Craig Morey
2022-2023
What follows is a series of reflections on my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone. I feel that they serve as a less public and more personal addendum to the blog that I originally wrote while volunteering, and in particular to posts number 11 and 13. Everything below was written three to four years after I left Sierra Leone, and deals with thoughts that have stuck with me over time.
This blog addendum is not written about Sierra Leone itself, nor simply about my experiences there. It is written about me. Most of what is written here was originally written as a way to help me process my thoughts, rather than for the purpose of being shared, and I debated for a while about whether to actually share it.
I don't know whether or how much I will continue to add to this page. I still have a lot of thoughts and feelings left over from my experience in Sierra Leone that I haven't been able to fully make sense of yet or to put down in words, but if and when I write them down, if I feel comfortable sharing them, I'll add them.
I haven't yet decided if or how I will share this. I don't even know why I'm writing it really, except that the fact that the experience has stuck with me for three and a half years now makes me feel that it ought to be written. Having first entered Sierra Leone five years ago and last left it three years ago, I've had a lot of time now to process my experiences. Some have been digested from difficult, visceral memories into simple and straightforward stories that I can now laugh about or look sad about as I show them off to entertain my friends. Others make me feel ashamed or embarrassed, not because I think I acted shamefully necessarily but simply because having had the experience feels somehow shameful, and these I have mostly processed and set aside. Others have been forgotten. But defying any of these categories are a series of experiences I had while biking through Falaba District in early 2019. In what is now a rather belated attempt to process these, I am going to write down as much as I can confidently remember, along with the recurring thoughts accompanying these memories.
For context, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in east-central Sierra Leone from 2017 through 2019, working as a secondary school science teacher. In January 2019, while schools were on break, I and another volunteer went on a roughly-350-mile cross-country bicycle trip through the northeastern part of the country, from Kabala through Falaba District to Kono to Makeni and back to Kabala, camping in hammocks and stopping in villages for food and water.
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As a Peace Corps volunteer, being exposed to Sierra Leonean life, and in particular Sierra Leonean poverty, involved a series of successive shocks. The first and most significant one, at least for me, was walking from Sierra Leone's only international airport to our hotel during our first day in the country, July 2017. Passing dilapidated shacks roofed haphazardly with rusty corrugated zinc, people clothed in what looked to me like rags, mangy stray dogs, mud and weeds and garbage everywhere. It looked to me like a disaster area, maybe the aftermath of an earthquake or some kind of war. Looking at all the people who lived like that every day made me sick to my stomach. We must have looked so scared, all of us fresh volunteers, walking wide-eyed and horrified to our hotel with our luggage. I had been preparing for Peace Corps service for 6 months or so already, but that was the first moment for me where things felt real. I took a few photos while on that walk, which is something that I'm not proud of; the impulse to react to culture shock by taking a picture is something that I associate with the worst aspects of tourism, and throughout all of my traveling I do not like to think of myself as a tourist. Biking through Falaba District a year and a half later, I took some photos of the wildlife and scenery but none of the people or villages.
Those streets immediately outside the airport on that first day were, of course, some of the comparatively well-off neighborhoods in Sierra Leone, as I was to later learn. The successive shocks continued during pre-service training in Port Loko and then during my eventual adjustment to life in Panguma, where I lived for my two years of service. The tiny isolated villages within biking distance of Panguma contained the poorest and seemingly most desperate, as well as the most foreign, communities I had ever seen. I had a duty to the Peace Corps and to my assigned school as a teacher, but I felt that I also had a duty to myself to understand these villages. I believed then, and believe still, that the rural and isolated villages of Sierra Leone contain some of the meanest forms of human existence remaining on Earth. Technology, globalization, the progress of human history itself had touched those places less than perhaps anywhere else on the planet. I felt that if I could somehow absorb the existence of those villages into myself, drink up the experience and swallow it, if I could make sense of the simple fact of those villages' existence, then I would be able to make sense of it all: of Sierra Leone, of my life, of humanity with all of its quirks and missteps and injustices. On weekends and whenever else I wasn't teaching, I was drawn to the villages with a morbid curiosity. Some I could bike to, some were only able to be reached on foot. There was basically no lower limit on size; some villages were just a dirt clearing with two or three mud huts. Sometimes I talked to people, but usually nothing more than to say hello and explain that I was an American living in Panguma (actually, as the only non-African within a 20-ish mile radius, almost everyone I met already knew about me). Even apart from the language barrier, I had a perhaps anti-social instinct which told me that no conversation with the residents would ever help me solve the real puzzle I was after.
