#3

I live and work in Aberdeen, which is to the east of Freetown proper. Aberdeen Rd (as it is called my everyone except for the intermittent postal service, which call it Sir Samuel Lewis Rd) leads from the sea to Wilkinson Rd that brings you into Freetown City Centre.

Aberdeen Rd is bumpy, but quite drivable. From the hectic intersection with Wilkinson, it stumbles down and across a bridge. Crossing the bridge, to the right you look out and see the Atlantic and Freetown, and to the left you see a bay and Lumley Beach in the distance. Under the bridge is the very place where Pelican water taxis deposit passengers freshly arrived from Lungi airport. Just today as we drove over the bridge a gang of people were stopped looking over the side. As we passed, we saw the guardrails smashed through. The only plausible idea was that a car had gone off the side of bridge. We didn’t stop to see.

Aberdeen Rd continues over a few more hills coming to one turntable (or roundabout) that is lit with fairy lights and has a strange statue with ancient Egyptian gods in the middle. The second right passes the red and blue wall of the Aberdeen Women’s Centre. The wall is topped with coils of barbed wire. At the bottom of long hill, there is another turntable. The first right takes you up a hill to Cape Sierra, a chuck of land that sits out in the Atlantic Ocean like ball in a pool. The boy’s live is house up on the hill overlooking the sea. The house has a large covered patio with a bar and couches that serves as the real common space for the house. The this wonderful patio the ocean opens up before you framed by similar homes on either side and from beneath by the interlocking scales of zinc roofs covering less grand dwellings. At night during the brutal thunderstorms lightening streaks across the sky over the rolling ocean and single bolts snap into the Atlantic like whips. In one storm, from somewhere, one of these zinc roofs sailed passed ripped off by the violent winds.

Back to the turntable by the sea, the second right takes you down Lumley Beach Rd, which hugs the coast. Along the beach are restaurants many with decks that sit above the sand where you sit and look out over the Atlantic Ocean. You can eat grilled barracuda or snapper with chips. The sand is very white.