Living in Sierra Leone

So, I have safely arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It was a bit of a stressful 30ish hours with delayed flight out of NYC, trying to reroute my ticket in Ghana (not as easy as you'd think). Lack of sleep, delays, and a scary book outlining the history of Sierra Leone left me stressed and somewhat regretting my decision to come. Once I got off the helicopter and into my room and made it to the good part of Sierra Leone's history in the book (where the British come in and fix everything), everything seemed a lot better.As Rachel mentioned, the food is quite a bit better here and there are lot more options. As you can see in the photo below, its a beautiful mountainous city on the ocean.

On my first day I met with a couple of boys that were running a small firm that sells cell phone minutes. They walked me through their business and also what they purchase. They are part of the microfranchise initiative put on by the International Relief Committee, who we are working for. Our goal in this project is to identify 2-4 businesses that can easily be scalable to 750-1,500 microfranchises over the next 3 years. The work is a lot of fun and the people are great. The picture below is of Hassan and Paul. They've worked hard at their mobile phone business and used capital from it to launch a small tea shop that sells evening meals. They have big plans for a movie rental shop and latter want to go back to school. Both awake at 6 in the morning and work straight until 10PM. Hardworking and creatively enterprising, youth like these are the future of Africa.

Here's a picture of the view from my room - hard living in a third world country....