The final successive shock was while biking in Falaba District. I don't actually know if, objectively, the villages of Falaba District are poorer or more isolated or less 'developed' or 'aided' than the villages around Panguma. I also have no factual reason to believe that there aren't other villages in even more remote parts of West Africa that I would have found even more shocking. Regardless, those Falaba District villages still remain in my mind as the most surreally impoverished places I have ever encountered.
I'm not really sure how to go about describing the appearance of those villages. As previously stated, I took no photos of them. I wonder how many photos of any given village out there have ever been taken, period; it would not surprise me if there are some villages where that number is zero. Researching online and looking at the area with google maps, I'm relieved to see how little information is actually available. It would feel somehow sacrilegious if I were able to find bland surveys and detailed academic writing about these places which have grown in my mind over the past three years into something so pivotal for me. It would be too upsetting, to see these villages named and cataloged, to find out that they are in fact just as real as everything else in my life. I don't remember the names of any of the small villages my friend and I biked through, and I wouldn't write them down even if I did; I prefer to keep them anonymous and unreal. What I'm writing here is not about those villages or the people in them; it's about me, the ignorant American passing through, shaken to his core by the simple fact of those people's existence.
I think even if I did have photographs to show here, it wouldn't properly convey what I saw. Or maybe my experience didn't actually have much at all to do with the physical appearance of those villages, and my memory only puts so much emphasis on the way they looked in order for the feelings in the memories to have something to latch on to. Here is what I remember: Dirt roads, washed out by rainy seasons, rarely ever driven over by anything more than a motorcycle. Puddles, weeds, rocks, closer to an American ATV trail than any actual American road. Despite this, this 100-mile road from Falaba Town to Bendugu to Kono District is the only major road in all of Falaba District. The district has over 200,000 people but no paved or graveled roads. The houses in the poorest villages are occasionally rectangular, but are mostly circular mud huts, 10 or so feet in diameter. Windows have no glass or screens but might have a wooden shutter. The floors of the houses are just dirt. There is no rusty corrugated zinc for the roofs in these villages; roofs are thatched with dried palm leaves.
White people in rural Sierra Leone get used to constantly being the center of attention. Kids will shout at you, follow you, run away, or perhaps run up and try to touch you. Crowds of people will gather just to stare at you. Village chiefs will treat you like a visiting ambassador. After my forays into the villages around Panguma I thought I had already seen pretty much the maximum amount of commotion a white person's arrival could cause, but Falaba District was even more surreal. Rather than being looked at like a freak or a celebrity, it felt like I was an alien, or maybe a god.
Experiences at two different villages in particular stand out in my mind. At one village, my friend and I biked in and used the village well to fill up our water bottles. We had iodine tablets with us in order to sterilize the water. As we were putting the tablets into our water bottles, a dozen or so people, mostly women, gathered and started begging us "please, I'm sick, I need medicine too!", indicating the bottles of iodine tablets. They didn't know what the tablets were or what they were for, just that they were 'medicine' being used by Americans. My friend and I weren't able to explain it to them or to convince them that it wasn't actually medicine, and it's not as though we could've really given any away regardless. Shaken, we quickly finished iodizing the water and left, ignoring or repeatedly rejecting the crowd that was begging us and pulling at our sleeves. After that incident, we learned to only iodize our water after we had left a village and were by ourselves out on the road.
