#koindu

Leaving Koindu. It's been exciting and sad.

I used to play marbles here, eat cassava here, break dance here, sleep under the moon light here.... I used to live here.

Koindu, Sierra Leone (November 2011)

"Peppe Hall" used to also serve as a night club. At night, they would push the stalls aside, put up speakers and we (before we were old enough to go to the real night clubs) would dance into the late hours of the night. During these rave sessions, the pepper dust (from the afternoon) coming from the floor made us cough and sneeze. Hence "Pepper Hall". But nothing could stop us from boogieing to those disco tunes.

Was it a prison? Rape house? Where atrocities were sketched, celebrated? Were the children kept here while they were initiated into a world that made hacking off limbs a way to pass time? Was it the “home” of some “big boss”? Did he wash the blood off his hands here, tried to wash the stench off his body here. Did he cry himself to sleep here; because even Lucifer was once an angel (and may just be acting out to be let back into heaven)?

I learned a valuable lesson this day: Don't give without first asking what is needed. I don't know if I stumbled on it, or they did it just for me (because afterall Mr. Tengbeh was talking about the need for more classrooms), but all of a sudden in my tour, in the small room "library" where I first fell in love with books (getting all giddy from nostalgia), Mr. Tengbeh had some students start bringing out boxes upon boxes of books in varying stages of decay; maggots crawling out and all. "See," he says, "We don't need books. We have no place to put them. We don't need a library. We need classrooms." At that very moment my brother had a shipping container of books en route to Kenema Government Secondary School. And we were hoping to do similar for Kissi Bendu.

Before the PC, before the laptop, before the iPad, Kindle and all these new additions to tools used in the classroom, there was the black board. It is still very much in style in many classrooms all over the world.

Today Kissi Bendu is still there, thriving with classrooms overflowing with students (that got up and sang "Good afternoon, sir" to me every time I stepped into their classroom). And Mr. Tommy Tengbeh is still at the helm as the principal.