The Change

(No, this is not a post about menopause. Keep reading.)

There are weird moments when something shifts and, if you're lucky, you actually feel it happening. The second summer becomes fall where you are. Or when you realize you're not "just hanging out with" someone anymore. Or the first time your parents ask you for advice.

Everything slows just long enough for you to take notice.

Today, at 3:06pm, I really started living in Liberia.

There is Liberian Liberia, Lebanese Liberia and White Liberia. These groups can exist quite separately if they want to, interacting only out of necessity. In fact, it's possible to live in Liberia without really touching Liberia at all.

You can wake up in your 3K/month flat, go for a swim and be out the door before the cleaning lady arrives for the third consecutive day. You can honk to tell the security guard (whose name and face you won't learn) to open the compound gate. You can work eight hours and run back to your air-conditioned car and head to Stop & Shop for grapes and apples (which are, like, the only two things grown nowhere in West Africa). You can hit the squash club before dinner and drinks at one of the spots that mimics home. Payments for rent, groceries, car repairs, gadgets and nightlife nearly always go to a Lebanese owner. You can exist without ever patronizing a Liberian-run business. You can forget all about West Point, the 75,000-person tin-roof slum slowly falling into the ocean.

I'd like to give a shout-out to Heineken (though, really, I should have been drinking Club, which is Liberian). Heineken led me to say "Yes" to the French girl who asked if I wanted to trek through real Liberia on a Tuesday afternoon. For the first time in my life I was the foreigner who doesn't attract stares because, apparently, white people do not go where we went. And I proceeded to do half the things my mom lays awake at night hoping I won't do here. We walked across the old bridge to the flea market and drank water from a plastic sac. We played Chicken (http://tinyurl.com/4pyzck) with cocky motorbikers. We talked to street kids. We bought peeled, roasted plantain from a street vendor and ate it out of newspaper. We haggled over cloth and hunted for cocoa beans in alleyways. We contemplated unidentifiable meats and produce we'd never seen before. We walked for hours. We smiled at people who, eventually, smiled back. We thanked shopkeepers on our way out. We didn't look scared or appalled by bits of trash or the heat or poverty or proximity. We were just people among more people. A vendor asked for my empty water bottle and filled it with oil and sold it seconds later. Someone who had nothing to gain kindly told me my zipper was open. (Standard.)

And at one point I got tired of switching my bag to whichever shoulder was further from traffic and thought, "You know what? If someone swipes my bag, they can have it. I still have money in my coin pocket and shouldn't have brought my netbook anyway." It was at that exact second that, I kid you not, everything around me went Matrix and got realllly slowww; the wind blew past me and my shoulder blades fell and I actually became part of the world here.

Best. Heineken. Ever.