Freetown is beautiful by the way

My last couple of posts have been about how grim life is in Freetown. It's also pretty stunning: San Francisco, mixed with Rio and a touch of Cape Town. It just can't begin to cope with the amount of people who live here. During the war people fleeing fighting inland came here for safety and when the war ended they stayed.

Downtown, around the Cotton Tree which is where the first free slaves sent here in the 1770s from America arrived, there are old colonial houses. It's a bit like Bridgetown, Barbados.

Up on the hills, where this photo was taken, is where the rich folks live with majestic views. And then dotted around in the hills and gullies it feels like a collection of jungley villages with huts clinging to hillsides with lives not so different from the countryside. Then at the bottom are the slums like Susan's Bay. There are other shanty towns alongside the rivers that flow through Freetown. Before the war no one lived there because these areas are flooded and under water for most of the rainy season. People have everything on stilts. For months of the year they literally live in several inches of deeply polluted water.

Meanwhile, in the far west end of the town there is Lumley Beach, slightly past its best but still lovely. Like Joanna. The UN's army headquarters is just to the left of where this photo was taken and was the only part of town to avoid fighting during the war. The UN compound's pretty empty now but it still feels like this peninsula is an oasis of calm in a tumultuous city.

It's a lovely place to stay although last night my waiter asked me if I wanted to spend the night with his sister as I looked like, "the kind of man who would not beat her". I've never seen as many prostitutes as there are here. It's really depressing.

This is the police station in Susan's Bay. It's built on top of rubbish and smells awful. The policeman Mohammed, standing on the left with the hat, travels 3 hours each way to get to work. "I wouldn't bring my family here", he says. "But I am a policeman and must go where I am told. The crime here is not so bad, despite the poverty of the area".

Walking around Susan's Bay I was amazed to see TVs and DVD players inside some of the little huts we walked past. It's weird: you have no toilet but you do have a TV. It shows people's priorities, and that even within a slum there are very different levels of poverty. It also suggests the difficulties inherent in moving out. Freetown's expensive. Food's expensive. Everything is expensive. It's perfectly possible to be able to save up or buy a telly on credit or second hand and still not be close to having the money to move to an area where every rainy season you don't get flooded

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