Sierra Leone: 1, India: 0

A few months ago, I complained to a friend that I needed to get my groove back. He said all I needed to do was restart my blog. How do you start writing again after a year? Even as I type this I can feel the muscles of my palm twitching nervously and my index finger threatening to freeze up as I raise it to hit a key.

To be honest, I’m not in Sierra Leone, at the mo. I am resurrecting this blog while on holiday in India. It continues to shock my mum’s friends that I live and work in Sierra Leone out of personal choice. “An Indian girl should live in her own country, not in some African place no one’s ever heard of,” one aged aunty commented on a recent visit, chasing it with a quip on my apparent weight loss. They detest the fact that I live in Africa of all places. My god, couldn’t I have a found a job in London or New York like every other successful Indian out there?

People say living in the western world makes you soft. You become used to certain amenities which make it difficult to return to the developing world. I have a slightly different perspective. I was standing at a road crossing in suburban Mumbai the other day, seemingly doing step exercises as I tried in vain to cross over to the other side. I was surprised that no one stopped for me, or the young kids who were trying to get across with me. Where was our civic sense? If this were Salone, as we fondly call Sierra Leone, every single car on the road would have come to a screeching halt and let the pedestrians pass.

My work with the media in Sierra Leone forces me to keep a close watch on governance mechanisms. I see Sierra Leone making genuine attempts to weed out corruption in government and in society. Yes, on a drunken night we’ve all run into the slimy traffic cop on the side of the beach road, trying to make a quick buck but on the whole there’s a positive vibe in the air. Sierra Leone recently clawed its way up to 10 places from below on the UN Human Development Index which eight years after a brutal civil war is quite an achievement.

In India however, even though our GDP grew by 8.9 percent in the last quarter we seem to have lost our social capital. My dad and I got into an argument the other day with a taxi driver who refused to use the meter in his cab and was insolent when we threatened to report him to the traffic police. Yes, cabbies have tried to rip me off in Sierra Leone but no one has ever behaved with the kind of impunity I saw this balding man demonstrate. No one says please, no one says thank you, which to me is disconcerting considering in Sierra Leone I thank my guard for opening the gate for me.

I know what the mum’s friend was thinking. It was beneath an educated Indian girl to waste her time in Sierra Leone. But Sierra Leoneans are friendly, polite and treat you with respect. I beg to differ about which people are superior.