My internet friend Julie, from Frame Ambition, started a 5-day writing challenge. Since I’ve been trying to find and do things that give me joy, I put my hand up for this one.

Day 1’s challenge was to create an image- in words. I won’t include the actual prompt since you should join the challenge via the Frame Ambition website 🙂 Below is the image I selected and the words I used to create the image

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Day 1 of 5, 24 May 2020

Frame Ambition Writing Challenge

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It’s June 2019. Freetown, Sierra Leone. Leicester Peak to be precise. Everyone that’s anyone lives in this neighbourhood. Wealthy Sierra Leoneans and expatriates, mostly Americans. My friend Abi lives close to the US embassy, found at the base of Leicester Peak. Leicester Peak makes for a challenging walk up. Or run, if you roll like that. Free Town might be warm all year round, but not Leicester Peak. Leicester Peak has a climate of its own – a micro-climate, I think the experts call it.

Abi thinks it’s a fine day for a young walk up the peak. I look at the sky. Seems like a storm’s-a-coming to me. But it’s not every day you’re in Salone, so I’m game. We begin our walk up, and my body quickly reminds me that I have iron-deficiency anaemia. That, or I’m incredibly unfit, but I’ll go with the anaemia.

The crisp air and views to my left make up for it. A sweeping view of the Freetown Peninsula. A few more minutes of walking and the ocean views are now juxtaposed against the site of the 2017 mudslide that killed over 1000 people. The sky is incredibly moody, and I worry we will get caught in a storm.

Visibility is now less than 10 m, and it’s raining. “This is not what I signed up for”. My head is literally in the clouds, and all I can see are base stations towering over me. “How high up are we?” Feels like flipping Kilimanjaro if you ask me.

I later learnt that Leicester Peak hosts the primary broadcasting station for Western Sierra Leone, with signals being reached as far as Guinea (Conakry).

Oh, and it’s only 560m above sea level. It wasn’t the anaemia.

291 words

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Let me know what you thought in the comments, and if you’ve done a writing challenge before! 🙂