With the weather in New York lurching towards a quarantined pandemic winter and the election about to bring forth…something, it feels like the endless year of 2020 is about to enter some heretofore new phase. To prevent/distract me from constantly clicking refresh on every poll tracking site, I’ve instead been thinking back to the last normal day. It’s always difficult to reconstruct in hindsight, because you obviously didn’t know at the time that you were in fact living your last normal day. For most people it’s probably sometime in March when you were hanging out with friends at a bar, going to a movie, eating out at a restaurant or any of the other countless quotidian social interactions that we took for granted. For me, the gap between normal life and pandemic life is filled by the bright, vivid memories of my three weeks in Sierra Leone at the end of February doing architecture – presenting design ideas, sketching charettes, visiting the project site, finding new material suppliers and sustainable supply chains, understanding construction possibilities and finding equitable labor approaches – basically finding solutions to all of these challenges are what I really enjoy about my job. And I was with some amazing people.

The maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leone is the worst in the world. A mother is almost one hundred times more likely to die during childbirth than in the United States. There is no single issue or failure that you can point to as the cause of such an offensive statistic. This is a systemic issue, in part caused by deep political issues brought about by a history of colonialism with its attendant official extractive policies, endemic corruption, a civil war, the ebola outbreak, well meaning but failed NGOs, and a whole host of other issues that would require me as an American to understand much more deeply. However, there is no singular heroic act to solve this, no superhero to punch out maternal mortality, and building one hospital can’t singlehandedly correct for decades of neglect and the lack of an infrastructural support system required to both educate a new generation of doctors and pave the roads to get them to the hospital and a power grid that keeps the equipment running. Yet in the face of all these obstacles there are people devoting their lives to caring for each other and making things a little better for those that have been neglected and poor. It is a movement of people working together, fighting for other people just as you would do for yourself. A new hospital building can significantly aid in that work, but it is simply a part of a vast network of care and another step forward to justice and progress for those that are driving that change day in and day out.

Amongst the daily intensive collaborative design work and nightly dinner discussions, the steady background din of news from home got louder. First the cases in the Pacific Northwest, then evidence of person-to-person transmission in California, some false optimism thrown in for good measure: “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” then finally the first verified cases in New York state. While it was still over a month before Sierra Leone confirmed its first Covid case, ebola was a recent memory for people there, and hand sanitizing and temperature checks became a standard routine before entering any building, and while meeting at the Health Ministry, no-contact greetings were standard (though I appreciate protocol was broken for a trip highlight bear hug from the Health Minister). Maybe this wasn’t the last time that was necessarily “normal”, and the setting was most definitely different that what I was used to, but it was the last time I felt wholeheartedly positive about the future. I suppose all architecture proposals are inherently utopian in that way. Designing is an optimistic act. When you’re designing something you’re part of a team envisioning and sharing this idea for a project that when built will be a manifestation of that mission to create a better world. The work continues.

The project site (above).

There are a huge number of mining concerns throughout Sierra Leone, including both one of the world’s largest – Koidu Holdings – as well as well as smaller, more independent operations. However, regardless of the corporate structure, this natural resource belonging to the country has historically been extracted to create enormous wealth for the South African mining conglomerates, Lebanese diamond brokers and high-end Belgian auction houses who control the supply and reap the profits before the stones end up in some engagement ring. There is little to no benefit for the poor, surrounding areas and it just becomes a reason to die working in an open pit or a resource to kill for control over. Through a fluke of geological forces – one of the globes richest kimberlite pipes spiked outwards from the earth’s core out to this small county – and an overly permissive central government, the country is pockmarked with these open pits where 500m3 of earth is removed and discarded for every carat of diamond dug out of the ground.

Sustainable forestry initiatives have started to take hold in West Africa, and ideally this project could act as a lighthouse for potential future adoption of timber in the built environment. We visited a timber company producing FSC-certified fast growth, short rotation species of Acacia (shown) and Eucalyptus trees for construction material. These nascent industries promote social and economic development programs within their community, while also providing a more sustainable building material for a fast growing construction market.

The Freetown beaches are some of the most beautiful and active beaches I’ve ever been to. So many people laughing, walking, and playing together as the sun sets.

My shoes saw more action in the seven days in the Congo than the previous five years combined. They held up and held on admirably, never once giving in to the powerful suctioning force of the soft, squishy ankle-deep muck that seemed determined to send me back to camp barefoot; or so much as let a single lace loosen when they were conspicuously – and admittedly clumsily – splashing along a winding, seemingly endless stream (though their awkwardness at river treading should most likely be attributed more to user error than anything else). From the dry dust of the savannah to the persistent, humid darkness of the rain forest, my beat-up trainers soldiered on, and – aside from an unfortunate and uncleanable encounter with elephant dung – remained unchanged. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t trust them.

Paraphrasing Congo enthusiast and noted biologist/cryptozoologist Roy Mackal, the Congo Basin is an evolutionary oddity in that at least since the close of the cretaceous period it has remained static, the area has ceased to undergo further climatic and geophysical changes. Animals evolve and survive in response to changes in their external environment, while conversely, in the absence of external drivers, when conditions are stable, ancient creatures can thrive and survive unchanged, see: crocodiles.

Entering the jungle can seem like an escape, where you can quickly find yourself in a mesozoic state of mind, confronted with the terrifying – over 2000 strains of skin diseases, to the sublime – gorillas! A place where our evolutionary cousins can be found with relative ease, 400lb primates gently lazing in the trees around us, smiling, sunning themselves, and generally behaving in a relaxed manner that quickly evolves from frighteningly exotic to frighteningly familiar before giving way to pure joy. There’s a sense that anything is possible, running the gamut from the merely curious to the genuinely horrible, the giant Gambian rat that prefers to defecate upside down, to a virus that liquefies your internal organs. Anything could be just around the corner. So it’s easy to sympathize with the original early 20th century English colonial officers, their imaginations astir, seduced by crude Pygmy drawings scribbled in the forest floor of a four legged sauropod, and later taken up by Mackal and various other cryptozoologist expeditions, searching in vain for Mokele-mbembe, that last, illusory dinosaur, an evolutionary dead-end, too isolated to realize he was extinct. But the actuality was enough for us, a Congo so full of life and wonder where the overwhelming reality was all the phenomenon that could be endured.

Scenes from our honeymoon in northern Congo.