end-of-the-earth improvisation of commerce – can’t be understood fully from any one source, not through a UNESCO report or a firsthand account, and not even fully by going there oneself.
But look for a moment at Jeff’s face, the dewy Pumoi (Mende word for ‘white guy’) Peace Corps newbie looking at his camera in the middle of the market at the crossroads at Bunumbu, and look at the kid to the right checking Jeff out, trying to figure how this strange being got to his neighborhood, and you can see a bit of the bewildered acquiescence that is the slow comprehension of a place more different than you could ever imagine.
Going to this market, it will change your life. To change the lives of the people who live there, go to http://www.tc.umn.edu/~jewel001/SierraLeone/2 years ago with 1 note
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