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The Difference
Life Lessons From the Guinean Backroads
Many years ago I lived in Guinea, West Africa during a stint as a volunteer grant writer for the International Rescue Committee. My position meant traveling around the country to visit refugee camps and report on our programs. The transportation was usually hot, crowded and unreliable: The IRC owned several aging Land Cruisers that had no AC and had been beat to hell by the African roads. Because I was a volunteer — also because I was young, female and not used to advocating for myself — I was usually taken on last, as an afterthought, so that I and my laptop were wedged into the vehicle wherever we happened to fit. Sometimes the drive lasted fourteen or fifteen hours; often the temperature soared over ninety and the humidity somewhere near that. My gut was usually in knots from the inevitable African stomach bugs; frequent stops were necessary, in which I’d have to scramble to find a hole in the ground or a tree behind which to do my business. We brought mix tapes to combat the tedium and stress of the long ride, bouncing through the countryside accompanied by U2, The Cure, Better Than Ezra, Pink Floyd, Tom Petty and the like.
On one such cross-country drive, I found myself in the company of one of our local staff, a Sierra Leonean man named Bangura. He was a refugee himself, having fled when his village was raided by rebel forces who killed some of…
