By Idrissa Bangura

The lives of most people who live in the city have become a greater  concern to most right thinking people.

Their living conditions have become so miserable that they have no option but to engage in criminal activities and drug dealing.

These are people who take these places as their permanent residences, and sadly, they have witnessed so many natural disasters such as ,flooding, fire outbreaks.

These dwellers are exposed to unhygienic conditions whose situation threatened their health as most fall sick.

Most slum areas are treated as either garbage sites or landfills where people recklessly depose of the rubbish.

Since these are found on water ways and because most wharfs have been turned to slums, such are not good places to live.

Turning the slums to settlements, dwellers often bank water ways with sticks and rice bags.

The unhygienic practice goes unabated as residents continue to fill in wastes at slums surroundings.

They apply unwanted materials at some open spaces to see that those pits are filled to their capacity.

In spite of the unhygienic and life threatening risks the people are  surrounded by, they go without hesitation to construct dwelling houses ,making them permanent homes.

And because of lawlessness and other illegal activities going on within slum communities, some hard-core criminals continue to grow love for the slums.

A scenario is explained when one of the slums was involved in a flooding disaster years back.

After the flooding, victims were provided some plots of land to build around Newtown, Four Mile, which is about 30 miles off the capital.

The victims, initially honored the gift as lived there for a while, but within a twinkling of an eye they  returned to their previous slums settlements again.

Like in the Bible the so- called ‘villagers in the slum areas’ can be compared to the Israelites.

When Moses saw that the Israelites were being enslaved in Egypt by King Pharoah, Moses decided to go to Egypt to free his people.

And when he wanted to free them from Pharoah’s slavery, the Israelites got disappointed as the journey to free them became strenuous due to the long and perilous distance.

They grumbled that they rather die as slaves in Egypt than they die in the wilderness.

This story can be compared to Sierra Leone’s flood victims and whose plight couldn’t be resolved after government had promised to construct them houses for decent living.

These victims had undergone several constraints over the years and the situation had forced many come back to their slum places– who now live as villagers.

The root cause of them being persistent to live in these slums is that they have come to love and get used to the system of living at slum communities than more decent and safer other places.

They believe that the crimes like housing   thieves, habouring prostitutes and drug dealers and using thugs to serve politicians are common practices in these places days.

Since this water catchment places are very close to the political offices thus  living  in these disaster prone areas can make these criminal activities to be attainable, irrespective of the unhygienic conditions and disasters like flooding these squatters may prone to.