I was reading the New York Times on October 29 when I froze. The story described Hurricane Melissa – how it ripped through Jamaica and Cuba with winds of nearly 300 kilometres per hour, tossing boats ashore like toys and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee. Cuba’s president, with a heavy voice, warned that it would be “a very difficult night.”
And it turned out so.
By dawn, entirer communities were unrecognizable. Families who went to bed under a roof woke up staring at the sky. Nature had reminded them of who truly holds power.
As I watched the videos and read the reports, I couldn’t help thinking of Sierra Leone – and how, by some stroke of grace, we have been spared storms of that magnitude.
We often complain, and rightly so, about corruption, unemployment, bad roads, and unreliable electricity. But what we rarely pause to acknowledge is that this small country, sitting quietly on the edge of West Africa, has been blessed by relative calm from the world’s most destructive natural forces. We don’t have hurricanes tearing through Freetown. We don’t have volcanoes waiting to erupt. We don’t have earthquakes splitting the ground beneath our feet.
Yes, we have floods -sometimes deadly ones. We’ve seen landslides and fires. But most of these disasters are not caused by nature’s cruelty; they’re born of our own neglect.
When the 2017 mudslide swallowed hundreds of lives in Regent, it wasn’t the mountain’s fault. It was ours – for cutting down trees, for building on fragile slopes, for pretending warnings were “just talk.” The same is true for every rainy season, when blocked drainages turn neighbourhoods into rivers and people lose everything. We treat these tragedies as surprises, though they arrive faithfully every year.
Other countries are forced to plan because disaster leaves them no choice. In the Netherlands, a nation that literally sits below sea level, people have built one of the most advanced flood protection systems in the world. In Cuba, where hurricanes strike often, emergency preparedness is a way of life.
In Haiti, a single earthquake in 2010 killed over 220,000 people and displaced nearly two million -the country is still struggling to recover. In Bangladesh, monsoon floods swallow entire districts every year, forcing millions to rebuild their homes from scratch. In Japan, earthquakes are so common that children learn evacuation drills before they can even write their names.
And in the Americas, hurricanes like Katrina (2005), Harvey (2017), and now Melissa remind even the wealthiest nations that nature does not bow to money. Hurricane Katrina alone caused damages estimated at 125 billion dollars – more than ten times Sierra Leone’s national budget.
Here, we have the gift of time – and we waste it.
We live in a country with no hurricanes, no volcanoes, no earthquakes. We should be using that peace to build better schools, stronger hospitals, and safer cities. Instead, we build haphazardly, ignore warnings, and act shocked when predictable problems overwhelm us.
Our biggest storms are not in the sky – they are in our systems. The chaos of traffic, the erosion of trust, the breakdown of services -these are our man-made hurricanes. And unlike Melissa, they are entirely within our control.
Being spared disaster should not make us comfortable; it should make us grateful – and gratitude should lead to discipline. Because the peace we take for granted today could vanish tomorrow. Climate change is already knocking at our door. The rains are heavier, the heat is harsher, and the coastline erodes a little more each year.
If other nations rebuild after catastrophe, Sierra Leone should build before one arrives. We should treat our calm as a head start, not a resting place.
Imagine a Sierra Leone that uses its good fortune wisely – investing in proper urban planning, enforcing environmental laws, and teaching children the value of preparedness. Imagine if we treated our stability not as a given, but as a responsibility.
Because one day, nature may decide to test us. And when that day comes, it won’t be mercy that saves us – it will be what we did with the mercy we were given.
