Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone got its name (Lion Mountain) from the shape of mountainous peninsula of Capital city Freetown. Freetown was founded in 1792 as home for a freed slaves from United States, Canada and United Kingdom. Their biggest export is diamonds, They are also infamously known as Blood diamonds, RUF rebels used them to fund a brutal civil war in 1990s and there was even a movie about it called Blood diamond, starring Leo Dicaprio. One of the biggest diamonds ever found is called Star of Sierra Leone and has 969 carats.
You would need to do a lot of digging if you want to find a country with such an unfortunate history as Sierra Leone, especially last 200 years. From slavery to years of unstable governments, civil war and Ebola virus outbreak. Nonetheless, people that I met here were really nice and friendly and are trying to improve the life in here.

I wanted to visit the famous Tacaguma chimpanzee sanctuary, but when I got there one of the chimpanzees escaped and they had to close:)
 
My huge thanks goes to Mr. Shole Buckley who is doing a tremendous job for chess in Sierra Leone and with his team from chess club Checkmates, they prepared a lot chess activities for me. We visited 10 different school and universities, went to a morning TV show and had two visits in a radio show. Thanks to Christex foundation for the venue that we could use for simul, tournament and a lecture for coaches.
 
I would like to write only about positive things when it comes to people, unfortunately I cant do this when it comes to leadership of chess in Sierra-Leone and players deserve to know the truth.
 
The chess federation only had one president in 21 years, Ansumana Kamara. In those 21 years, there hasn’t been a single election. Yes, you read that right. On top of that he made his wife a treasurer of chess federation. Every federation has to have some people in the Fide directory in order to receive funds. There were few occasions when he put a non-chess player into directory or someone who is dead. That’s just borderline insane.

He has received a lot of chess sets from Gift of Chess organisation but only a very small number was distributed to chess community. Sierra Leone has received around $50000 between 2019-23 from Fide that should have covered Olympiads and fees to run the federation. There was no Olympiad during covid time and no paperwork on how this money was spent. If all this is not corruption then I am going to eat my leg.
 
It’s an abomination that people like Kamara are still running some chess federations around the world and I hope this will be history soon.
 
Mr. Kamara has recently passed away and there will be an election soon, Sierra Leone needs a breath of fresh air and I hope people who were in the close circle of former president and benefited from all this corruption will not be a part in this new chapter.