The other incident happened some time afterwards, it might have been the next day, I don't remember. We were running low on water and came to a village where the well was boarded up. We tried to ask about getting water but weren't immediately able to find anyone who could speak Krio (let alone English). Soon the whole village was gathered in the street. This was a larger village, with its own small school building. We were made to understand that we should talk to the schoolteacher. He came out to the street to meet us, followed by the entire student body. I remember the entire scene feeling very solemn, almost grave. He walked slowly across the field between the school and the road, and introduced himself to us. Maybe he was the village's only fluent Krio speaker, in addition to presumably being the only teacher. I believe he assumed that we were there as part of some NGO development project to help the village. It felt almost like a formal community meeting was being conducted, like we were visiting dignitaries. There was us and our bikes on one side, the schoolteacher on the other, and the fifty or so children and villagers surrounding us in a circle. I don't remember how many of these details are true and how many have been reinvented in my memory over the past three years, but in my memory no one other than me, my friend, and the schoolteacher made any sound or movement the entire conversation. The schoolteacher led us to the well and some villagers helped him to unseal it for us. They might have thought we were there to improve or rebuild the well maybe. The well had water, but there was no bucket to draw it with. When we asked for a bucket, the schoolteacher barked orders to some of the villagers, who ran into a house and brought out a cut-up plastic fuel canister (I had seen all sorts of things used as well buckets in Sierra Leone by this point, cut-up fuel cans weren't uncommon) and some rope made of strips of cloth tied together. Clearly they hadn't been using the well at all and our casual request had probably taken the bucket and the rope away from some other task they had been being used for. We drew up water and filled our water bottles. We asked where the village usually got water from if not from the well and the schoolteacher told us they got it from a nearby stream. Obviously if we had known that beforehand we would have just done the same ourselves so as not to have put people out and caused such a scene. We thanked the schoolteacher and left. The whole thing felt very surreal in a way that feels difficult for me to convey just by writing it out. Or rather, it felt unreal; like a scene from a movie maybe.
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I don't really know why my brain has singled out my experiences in Falaba District this way, since in a lot of ways the confusion, shock, and alienation I felt on that bike trip were just a microcosm of my entire two years in Sierra Leone. I think partly it's the fact that I was in and around Panguma and other places like it so much that, despite how foreign they still felt even after two years, the experiences did still ultimately get to be routine. Falaba was a distinct place experienced only once without any chance for me to normalize it into something real.
There's a particular way in which my handful of memories of Falaba District still haunt me, which involves them being dragged up for comparison with America. Not even comparison, really, just the fact that Falaba District and the U.S. both exist. I'll be in the supermarket and suddenly conjure up an image of the solemn village schoolteacher standing in the schoolyard, and it will feel impossible to me that the supermarket and the village are both not fictional. How can the world contain both of those things? On a basic level, there's the moral aspect to it that I think about a lot, not in any particular connection with Falaba: "How can we justify our American mansions and supermarkets and lives of leisure and abundance, when people somewhere else are dying in a poverty worse than I could've even imagined before having seen it?" These thoughts I tend to connect up more with Panguma and the other parts of Sierra Leone that I had more experience with and context for. With my Falaba District memories, the question seems to go beyond that moral aspect: "How can the world, physically, contain both of these things? How can I even think of those villages as being part of the real world while I'm standing in this supermarket?" It feels impossible that both exist and yet I'm also not able to deny the reality of either one.
This sort of feeling follows me everywhere now. Sometimes it's powerful moments with conjured up memories, but even when that sort of thing isn't happening the feeling is still there in the background. The feeling of unreality that latched onto me while I passed through Falaba District now bleeds into all my U.S. experiences. I'll be looking at a running faucet or a TV remote and think "how can this be real?", and the faucet or remote will have its own sort of unreality to it. The movie-like unreality of Falaba District, the feeling of "this can't actually be the real world", carries over to anything that can be remotely juxtaposed. Falaba District is real, and also it's impossible that it exists with all these other things that I know to be real, and so its as if the only way my mind can make it work out is if everything now feels to me to be a little bit unreal.
I experienced a significant amount of depersonalization and derealization while living in Sierra Leone. For example, while having conversations with neighbors I would often feel like I wasn't actually the one having the conversation; instead, it would feel like I was passively watching myself have the conversation the same way I might watch a movie scene. I partly attributed these feelings to the fact that I was using a foreign language for basically all of my interactions, but I do think the culture shock was a big part of it. Coming back to the U.S. reduced some of the dissociation but it has by no means disappeared, which I suppose is due to the fact that I am effectively going through culture shock every day here still, trying to reconvince myself that America is the real world. I've never felt the depersonalization/derealization to be particularly uncomfortable, but I do think that it has left me feeling like I'm set apart from the world and from my own life. I have some vague hope that traveling to other parts of the world and experiencing more culture shock and more other ways of life will help to 'cure' the dissociation, by bridging the gaps and making the different parts of the world that I've seen come together into one big contiguous whole, something that I can understand holistically without having to deny the reality of any of it.
I don't have any concise concluding paragraph to write here. My thoughts concerning Falaba District have not yet reached any sort of settled conclusion, and perhaps they never will. And so (assuming I do at some point share this writing) I am likewise going to leave you, dear reader, with no conclusion.
