Beaches and Football
on Shona in Sierra Leone (Sierra Leone), 16/Oct/2010 17:59, 34 days ago
I’m just back from the beach – again? I hear you say. I went this afternoon to Lakka Beach with some of the lovely people from The Mercy Ships hospital. We had a lovely swim, walk and some ace barracuda with chips and rice for lunch. We left just in time before a tropical downpour. The Mercy Ships have a maternity ward, an obstetric fistula clinic and a children’s outpatients clinic. It was nice meeting up with a couple of their doctors and some midwives.The FootballSo…last Sunday afternoon, we went to see the football. At least we attempted to see the football. We (Cat and I) went with our lovely neighbour Joe to see if we could get tickets for the SL vs South Africa game for the knockout stages of the Africa Cup of Nations. So.. getting the tickets was the easy bit. We got into the ground and were just going into the stadium but it honestly looked like hell on earth actually inside the stadium. There were FAR more people there than the stadium was clearly designed for. My phone and purse were expertly pickpocketed (luckily there was only about 50p in the purse and the phone was only worth £3.50, and I’ve already got the same number back, along with most of my credit – I just had to pay to get another phone unlocked. I was very impressed with the mobile phone company). So we wandered around for a bit trying to see if there was anywhere we could go that wasn’t totally packed. Crowd control was clearly NOT on the agenda of anyone there, apart from some policeman using their truncheons to get people to stand back.Being crushed was not what I had in mind for today. We decided to leave. The lovely Joe got some nicer policemen to escort us out of the stadium. The policemen were most surprised that we didn’t want to stay and watch the game!