chronicles of salone

I swear I wasn't expecting this. I just started photographing a few months earlier, and I went on this trip to visit my friend who had moved to Sierra Leone to be a teacher. A volunteer teacher, part of the 1st Peace Corps group to go back there after the Civil War. This was Dec - 2010, the civil war finished in 2001. Looking back, it would probably be a trip I wouldn't do now.

Sierra Leone - or Salone - is an amazing place with big-hearted lovely people, that 10 years later still showed the destruction of 9 years of inexplicable brutal war, and looking for reflections in its society, I saw scars, occasionally deep ones in the skin,  but also a friendly and safe one, showing a dignified warmth of one fighter left behind by its government and those who should provide them. and how beautiful is the country itself!

that struck me so strongly that I went back. a couple of years later to travel the coast registering the growth of surfing in the country. Salone has a cut-out coast vibrant for this sport, but mostly unaccessible.  During my second visit, I also had the chance to photograph a big part of my friend's village people. by that time, they'd bound together and the trust is something they carry until this day. that gave me a chance to access people willing to share with me a small part of their selves without asking anything in return, just the presence, always returned with kindness.

That's mostly the memories I keep from there; kindness, a late afternoon with a golden sky of Sahara sand, strength, hard work, palmwine, children running to me, children running from me, simpleness, dreams, purity, a wedding, celebrations.