I still haven't decided how or if I plan to share any of these writings, but I feel that they are worth writing down all the same. I think in effect they serve as a sort of unofficial off-the-record addendum to the more introspective parts of my Peace Corps blog, not necessarily things that ought to be shared widely, but important and personal aspects of my time in Sierra Leone. If the point here is to open the door to awkward or taboo topics, then let me go ahead with a loose collection of Sierra-Leone-related thoughts on that most awkward and taboo of subjects: sex.
In abstract, I strongly oppose the sexual repression that is casually enforced in basically every human society. I resent the way in which people at work or in school or otherwise participating in most public aspects of life are expected to behave as sexless sterile robots, as if it were a requirement of civilization that we all pretend that we are no longer animals. I resent the ubiquitous sanitizing of media of all forms, often done with the pretense of protecting children, as if sex was something harmful or dangerous that children ought to be protected from. We are pressured into hiding our sexuality. We can date, marry, raise a family, but we dare not acknowledge the fact that we have sex (or worse, the fact that we often desire it) in any remotely public setting. More than just annoying or grating, I think this enforced repression is often damaging. No social controls can actually stop up human sexuality, and so instead our sexuality is shunted into less healthy outlets. We claw desperately at the bars of a cage that we are not even allowed to acknowledge the existence of. I think much of the turmoil inherent in the human psyche, perhaps much of the "human condition" as we know it, is due to our enforced inability to openly deal with our own sexuality. Also, this may sound counterintuitive, but I truly believe that a society with fewer taboos and social controls regarding sexuality would have fewer instances of harassment, rape, and other forms of sexual violence and misconduct.
These are all things that I believe in abstract. In practice, however, I have fully internalized my society's sexual repression, and find sexuality difficult to grapple with in myself let alone in my interactions with others. Not that I can entirely blame my condition on my society, as is proved by my many friends who shared similar upbringings but do not share my current repression. At this point I have basically come to terms with the fact that I am irreparably damaged, mentally and emotionally, with regard to sex, and that I ought to simply work on acknowledging this fact, understanding it, and then getting on with my life and moving past it. In our society (and I do mean society generally here, not just America) I'm pretty sure this psychological damage in some form or another is pretty much the norm, and in most ways the damage that I've sustained actually makes me better equipped for interacting with our sex-repressed world, as messed up as that is.
I do not think Sierra Leone is significantly more or less repressed with regard to sexuality than the US is, but it is repressed in different ways. Navigating those differences was often challenging during my two years in Sierra Leone, and yet I was mostly unable to talk about these challenges for all the reasons given above.
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With regard to relationships between Peace Corps volunteers and Sierra Leonean locals, in both my opinion and in the opinion of the handful of other volunteers I talked to about it, it was felt that American women dating Sierra Leonean men were better able to navigate the situation than were American men dating Sierra Leonean women, for several reasons. For starters, on the statistical side of things, the vast majority of rural Sierra Leonean women in their twenties were already married with children. Social norms were for men in their twenties to seek out relationships with teenagers; any man looking to date a woman his own age didn't have many choices. Other social norms further complicated things for male volunteers. To my understanding, Sierra Leone had no firm distinction between dating and prostitution; it was very normalized for local men to give money to women they slept with. Add that fact to the way that Americans in Sierra Leone were already seen as an assumed source of charity and a target for begging, and it would make it basically impossible for a man in my position to know whether sex was really uncoerced and fully consensual. And even beyond just the age gaps and the money exchange, there was this sort of background assumption that a man entering a relationship with a woman was taking on an obligation to 'provide' for her, to take on the responsibility for her wellbeing that her family had previously held. Romantic relationships were almost like something in between a typical Western relationship and an adoption.
None of this was actually a barrier to me in the eyes of my neighbors, though. Any of them would have been eager for me to pick out their daughter as my girlfriend. In many cases they told me so directly. Dating their daughter, I would be implicitly responsible for feeding her, buying her things, maybe housing her as well, taking her off their hands and maybe even bringing her back with me to a better life in America. It made no difference if the girl in question was someone I had never even seen before, or if she was my student, or if she was ten years old. All of that would have been fine and normal, and from a pragmatic view they were right that marrying an American man would bring basically the best quality of life that a Sierra Leonean girl could ever hope to achieve.
