01/10/2024 Bikepacking Sierra Leone Day 155 : Apotho

What should I tell you about today? Should I tell you about the kids using a rope to drag a cut-open plastic water jug down the road with the littlest amongst them sitting inside as of it were a car? Should I tell you about the women, and how they have unusually big hands? Should I tell you about the 3 boys standing in the road, holding an African Civet upside down by its 4 tied together legs, offering it up to passing cars (and me)?

Each day is like a video game reaching a new level. You think you’re in the same country you were in yesterday, but everything has changed. This is the constant novelty I’m seeking, but it is exhausting too.

Continuing with the video game analogy: There is a little battery indicator in the upper left hand side of the screen. It drains when I meet soul-sucking people, and it recharges when I meet the happy smiling ones. Most days, that battery finishes at 25%, and recharges back to full overnight.

Today, however, that battery went dead quickly - and never charged back up.

Early on, a boy kicked my front tire while I was riding, and then threw some trash at me. I managed to avoid crashing, and turned around to face this kid. In the past, the offending child always has run away - his buddies laughing at him. My hope is that humiliation will curtail the bad behavior.

Instead of running, this kid glared at me as I said bruskly , “You don’t do that!”

The kid replied defiantly, “I speaking the English!”

I had no idea what that had to do with anything.

The slightly older kid next to him, about 15 years of age, said, “sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”

He seemed contrite - for what the other kid had done. I was satisfied with the apology- even though it came from the wrong person. I thanked him for saying sorry; ignored the bad kid and rode off; this would set the stage for the rest of the day.

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I usually try to focus my stories on the happy stuff. Like Luke Bryan says, “Most People are Good.” Most people ARE good, but I’d be lying-by-omission if I didn’t tell you about some of the turds.

All day long, kids would come running to the road to yell, “Abodo!!” I’d not heard this word before, so when a young man said, “How are you” in English, I turned back to ask him what the kids were yelling. Even though you couldn’t see them, you could hear the echos of them still yelling from the little village I had just passed.

He laughed, “It’s ‘apotho’ and it means ‘white man’ in the Tim Language.” He even spelled the new word for me. When I got to the hotel, I looked up “Tim language”, and found it is actually spelled “Temne.” When the kids call me “apotho,” it’s not actually angry; more like an exciting statement of fact.

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Commonly, a motorcycle will slow and pull alongside me to stare or to start talking. I can’t outrun motorcycles, and if I stop, they stop too. As we rode side by side, The passenger said, “Hey White Man.” I replied, “Hey black man! Is it okay if I call you ‘black man?’”

“Yes, it is fine.”

I said, “In my country, if I went up to someone and said, ‘Hey Black Man,’ it would be very bad.”

He just shrugged and began the usual line of questioning.

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Since arriving in Sierra Leone, I’ll see at least a few loud arguments per day. Apart from the one in French at the Guinea/Sierra Leone border, I don’t know what these arguments are about. I miss the peaceful days of men walking and holding hands in Morocco and Mauritania. I liked the more polite people further North, and am intentionally heading that way.

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It’s not just locals scaring me… I too have been scaring people. Today when stopping to buy water from Shoku and Agnes, a little boy suddenly went running away. This has happened a few times in Africa where I scare people like this. As I was crouched on the ground to fill my bottles with the water, Agnes had seemed kind of distant or suspicious, but she brought her son right up to me and pretended like the crying child was an airplane, and I was the runway. She swing him back and forth without consulting with me, but I played along and smiled and waved at the crying child who had snot dribbling out of both nostrils. Momentarily, he stopped crying to do a small wave back, but once she put him down, he ran away crying again. I asked Agnes, “Is he crying because my skin is white?”

“Yes,” she replied.

For some reason, her little game reminded me of when my sister got chicken pox, and my mom tried everything she could to expose me and my other sister to the contagion. Feel free to take that metaphor as far as you want.

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Everywhere I go here, teenage boys try to get my attention by making loud kissing noises. The sound is like Bugs Bunny smooching Elmer Fudd.. and it’s “In Stereo” because it comes from both sides of the road.

There seems to be a chunk of young people who do not speak English. Many of the villagers i met today don’t speak a word of English, but once you arrive in a larger town, the teenagers seem to be the ones who don’t speak it. The 8-12 age group seems to know English, and some adults as well. Just so you know, I’m not expecting people to speak MY language in THEIR land; I just use English proficiency as a benchmark for education.

Just like you can analyze tree rings to incover past events, my theory is that something happened to education during the 2014-2016 Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone that left this age group behind on their education. Just a theory, though.

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This morning, I accidentally overdosed my 24 hour insulin. You have to adjust insulin quite drastically, depending on how much exercise you anticipate for the day… and I badly underestimated the amount of climbing in today’s ride. By the 100th mile, I needed a steady stream of sugar to keep moving. I bought cookies and candy (somewhat fortuitously, that was all that was available). I kept stopping at people’s houses to buy 3 rolls of cookies at a time; devouring the entire package, and 10 minutes later still going low. I finally found a man who would sell me a bag of candy. It was already open, so he was about to count out the 49 or so candies to give me the right price. I said, “I’ll just pay for the whole bag; I need the sugar for my diabetes!” It was $2.50. The last 30 miles, I rode and unwrapped candies; eating them almost as quickly as I could unwrap - nearly 2 candies per mile!

There are many more short stories, but it’s time for bed! Thanks for reading.