Will the Yelibuya Sound fall on deaf ears?
By our records, Yelibuya is probably the most-written-about town of the year. It really started more than a decade ago when a picture of the island was posted on Panoramio, a photo-sharing website that was once used by Google to augment its Google Maps and Google Earth services. Apart from old British Admiralty nautical charts used by mariners, nothing much can be found on Yelibuya. However, an article in Al Jazeera would change all that in August 2018 when it asked: " Why is this town in Sierra Leone sinking ?" Mara Kardas-Nelson, a journalist based in California, found that while there's no official government data in Sierra Leone on just how much the water is rising, the community estimates that the ocean has encroached inland at least 300 meters over the last 30 years. "As you can see, there is no method for protection. And it gets worse every year," one Yelibuya resident told Kardas-Nelson. The same week, Face2Face Africa picked up the story u...