Rereading that last paragraph, I'm worried that it gives the reader this picture of me being politely or surreptitiously approached by a neighboring parent and hearing some well-thought-out wedding proposition. This is what you should be picturing instead: Me, buying groceries in the town market after having left school for the day, facing a middle-aged woman that I don't know, with her holding up a child by the arm and asking me "Do you want this girl? Please, take her." Her face is serious, she isn't making some off-color joke. I'm not even thinking here of one specific incident, this sort of scene played out too many times to count.
American women dating Sierra Leonean men are able to largely sidestep the above issues by asserting their independence, by not accepting money or gifts or whatever else might make them 'owe' (and consequently be 'owned' by) their boyfriend, by not being automatically viewed as being responsible for the welfare of the men they date, and by having a much larger pool of single adult men to choose from. I don't mean to imply that my female colleagues didn't have problems of their own with regard to dating locals, but they were problems that I didn't experience directly and so can't necessarily speak to with any authority; let me just say here that sexism, harassment, assault, and rape are all widespread and endemic in Sierra Leone and leave it at that. My overall point here, though, is that it was possible in at least some cases for female volunteers to successfully navigate the situation, whereas for male volunteers it was, in my opinion, impossible to do so ethically.
There are a whole list of other related topics I could bring up here, additional obstacles or considerations that would need to be kept in mind: the horrifying prevalence of STIs (including HIV), the widespread lack of birth control and lack of abortion access, the near-universal practice of female genital mutilation. Even beyond the more concrete issues, I'm also still personally skeptical of the ability of relationships to overcome serious language barriers and deep cultural differences, despite knowing that it does in fact happen and works out fine as often as not. These additional considerations were all superfluous, though. The situation described in the paragraphs above was already enough for me to have consciously made up my mind to not be romantically involved with any Sierra Leoneans during my two years there. I hope it's clear from everything I've said so far that this decision was not made out of some irrational prejudice. I believed then, and still believe now, that no relationship with a local woman within the cultural norms described above could be undertaken without it being problematic and unethical.
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My choice of celibacy was seen by my neighbors as bizarre and unheard of. It was automatically assumed that I must have a wife or at least a girlfriend back in America, but even then it was taken for granted that I would need to get a local girlfriend as well while I was here. Never mind that I already hadn't been sleeping with anyone for several years prior to joining Peace Corps; saying that in order to help explain myself only made people even more confused and horrified.
One conversation in particular stands out in my memory. It happened early on, when I had been in the country for only a few months and had been moved into my new house in Panguma for only a week or two, and was getting ready for the first semester of school to start up. I was meeting with my principal and vice-principal, both of whom I knew somewhat well already by this point, in the staff room of the otherwise-empty school. They had been asking me about my educational background, about my life in America, about my family, things like that. Gradually, the topic shifted to whether I had a wife, or a girlfriend who would be coming to visit me in Panguma, or whether maybe I would soon be getting a new local girlfriend. I didn't give a flat-out 'no', but did make it clear that I was perfectly comfortable being single and living by myself. "And you're okay with that, with sleeping alone by yourself every night?" When I answered yes, the vice-principal looked at the principal gravely, gave a small nod, and said, "Masturbation." I had no idea what to possibly say in response to that and so I just awkwardly pretended that I hadn't heard him, and the conversation moved on.
I don't actually know, really, whether masturbation in Sierra Leone was necessarily taboo, or if it was simply not the universal norm the way that it is in America. I didn't ever bring it up. I have to assume that my other neighbors came to the same conclusions as my vice-principal, based on my living situation, but I don't know whether they saw it as something 'bad', or something that was bad for them but okay for me since I was a foreigner, or whether they just thought it was weird or maybe just felt bad for me. My understanding of traditional American cultural norms is that masturbation is something that is universally practiced, but is never talked about and is often seen as shameful. Looked at objectively, I think the American view is almost certainly no less weird than whatever the Sierra Leonean view was.
On the opposite end of the spectrum in Sierra Leone was another sexual practice that I think of in America as being near-universal and yet shameful and secretive: pornography. In Sierra Leone, unlike in America, as far as I could tell there was nothing taboo or shameful about porn. People didn't masturbate while looking at porn, but they would share and watch videos in public without it seeming to bother them or anyone else. I remember one time where a neighbor kid, around twelve years old maybe, was sitting on my porch watching porn videos on his phone, with the volume turned all the way up. After a few minutes I finally got so uncomfortable that I asked him to leave and do it somewhere else.
