This week’s ‘Weekly Photo Challenge’ from WordPress is all about the theme ‘Foreign’. I sat and thought about this one and decided that to me the word often describes a feeling rather than a place or a thing. I have sometimes been thousands of miles from the UK (my birth place and where I grew up) and have felt totally at home. Equally I have sometimes been in my own home town and felt like a foreigner. ‘Foreign’ means to feel out-of-place I think. The photo I am using is not a great image but is one that sums up a moment where I felt foreign. In 2011 I went to Sierra Leone for the first time and for the most part felt happy, accepted and welcome. The only time I felt really foreign whilst in the country was taking a walk on the sucking sands of Sussex beach. I had been thinking to myself how lovely it was to take a walk on an empty stretch of beautiful beach – I could have been anywhere in the world! Just then a group of local children started running at me shouting ‘AMERICAN, AMERICAN’. They were incorrect in their assumption but  I was instantly reminded I was only a visitor to this place. We had a short chat where they trialled their English on me and my friends and then they ran back off to continue with their games. I was left standing on the beach feeling out-of-place. A tourist. Foreign.

Sussex, Sierra Leone. The foreigner is behind the camera! And yes… the beach really is that colour!