Saturday night – in a random hotel room somewhere in Paris…
At last, an opportunity to have that “early night” I’ve been meaning to have for ages – and I have to come all the way to Paris to have it! I don’t even want it now! I’m in Paris! Friends of mine have got engaged here! I wanted to go on a late night tour of the city, but apparently you need to book those in advance, as the nice man at the tourist info desk informed me after I wandered in is direction, having been safely delivered by Air France an hour or so earlier.
You’ve probably guessed that France isn’t my final destination on this jaunt (well, there is a huge clue in the title of this blog post). I’m actually on my way to Freetown, Sierra Leone – but for several reasons which I’ll explain as we go on, the cheapest fare I could find to get me there involved a 12 ½ hour stopover in Paris. Hey – it’s with Air France and there’s a night in Paris involved. And it’s half the price BMI were charging! What’s not to like?
I’m not the only person in my family who’s made the trip; just the least organised. My mum flew over to Freetown a couple of weeks ago. And yesterday my sister Fiona flew over to join her, together with Tina – my Swedish adopted sister who I only met for the first time two years ago.
Er, something tells me you might want a little more back story on that last name I mentioned. A’ight. here goes…
It was the late 80s, and my mum worked in a maternity hospital in Freetown which had a children’s hospital next door to it. Tina was abandoned there as a baby – a cute little girl with a cleft palate who nobody wanted. My mum would bring her home at weekends, and for the first two years of her life, Tina was one of our family. Eventually she was adopted by a Swedish couple who took her to Sweden where she had corrective surgery done to her face, and where she’s lived ever since.
I missed out on all this excitement, as I was back living in England then. When the rest of the family came over, they’d talk a lot about Tina, but they never heard from her again. Then three years ago, she found us – another long story involving a Swedish television show and a certain social networking site. I finally got to meet Tina in the summer of 2009; the adopted (Swedish) sister I never knew I had.
This is Tina’s first visit to Sierra Leone since she left for Sweden as a toddler. She asked Mum to go along with her for moral support as she expected it to be a bit overwhelming emotionally. Fiona runs a charitable initiative which donates stationery and books to cash-strapped Sierra Leonean schools, and so she’s always toing and froing between London and Freetown. This is only my third trip back since I came back to England for good, and the first which doesn’t involve a family wedding (and no, I have not come out here “to look,” thank you very much). It also happens to be the country’s 50th independence anniversary, coinciding nicely with the Easter holidays (which is why the likes of BMI were charging something in the region of 900 quid to fly people out here).
Oh, and there’s one other small detail: neither Fiona nor Tina knows that I’m about to arrive in Freetown, My mum does, but the whole family’s been under strict instruction not to tell them, so they get a big shock when you-know-who turns up (big brothers are allowed to mentally torture their younger siblings. It’s in the Big Brothers’ Instruction Manual or something). I can’t wait to see their faces…
PS. I’m writing this on Saturday night, but you won’t be reading it until Monday or Tuesday. ‘Cos if I hit ‘publish’ now, the secret’s out. See? I have thought of (just about) everything…
GEORGE LUKE 