One further major cultural difference is worth mentioning. I haven't said anything at all about homosexuality up until this point, because for the most part there really isn't anything to say. Homosexuality is completely out of bounds in Sierra Leone. It's not just that homosexuality is forcibly suppressed or actively shunned or anything like that; it's that homosexuality, to all appearances and to the public consciousness, does not exist. I personally don't believe it's actually possible to 'unthink' homosexuality out of existence within a community, but as far as I or anyone else could reasonably tell just by looking, homosexuality (along with other more progressive concepts like gender identity) is better regarded as a culture-bound phenomenon that does not affect Sierra Leone. I'm not making a moral judgment about whether Sierra Leoneans are right or wrong in not accepting homosexuality; it is not a relevant issue for them. Sierra Leone has many cultural and moral problems to deal with but homosexuality is, to my mind, not currently one of them.
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Returning to my own personal situation: in response to my status in town as bizarre sexual recluse, I began to feel a kind of perverse pressure to exaggerate my cold and unlibidinous posture. When faced with constantly being questioned about whether I wasn't desperately lonely and uncontrollably horny, my American conditioning made me want to emphasize even more that repressed sexless performance that I described earlier back in the second paragraph. I felt like I was modeling good American behavior, which was what Peace Corps volunteers were supposed to do, by showing my neighbors that it was possible to live happily and healthily without sex. It even went so far as that when I actually was in fact sleeping with someone (a Peace Corps colleague, not someone local), and my neighbors were able to make reasonable assumptions about it and came to tell me how relieved and happy they were for me, I found myself denying it, resolutely denying that I could ever be the sort of person who could be tempted by sex. Out of alienation from the foreign sexual attitudes I was constantly surrounded with I had built up this persona as someone completely above sex, and to make myself seem human and at all relatable to these people around me felt like it would be not just embarrassing but an abandonment of my carefully maintained American sensibilities.
As I said earlier, I don't think sexual norms in Sierra Leone were either more or less healthy than those in America, just different. I think the culture shock and the apparent arbitrariness of it all has made me more aware of contradictions in my own and my culture's sexuality, but it hasn't sparked any great realignment within me, any sorting-out of my own sexual hang-ups. I felt alienated from Sierra Leone's sexual norms, I feel alienated from the American ones, and I feel alienated from myself. Human sexuality and how to deal with it in the modern world is a problem both for us collectively and for me personally. I think there has been some progress in the past few hundred years and in the past few decades especially, but still a very long way to go, longer perhaps than it's possible for us to easily admit given our conditioning on the matter. I don't have any solutions in mind, other than the belief that solutions begin with us trying our best to talk about things openly, and it's in that spirit that I've shared my thoughts and experiences here.
There is a sharp divide in how Americans think about, and consequently how they treat, domestic animals. Pets, from our dogs and cats on down through something as simple as a goldfish, are pampered, are afforded every luxury they might be able to appreciate, are afforded luxuries that they cannot appreciate but are given anyway for our own emotional benefit, and in some cases are raised to the full status of family members and given the same moral weight as a human being. Livestock, on the other hand, including animals such as pigs that are just as intelligent as dogs or cats, are penned up and subjected to cruel torture for their entire lives until they are butchered for our consumption. The American meat industry is built around outsourcing and putting out of mind our treatment of animals; America is full of people who would be horrified at the thought of killing a cow but who have no issues with eating a hamburger. Those motivated by thoughts of animal welfare, America's vegetarians and vegans, most often come to the decision without any sort of prior personal exposure; in my experience, vegetarians are likely to be people who have never spent much time around a farm, have no real notion of meat production, and come at vegetarianism from abstract ideas of right and wrong rather than from a more grounded attempt to rationalize how Americans view animals. In my experience, the more chance people have to actually interact with farm animals the less likely they are to be vegetarian, which to me suggests that vegetarianism in America is a thing largely removed from the actual conditions and treatment of animals.
Unlike with a lot of my other views comparing America and Sierra Leone, my opinion on pets is not something where I feel that both countries' beliefs are correct but are simply different, or where both countries feel to me to be equally wrong. I personally believe that there is something deeply messed up in the way Americans and the developed western world more generally views animals, something very wrong with people's attitudes both toward the meat industry and with their love and anthropomorphism of pets. My feelings on this matter started developing when I was in Sierra Leone, but in the years since then I've had opportunities all over the world to work with many different kinds of farm animals and to meet many different types of pet owners, and all of it has only served to reinforce my beliefs.
