Josh celebrates his 8th Marathon in Sierra Leone.
In June, after a two-year Covid-enforced hiatus, the Sierra Leone Marathon will be back.
A small core of us have been promoting Street Child and raising money for them right since the start. Over the years, our whole attitude to the organisation (and our relationship with it) has changed. Whereas our focus was originally centred on (surviving) the absurd recklessness of its flagship endeavour – running 42.2 km in the punishingly humid equatorial heat – it has now switched to the absolute importance and legitimacy of the work that Street Child does.
Our first marathon in the tropics ten years ago was a physical struggle. But it was unbeatable for its novelty. One minute we were running through the vital chaos of Makeni – a town with dodgy electricity that still manages to effervesce and pulsate all through the night; the next we were on vibrant red dirt tracks coursing through villages and undulating forestland, where rusty tin corrugated roofs peek out between the trees. In that first year, the local security forces, police and army all lent support, helping the race organisers overcome basic hurdles – like the fact that nobody in Sierra Leone seemed to know how long a marathon was…
A year later we returned to stage West Africa’s second official marathon. But by then, the hare-brained endeavour of 2012 had “gone mainstream”. The international sports press was there to cover it, numerous NGOs had descended on Makeni, several top athletes had come down from the Gambia to compete… and even the then President of Sierra Leone – Ernest Bai Koroma – had made the arduous journey overland from Freetown to Makeni to wish us all good luck. The international community, it seemed, had got wind of what Street Child was up to and wanted to take a closer look. As COVID finally looks as though it might allow us to stage the tenth edition of the race, Street Child finds itself powered by more magical Makeni goodwill than it ever thought possible. They want us back, and it is truly humbling.
A marathon in Sierra Leone is unlike any other.
The money we raised from the first marathon ten years ago was quickly channelled into building schools, recruiting, and training teachers and fashioning and deploying sustainable business development programmes designed to give the economies of Makeni and Freetown the kick-start that they needed to extricate themselves from the disabling stasis left by the ten-year civil war. The young children who ran alongside us in the early years are now studying in those schools. And the teachers who were recruited are now in post and are training other teachers.
But there is still work to be done. Scars of civil war and corruption remain: a significant percentage of the population still live below the poverty line, and literally thousands of children still sleep out every night on the unpaved streets of Freetown, amid open sewers, stray dogs and malaria-carrying bugs. This is why running the Sierra Leone Marathon is so important. Apart from the training, getting there and then surviving the heat and the tough terrain, there’s the overwhelming scale of the poverty that we are raising funds to help fight. The impact Street Child has had in Sierra Leone since 2008 speaks for itself. 208,750 children reached and over 1,000 classrooms built. The impact Street Child has continues to have is vital.
If you are reading these words, it is because you are already flirting with the idea of coming with us. The question “Why should I do this?” is already colliding with your synapses. But you are, of course, asking yourself the wrong question. The question you should be asking is “Why shouldn't I do this?”.
If you are still undecided, I can help you out. I can look you straight in the eye and tell you that it is absolutely, absolutely worth your while doing it. I can promise you that you will be helping to effect sustainable change in some of the world's most vulnerable communities. And I can promise you that it will change you.