The Fallen, Floods and Fires of Freetown: Interfaith Engagement with Environmental Disasters in Sierra Leone

As a vulnerable city prone to diversified natural and environment-related disasters, this paper examines how the Interreligious Council of Sierra Leone (IRCSL), an important non-state interfaith agency, provided interventions that assisted Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital in dealing with its recent disasters. To do so the paper first discusses the impact of the Ebola outbreak, floods, and urban fires on Freetown. Second, it assesses Sierra Leone’s heritage of interreligious dialogue and peaceful coexistence. Third, it critically examines how the specific interventions of IRCSL aided a distraught nation through those disasters. The paper contends that while the Ebola crisis, floods, and urban fires are only three of Freetown’s climate-related disasters that decimated local economies, depleted livelihoods, and aggravated the misery of the city’s poorer residents, IRCSL’s interventions provided the much-needed moral compass which enabled the nation to process its disasters in an increasingly anxious world.