Sierra Leone: Into the beehive

Since her birth, a worker bee knows what she must do. In the first three days of her life, she cleans out the cell she hatched from. For thirteen days after, she removes the corpses of dead bees and encases invaders like mice in propolis, a sticky resin bees collect from trees. She feeds and cares for developing larvae, and takes out the queen's waste. She retrieves nectar and pollen from field bees and evaporates the water content to begin the honey ripening process. Later she produces beeswax, guards the hive, and by the sixth week, leaves to forage for pollen and nectar until she dies.

On any visit to a functioning hive in a summer day, you will find the queen laying eggs, guarded by her attendants and drones, or male bees, sitting fatly in combs eating. Worker bees dancing on the honeycomb to communicate the location of nectar-if the food source is nearby, she does a round dance; if farther than 80 yards, a waggle dance. If threatened, the entire hive will unify under the direction of pheromones to attack the intruder together. Without the sophistication of language, honey bees perform their duties day in and day out, and can produce 60 to 100 pounds of excess honey annually, traveling 50,000 miles and visiting two million flowers for one pound alone.

Just like in the beehive, unspoken agreements are natural and necessary in Freetown, the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone. For a first-time visitor like me, the actions and decisions of Freetown residents appear coordinated. Little boys appear on the street with spare change when taxi-drivers are in a pinch. Buses the size of mini-vans swallow and hold twenty people. Chickens, sheep, dogs and babies fend for themselves. SUVs navigate rocky dirt roads around puddles the size of ponds and through tiny alleys hemmed in by rows of women carrying plates of peanuts on their heads. Drivers park their cars in the middle of a two-lane city street, and taxi-drivers, reaction-less, simply navigate around the obstacle. People wander aimlessly, fearlessly across Regent Road where cars jam and merchants reach for free limbs with sticky mango-coated tentacles.

Many people say Africa is cursed. She has natural resource ailments, diseases, corruption, war and still wears the scars of colonization on her forehead. In some ways, Sierra Leone is a test of man's limits. A tropical climate with a dry season of droughts and a wet season of floods. There are secret societies, witchcraft and demons that further drain villagers' meager pocketbooks during the worst times of economic strain. Freetown buildings still bear the bullet holes of a brutal ten-year civil war. But the chaos is managed by a secret understanding among the players. They are all grinding pieces of the puzzle that makes up Freetown, fitting into each other, interdependent and revolving like clockwork. The expectations people have for one another in Freetown may not be verbal, but they are anticipated. One strike against the norm and you will trigger a shrill EEE BO!

If you land here you will agree that the streets are chaos. But it all makes sense. There is logic in the mayhem. Life in the country ranked lowest on the Human Development Index is not all that we associate with the bottom rung of development and with endemic poverty. It is not starving children lying on the streets, the smells of human excrement and the drone of hopelessness. It is rather, vibrancy. Pride. Hope. And a communication system that is as unspoken and elegant as a hive of honey bees, working and thriving in its own space, day in and day out, a coordinated whole.

Courtney Han is a Trinity senior. Her column will run every other Thursday during the summer.