Mike Simpson, One Sky

Mike Simpson works on international environmental projects with partners in West Africa and Latin America. He is the executive director of One Sky -- The Canadian Institute of Sustainable Living in the rural, northern town of Smithers, British Columbia.

It is going to be an extra underwear day, and a busy one to boot. I have had a range of illness from typhoid to meningitis doing this line of work and I can tell this is just a "keep hydrated and keep going" kind of day. Sierra Leone has every disease you can imagine, and the crowded conditions and filth everywhere make for easy bug catching. The sewers here are open or broken so human waste of every conceivable kind just flows through yards, backs up behind mounds of plastic bags and rubbish, or becomes an interesting puddle for a rag-wearing toddler to sit down in.

We are in the middle of a two-day strategic planning session and due to leave tomorrow morning for Koindu in the north. I still have to get my Nigerian visa sorted as they are being difficult at the embassy. It took two hours of sweaty, patient waiting in a sauna office for the consular officer to tell me that I needed a letter before he would even give me the form to fill out.

Kristin is down for the count with shakes and a bellyache. Working here is about high performance under marginalized conditions. Anything that one dreams up is tempered by illness, lack of resources, or broken equipment. It requires a mindset aware that you are going to have to perform handicapped by something. No matter what you do, it will not be what it could be simply because something will go wrong. The goal is to move forward anyway and forgive the results.

I could not do this work without being surrounded by good people every day. The One Sky and Friends of the Earth staff are outstanding individuals. They have an ability to keep smiling and laughing and joking and staying optimistic. The odds of failure here are almost 100 percent when it comes to long-term environmental health or even a modicum of social stability. I say that as an optimist who works in very difficult countries but who cannot ignore the overall exponential trend toward environmental degradation and economic marginalization. While it is easy enough to romanticize poverty and keep a smile on my face because people are so friendly and West Africans are so easy to laugh, at the end of the day it is hard not to see how screwed up war and extreme poverty can be and the long term impact they are having.

The people I work with here know how life could be and this human ability to vision is what keeps inspiring social and environmental change. Olatunde, the executive director of Friends of the Earth Sierra Leone, is an older man driven by memories of what life was like before the war and visions of how life could be drawn from an extensive collection of ragged books and dusty magazines. He has broken glasses and wanders around in the same old T-shirt and crappy shoes, moving people who affectionately call him "daddi" to keep going, to quit complaining about the lack of this or the lack of that, and to see the future. It can be hard to complain when I see him keep struggling, keep going under conditions that are so demanding.

Whenever I hear people talk about Third World unemployment or work ethic, I feel like shoving their senses into how hard life here really is. Simple statistics don't do it justice. Only a few years ago, life expectancy here bottomed out at 25 years, but does that explain how hard people have to work to survive? Simple things become so demanding and tragic. I heard a woman wailing yesterday because she lost a sum of money that was significant by local standards and was convinced she would be beaten up when she got home. She probably was beaten up. It was about $3, but the locals were looking at her with pity as though she had misplaced $15,000.

S, another ex-combatant, spotted me on the street yesterday and walked with me downtown. He is on his own now, trying to get through school by the grace of some expatriate who pays for his tuition. The school wants an ID card and he has no money for food let alone the photo, so he stopped going. Simple little obstacles, every day, but each one has such significant ramifications.

They have a saying here that one often hears. "Oh Salone," they sometimes exclaim, followed every once in a while by an "Oh Africa." You draw in your breath and it is said as one would sorrowfully sigh about some lost cause, yet the sentence usually ends with a smile. It is that moment that we smile anyway despite what we know to be true that keeps me inspired. If we judge our planet's future by looking at its current predicament, could we do anything other than say "Oh Earth" and keep smiling? It is going to be a long, hot day, a thousand things will go wrong as we try to carry out an underfunded environmental program in a marginalized poor country, and on top of that my belly aches and now I am getting a headache.

"Oh Earth" -- gotta get up and try to send this while it is still early in the day.