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In Sierra Leone and in most of the undeveloped and developing world, the concept of pets is very different than in America. In Sierra Leone, dogs are for the most part kept for the purpose of security, are not allowed into the house, are not fed any more than is required to keep them alive, are not necessarily named, and in many cases (partly due to Islamic rules about cleanliness) are not even touched. Cats, likewise, are kept for the purpose of killing pests, and are not cared for any more than is necessary. In both cases, there isn't necessarily a clear divide between a dog or cat that belongs to someone and one that is a stray. A stray-ish dog may be given a little bit of rice once a day or so in order to keep it hanging around the person's house so that it will bark at strangers, or a cat might be fed to keep it around to hunt lizards, but the degree to which the person doing the feeding takes 'ownership' of the animal varies or may be completely absent. Stray dogs are common and are mostly treated as a sort of pest. If a stray dog shows anything other than fear toward you, the correct thing to do is to pick up a rock (or to mime picking up a rock) to scare the dog away (from the implication that you're preparing to throw the rock at it. Incidentally this same pretend-to-pick-up-a-rock trick worked for me in rural Indonesia as well.) A sick or injured pet is typically treated the way sick or injured livestock might be: low-effort and low-cost solutions might be half-heartedly tried, but if the problem is serious then the animal is effectively 'totaled' and the owner lets it die.
To the average American, this all probably sounds cruel. Some of my Peace Corps volunteer colleagues also felt that Sierra Leoneans treated animals cruelly. Personally, I never felt that any Sierra Leoneans were acting cruel towards the animals around them. Or rather, I never felt that I detected any malice, any desire to make animals suffer. To me, it just felt like people in Sierra Leone were treating animals like animals. Once I got used to it, the relationship there between people and animals felt much more natural than in America. It was also remarkably more consistent; goats, cows, and chickens were treated with basically the same level of kindness as the dogs and cats described above, which is to say, they led drastically happier and healthier lives than American cows and chickens.
Most of the families and farms that I've visited in other countries fall somewhere in between Sierra Leone and America in their overall treatment of animals. I think that having been brought up into the American worldview means that I will never be fully able to adopt the Sierra Leonean mindset toward animals, and throughout my two years there, no matter how much I might have approved of things in the abstract, there were still constantly incidents that shocked me or made me feel pity for the animal in question, and I've listed out some of those incidents that have stuck with me in the section below. Overall though, I think compared to America, Sierra Leone's attitude toward animals is the more natural, the more reasonable, and ultimately even more humane.
I personally spent a few years in college as a vegetarian, and several additional years eating meat only when it was inconvenient for me to avoid it. What I usually tell people is that it was my experience working for a year on cow and goat farms in eastern Europe that made me feel comfortable with eating meat again and made me no longer vegetarian. I still eat much less meat than a typical American diet, and I don't buy meat from restaurants or supermarkets, but for me this is more out of concern for the environmental impact of large-scale factory farming and as a boycott of the scale of the American meat industry, rather than out of any real concern for animal welfare. I have had the opportunity to help with butchering several different types of animals and I do not feel any ethical qualms about doing so. I personally believe that if a person would be unwilling to butcher an animal themselves, then they should not eat the meat. I think that my fellow Americans have a moral duty, not to animals, but to fixing their own double-standard in how they view animals: to be more mindful of livestock and of where their meat comes from, and simultaneously to be more appropriate and realistic and less carried away in their attitudes and treatment of dogs, cats, and other pets.
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Some incidents that happened in Sierra Leone and that have stuck with me in my memory:
These experiences felt surprising or weird to me at the time, and still feel foreign to me now, but they don't make me feel sad or upset exactly. There are other incidents that did make me upset though. Seeing a fellow volunteer refuse to give leftovers from their lunch to a begging child and instead give it to a stray dog. Hearing about a volunteer who sent money back to their village after having left Sierra Leone, with specific instructions that the money be spent on buying food for a pet dog they left behind rather than being for the people in the village. Those memories carry the same sense of sadness and injustice for me as when I hear about a dog in America getting chemotherapy, or someone crowdfunding for surgery for a cat. It's just messed up.