Sierra Leon Research

Located on the west coast of Africa, with a population of approximately 4.7million people. There is a diverse climate ranging from desert like temperatures to rain forests. 

English is the official language; there are three other top languages that are spoken Temme, Mende, and Krio. Although there are about 16 ethnic groups that form a part of Sierra Leon.

Majority of the population is of Muslim faith, about 60 percent. 10 percent is Christian and the other 30 percent is of indigenousness believers. I found it interesting that Sierra Leon is one of the few countries that are most religiously tolerant in the world. An example the Muslims and Christians work together and interact peacefully in the country. Sierra Leones view on religion would be something great model to follow in other regions to stop religious wars. I also found that even though they claim to be of one religion they still might hold beliefs of their ancestors mixing beliefs, which is why they are very flexible with religion. 

Education: Instruction is taught in English, Krio is also an important method of communication because Krio is admixture of the different languages of all the ethnic groups and it makes it easier to understand. 

An interesting fact that I found about education was that it legally required for all children from the ages of six and up to three years into junior secondary education. Even with this requirement two thirds of the adult population is illiterate, because of the lack of teachers and schools available. 

The structure of education in the country is from approximately age 6-12primary school. Age 12-15 junior secondary school (middle). Age 15-18 senior secondary school. and tertiary education afterwards for four years. I found that there were only two universities in Sierra Leone. 

Work/ Economy: Many people work in agriculture for their living.  The main source of work in Sierra Leon is mining with a focus on diamonds. They are major producers of gold. Although it would seem that the country gets great profit out of the mining industry, they don’t because of corruption. There is smuggling of the products. there have been many efforts to stop the  smuggling of diamonds but it hasn’t been very successful, because people can  simply cross borders and  sell them toothed countries, but vendors claim the diamonds to be of Liberian or Guinean origin. 

Usually men do the hard labor like clearing fields and posing swamps. But women more of ten are the ones planting, harvesting, weeding, gathering wood cooking cleaning, marketing and taking care of the children. 

Food: “If I haven’t even rice today, then I haven’t eaten!” is common thing that people say. Because I found that rice is eaten with almost every meal of the day. There are also more kinds of food eaten such as fruits but those are called snacks. I found it very interesting that they have specific taboos related to the family, it just depends what has been passed down from family or founder of a village. An example would be not using a certain type of oil, or food prepared in a certain way.