Arrival

2/1/15 – A quick note to document our arrival in Sierra Leone. We headed to the airport in Boston (amidst another, happily less threatening, snowstorm) about 35 hours ago. 31 hours later, we arrived at the Freetown airport. The trip included a 7-hour layover in New York, where I headed into town to have brunch with some friends, and a flight from Brussels where we touched down in Dakar and Conakry (Guinea) before finally arriving in Freetown. 5 flight legs all together!

There are posters about Ebola in the airport (see photo), and they ask you all sorts of questions about any symptoms or possible exposures, then take your temperature, as you go through customs. (Not sure what they would do if you DID have a fever coming IN to the country - but none of us did, happily.) There were less than 100 new cases last week (yea! A huge improvement, and it is coming steadily down), but clearly it is on everyone's mind.

For reasons I don’t fathom (someone suggested that maybe the ferry boat operators have a strong lobby?), the Freetown airport is across a very wide estuary from the actual city. To drive from one to the other apparently takes many hours. So, instead, we took a bus a quarter mile over some wildly undulating dirt roads and boarded a ferry. My guidebook (yes, there is a tourist guidebook to Sierra Leone! Published in 2012, before Ebola. Extremely informative) had told me that these ferries have been known to sink, and generally do not have lifejackets. Also, one of my colleagues was told by a seatmate that his company does not allow them to take the ferries after dark, because of the high rate of accidents once the sun goes down. In the event, however, it was a newish boat (WITH lifejackets) that took us on a very fast and breezy ride across the estuary. The lights of Freetown, pretty if sparse, appeared 20 minutes or so after we started, rising up what looks like quite a high hillside, a la San Francisco. That, and the lovely full moon, and the cool, gently moving, if very humid air, made for a sweet arrival.

We’re staying in classic developing-country “professional” housing – reinforced concrete, bare fluorescent tubes, heavy dark furniture, all the edges a bit dirty and crumbling – but 100% adequate, and of course so much more solid and spacious than what most people live in over here. And everything works! The lights, the plumbing, the internet. Not always the case. (Well, the elevator doesn’t work. A last, four-flight wrestle with our bags.)

And of course the smell of dust and burning. I could swear it is almost the same smell I remember from my first trip to India – Could that be? We’re thousands of miles away and on a whole different continent. Not in Kansas any more, in any case.

A meal of coucous and shrimp, chicken, coleslaw, fried plantains, French fries, and cupcakes. I don’t think we’ll have anything to complain about.

Tomorrow (at 7!) we start hands-on clinician training with WHO, at the national stadium (isn’t the national stadium where dictators always were committing atrocities in the ‘80s?). I’ll let you know how it goes….