This is a journey through the reality of Sierra Leone, a country in which the Augustinian Recollects have left their mark. The author, with his soul in pain but in love with Sierra Leone after a year in the country, tells us the story sometimes in the first person, other times from the point of view of the objective observer, with traces of humor and dreams for the future of this country.
Sierra Leone is famous amongst its neighbours as a place in which you can´t trust anyone. In the large cities, the only place where they exist, the supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, hardware shops, always have as someone in charge of the money, as boss or of his family a foreigner: Chinese, Lebanese, English, and Italians.
The macroeconomic figures and their indicators of well-being are a shock. Above all when looking at the figures of the last twenty years, because you can see that the civil war in the 1990´s meant that this country is thirty years behind.
According to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and their own government, Sierra Leone has 5.7 million inhabitants (year 2009) with a population growth of 2.4%.
The gross interior production of the country is $1,900M. To give us an idea, the gross assets of the richest man in the World, the Mexican Carlos Slim, is $53,500M; the Spaniard Amancio Ortega, the ninth richest according to Forbes magazine, has gross assets of $25,000M. In the world there are 1,011 people who possess more than $1,000M. What is true also is that between 1991 and 2003 Sierra Leone lost 5.3% of its GDP whilst prices went up288.46%.
This means that every inhabitant has $341 GDP per head. In this indicator, Sierra Leone occupies No.164 of the 170 countries on the list of the World Bank. To compare, the Spanish GDP per head is $32,425 (No.23) and in Mexico it is $14,337 (No.53) and in Brazil $10,427 (No. 71). The worldwide GDP per head is $10,671 (Brazil almost coincides with the worldly average).
Sierra Leone has an annual growth of 4%, but the consumer prices went up 14.8% in 2010, which means that this modest growth is cancelled out so the population doesn´t gain any benefit.
Life expectancy has gone up from 42 years in 2000 to 47 in 2009. Infant mortality is about 122.8 for every 1000 births, and 54% of women between 15 and 24 years old are illiterate. 1.7% of the population between 15 and 24 years old are AIDS sufferers. Only 49% of the population have access to clean water, and 13% can count on sanitary access. Logically, these figures get worse in the rural regions. It is not possible to give employment figures because…they do not exist!
In the most rural regions, the economy is purely a matter of survival. There are no offices, factories, businesses and only a few small shops like a “village shop”. In all of the Biriwa Chiefdom, whose capital is Kamabai, there is only one shop. Business is carried out in the markets, some are permanent like the one in Kamabai, and others are weekly called “pork” in the villages, in which buying and selling is no longer a formal economy. Families eat what they plant, and they live to plant.
A small percentage of the population work for outside wages and the salaries say everything: the most privileged between 200,000 and 300,000 leones (40€ or 60€ a month). The majority, around 150,000 leones (30€).
Salaries with which they have to feed an extensive and numerous family: 5.2 children for every woman, in a great number of cases more than one woman, and the presence of cousins, uncles, and people from the same village or origin…there are 15 people in every home.
NEXT PAGE: 3. Religion
