Building a Better Marketplace : Seabees Breaking Rocks in Sierra Leone

Vultures peered down from the slaughterhouse roof as a dozen U.S. Navy Seabees from Port Hueneme, Calif., broke rocks and mixed concrete with shovels to build a new market for 240 traders in the congested downtown of this West African city.

It’s the second year in a row Seabees have worked on a market project here. Others are at work on schools in Togo and Cameroon, clinics and hospital wards in Zaire and Mauritania, and a water system in Equatorial Guinea.

U.S. Government Project

The projects are part of a program called Small Project Assistance, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and administered by the Peace Corps.

The Seabee projects are timed to coincide with the annual training visit of U.S. Navy ships to West African ports.

In this seaside capital, traders, mostly women, line the narrow downtown streets, slowing traffic to a crawl. The new market will put them under one roof and out of the sun.

“We suffer, sir, in the heat,” said Fatnata Kargbo, shooing flies as she sold vegetables from the curb nearby. “When the sun is hot, it is very difficult for me to sell out in the open.”

Kargbo added, “The trucks drive on top of us and our wares.”

Peace Corps volunteer Michele Boecker, who is supervising the market project, said, “The idea is to clear as many people as possible from the streets, where it will be cleaner.”

Boecker, from Norfolk, Va., normally teaches primary school teachers how to teach. The daughter of a Navy captain, she volunteered to oversee the Seabees.

She greeted Seabee Chief Alberto Garza in Krio, the local pidgin English, with “Ow die bodie?” He replied: “Die bodie fine.”

Put up in a U.S. Embassy house, the Seabees eat military rations and after 10 hours in the blazing sun “they’ll have a couple of beers and go to bed,” Garza said.

Before starting, the Seabees toured the market built last year on the outskirts of town. It had a cathedral-like quiet compared to the bustle of the city center.

The job was a new experience for his crew. “We got picked and we volunteered” for the assignment, Garza said.

Supplies were late, and much of the concrete had to be mixed by hand when mixers didn’t arrive.

“I took pictures of them breaking rocks just like on an old chain gang,” said Garza. He added his men were used to more technical work.

Conga and Vultures

Workers carrying freshly cut beef from the slaughterhouse kept moving through the construction area, and off to one side other workers burned the skin off slaughtered cows to make a popular food called, conga, whose aroma attracted even more vultures.

U.S. Ambassador Arthur Lewis said, “It will be an income-generating project for the local people. It demonstrates our principle of the magic of the marketplace, and shows our own desire to be involved in the aspirations of the small people.”