What started as a dream or better still, a bridge between balance and folly in 1999 is beginning to bear fruits. That is to say, G. K. Chesterton’s ‘distributist’ ideas are at work in Sierra Leone-one of Africa’s poorest countries.  On 4th October 1999, I took the X-90 coach from London (after 3 days stay in London with my former parish priest, the good old Canon Fr. Herbert Veal) to Oxford to start yet another round of encounters. My encounter however with a soft-spoken English man represents a life-changing and an everlasting positive turn of events. The soft-spoken English man-a God-sent philosophy lecturer-was Mr. Stratford Caldecott (blessed memory). Mr. Caldecott was the master of the Christianity and Society (C&S) class at Plater College, a Catholic residential college founded in 1921 in Oxford in memory of Fr. Charles Plater (SJ) to provide a second-chance education opportunity for Catholic workers who like me, had dropped-out of main stream education because I had to find work to fend for my young family. It was from Caldecott through his soul-searching tutorials in his small office room at Plater College that I learnt about G. K. Chesterton and his ideas of ‘Distributism’. So, what was it that so much fascinated me about G K Chesterton, an Englishman who never came to Africa? Although Chesterton never came to Africa and I have never heard of him or his works until I met Mr Caldecott in 1999, I was struck and still fascinated today about his candour and the parallels of his writings and my experiences of community life in Kabonka, a typical small African village.  In other words, Chesterton in his distributist writings gave expression to the best qualities of traditional African communitarian values. Although I left with a master’s degree in the social sciences from Oxford University, attending Stratford’s CS classes was the best education experience I got from Oxford! My providential encounter with Stratford Caldecott sets off a litany of other encounters some of which I will someday describe in another piece, such as my encounter with the Penfolds (Celia and Peter Penfold) and the “magnificent 4” (Aidan Mackey, Clark Durant, Dale Ahlquist and the ‘consumate’ Marco Sermarini). ‘’Distributism holds that, politically and economically, the best kind of society is one characterized by widespread ownership of property […and I will add, in the case of our realities in Sierra Leone…the means of production and productive communal assets including the possession of relevant capacity or skills’’]. The truth is: there is no way I could have returned back to Sierra Leone-a war devastated place-after three years living in Oxford with my family and a job offer if I had not discovered Chesterton’s distributism ideas. Through this encounter, I saw for the first time the fulfilment towards the dream and the commitment of my village folks, who as a child, had argued and debated whether or not to have me, one of their own ‘sent to school’. Today, three little initiatives are taking hold in Sierra Leone in honour and fulfilment of my discovery of G. K. Chesterton’s ideas: ​