Scratch “Plays well with others,” add “Scares little children”

20-21 March 2008, en route

It took two days to drive from Freetown, on the western coast of Africa, to Kailahun, in the extreme east of the country, not far from Liberia. The further we got from Freetown, the more and more excited people seemed to be to see white people. In Rwanda, as I walk down the street, they might say, “Mzungu,” once…and I might look, or I might not. In rural Sierra Leone, as the car drives down the road, kids scream, “Pumwe!” about a hundred times in a row. They wave so hard I’m afraid their hands will snap off at the wrists.

But when we stopped to wait for a ferry (see below; it is worthy of a picture), I made a kid cry.

She was maybe 3 years old, sitting under a huge tree with a tinier kid. They were cute enough, but it wasn’t the kids I was interested in (for once): there was a bird making an amazing noise in the branches above their heads.

So I pulled out my Edirol recorder and wandered close to the tree, arm outstretched to better pick up sound.

And then this girl starts bawling. The way badly-raised American children do if you take ice cream away from them at a restaurant before they feel like they’ve finished.

She’s screaming, she’s crying, she’s looking around, panicked, toward any adult, as if to plead for them to rescue her.

And then I’m told by some traveling companions that “pumwe” also means white devil. The way our parents used to get us to do stuff by promising us dessert before dinner, or to get us to stop doing something by threatening that our father might come home early and catch us in the act–in rural Sierra Leone, they tell kids that if they don’t behave, the white devil will come and get them.

I wonder if, in what she thought were her last moments, she was trying to figure out what she had done to call me down from the spirit world to the banks of that river.

Here’s the ferry: