Salone Style & Story Spotlight ( with Yazmin Karim)

Salone Style & Story Spotlight (SS&SS)  features young, inspiring and driven Sierra Leoneans with a great fashion sense.  This platforms aims to show the world that there is more to Sierra Leoneans than being victims of Ebola and a civil war. 

Today's Salone Style and Story Spotlight features the gorgeous Miss Yazmin Karim, a Sierra Leonean living in the UK. She is a 23 years old God fearing, BA Human Resource Management graduate currently training to become a qualified session hairstylist.

She is also a finalist in the running for the first annual Miss Sierra Leone UK 2015 beauty pageant ( follow her pageant journey here and vote for her here). 
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Yazmin is a determined young lady with an awesome style. Check her out and be inspired!

Watin de Apin (January 4 -10, 2015)

 Hello Earthlings (and any Martians out there lurking our planet), congratulations on making it through the second week of 2015. With the hustling and bustling of everyday life, this may seem like a trivial accomplishment however, one just has to turn on their TVs or go on the internet to see that many people were not as fortunate.   Everyday people across the planet are faced with numerous experiences ranging from deaths, hardships, victories and so much more.  Some of these events are shown repeatedly by media outlets while many are trivialized and barely shown, thus making billions of people far removed from these events.  In light of this, “Watin de Apin” (meaning what is happening) will be a weekly post highlighting some of the good,  the bad and  the ridiculous events of the week with commentaries from me of course J. On that note, let us dive into events for the week of January 4 - 10, 2015.

The Good

Bye, Bye to Ebola in Liberia

 It was indeed great news to hear that the Ebola situation in Liberia will soon be history. Liberia has gone from having the most Ebola cases with a peak of 300 new confirmed cases per week to currently having the lowest among the three countries with eight new confirmed cases per week.  In the true West African spirit, my Liberian folks took to  the streets to dance Ebola away, to celebrate this accomplishments. Check out the video below.

Post by Africa to Dha Core.

Bye Bye to Ebola Video

Tell me what’s not to like about the unbreakable spirits of Africans.  Nothing, I repeat nothing can break our Spirits, not War, not Ebola, not Stigmatization! 

Further putting Liberia in the good book for this week, is the president’s decision to send some of its Ebola health workers to help neighboring Sierra Leone which continues to be ravaged by Ebola with 248 new confirmed cases per week. This is very selfless of Liberia considering the fact that they themselves have barely fully recovered. For this selfless act, Sierra Leoneans, myself included are grateful. In like manner Kenya and South Korea have decided to send health workers to Sierra Leone. Thank you to both countries (my question though is what took you so long? J ). I am all for other countries sending aid to nations in emergency health situations, however it seems like there continues to be a lack of aid coordination in Sierra Leone, without which no progress is likely.

Remembering January 6 1999

January 6, 1999 commonly referred to as J-6 will forever be a date entrenched in the memories of many Sierra Leoneans.  My family and I woke up to heavy  and repeated sounds of gunshot and screams at 4 am on that fateful Wednesday morning.  In no time everyone had jumped out of their beds into the hallway, our expressions identically marked by intense fear and dread. Without saying a word, my mother hurdled us together in the corridor between two concrete walls. We all knew this drill from previous experience. It was done to get us away from the windows, making it less likely to be hit by stray bullets entering through the window. As we hurdled together gripped with terror, my older brother softly uttered the first words saying “dem don cam” (they have arrived), everyone including my 10 years old self knew what this meant. Mother turned on the radio to BBC’ where focus on Africa anchor  Robin White confirmed our worst fears.  RUF rebels and AFRC soldiers (they) colloquially referred to as Sobels many of who were child soldiers hooked on drugs had indeed invaded Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. We would sit in this corridor for almost the whole day and thus began for me one of bloodiest three weeks in the history of my country. It was filled with heinous crimes including murder, amputation, rape, robbery, displacement and destruction of private and public properties during which Sierra Leone became the worst place to live.

Facebook Shenanigans - Part 1

It is the first Friday of 2015 and the last weekend of the Christmas holidays (Can someone please tell me how the holidays went by so quickly?) Come next week most people will go back to school, work and normal everyday lives. Naturally most people will be out tonight getting “turnt up”, partying, chilling or socializing with others. To my social butterflies, my party people and dope, cool peeps I say have fun responsibly.  Remember there are 51 more weekends in 2015. 

Yours truly will be home crawling the internet looking for funny pictures and videos, binge watching ancient aliens (O_0) and lurking social media websites. Yes I said it, I am a social media lurker. On most days I pop in once or twice  to see what’s happening and like a ninja I exit without leaving a foot print or evidence. Every now and then I update my profile picture, post  news or current affairs articles, “like” status updates and pictures here and there and there and most of all wish my loved ones a happy birthday.  

When I first got on facebook eight years, I was far from a facebook ninja in fact, I was an addicted facebook drill sergeant- loud, brash, in your face and constantly on your timeline like white on rice. Over the years I have moved from being a facebook drill sergeant to deactivating my account for long periods of time and to my present ninja status.   I have seen a lot of shenanigans on the streets of facebook during this time, some of which I have listed below. I am personally guilty of some of these at one point or the other.

Disclaimer: The following are the thoughts and opinions of Lady B, a professional people watcher and a semi professional facebook lurker.  They come in good faith and are not personal attacks on anyone, all the names used are fictional. Shoot not the messenger!

Facebook Diary

 In many people’s mind facebook is a digital diary where they can let out every single  personal activity, event, thought and feelings regardless of whether other people need to know this or not.     Fatu:  Eating foo and okra soup with my hands… Yum.  Yabome: will go underwear shopping for her booski tomorrow. Abu: I just shaved and showered, I am  feeling so fresh and so clean. To you all I say sometimes less is more and besides we don’t need to know your every single and personal move. An actual diary will work better. Folks who keep updating their status every 30 minutes.   We  your unsolicited facebook audience acknowledge your presence and the fact  you live an exciting life. There is no need to fill our timelines with your day's activity.  I recommend a reality TV show, that way you get paid for over sharing your awesome self with the public. On a serious note, this is not a safe habit, there are lots of bad and sketchy people out their  lurking social media sites looking for preys. You arm them with critical information when you post every minute detail about yourself  on social media ( says the criminal minds TV show buff).

New Beginnings

Appi Nu Yia we no die oh! Tell God tenki   fo we lif O¹. So it is January 1, 2015, the start of a fresh new year. There are lots of resolutions flying right, left and centre. Some of these resolutions will die by January 7^th , other’s by July 1^st and they very luck one’s will live to see December 31^st 2015. Regardless I say go for it my people, go for it!

 Hi, Kushe, Buwa, Seke ²! My name is Baindu and one of my new year’s resolution is to start blogging.  I have been making this specific resolution since 2011, but every year I make up excuses and never get to it. Actually sometime in 2012, I did start a blog that I never published (side eyes myself).  So here I am in 2015, four years later with my first blog post on the first day of the year. Better late than never, I say.

Looking back through 2014, I have to say it was one of the toughest years for me. It started off with a bang. I was off to my Mother land, Sierra Leone (proud salone titi for life) for an all-expense paid four months internship with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation. It was an exciting, challenging and great learning experience for me, in a way it was one of the most fulfilling things I have yet to do (watch out for a full post about this experience).  The first quarter of 2014 was great, I got to see my family, hung out with old friends, made new friends, network with people in my field and made a lot of great memories.