Math

Once upon a time, I had math with a Mr. Ledenev. I had a crush on the guy to my right and the moral support of the friend on my left.

Anything the two of them said took priority over math.

One day, Ledenev calls on me and I, of course, have no idea what he's asking.

"What?"
"Is 'what' your answer?"
"I didn't hear the question."
"You didn't 'hear'? Or you weren't 'listening'?"

So now I'm getting schooled in math and English by a Russian.

That that was sixteen years ago and I still remember it. The sad truth is that there are many moments in which people try to connect with me and I actively tune out; I think it amuses me to just nod and concur at the right moments.

I've missed more than I realized.

On Sunday, I kidnapped my mother until she taught me how to cook palava sauce, my favorite of all Liberian foods. Midway through the lesson, I remembered the thing I've been waiting to ask my mom for years, the thing I probably already know piecemeal by mental osmosis but was never really listening to.

"Mom, can you talk me through your family tree?"

Remember, I am 29.

It took an hour and four sheets of construction paper to cover the 116 years since her dad was born; that was as far back as she could go. 

"....So then, as you know, my father was jailed..."
"Wait -- what?"
"Avril, I told you this."
"You tell me a lot of things! Tell me again."
"He founded an opposition party so the government locked him up."
"For how long?"
"A few years."

This is a man who held prominent positions as a lawyer and businessman and still managed to have 12 children with 7 women in 23 years.

Yeah. I'm still doing the math on that one. (I really should have been listening to Ledenev.)

Lean

My glasses are fogging up over a bowl of plain white rice (with salt!) because it's pouring and because I'm allergic to everything else in the fridge. (My mom thinks it's fun to keep gifting me food guest starring peanut butter. It is not.)

Maybe this is my belated attempt to empathize with Liberians, who more or less live on rice. Maybe I'm paying my respects to the "hunger season" (June -September). Most likely, though, I'm just too embarrassingly lazy to go to one of the five (5) supermarkets within half a mile.

Lately, I have no real interest in food; this is worrisome given that, in San Francisco, I was up to two breakfasts before 11am. I chug hot acidic water almost exclusively. I have also taken to watching the DStv programming channel. (That's the channel that tells you all the shit you're missing out on because you don't actually have DStv.) I shoot daggers at Will as he rinses his toothbrush in half a bottle of spring water and I run mine under the tap; I choose $7 mystery detergent over $21 Tide and scratch my skin to shreds for the rest of the month.

Someone I know once moved very far away for three years of voluntary suffering (also known as law school); he referred to this experience as his hairshirt. I seem to be having my own fling with self-inflicted pain.

There's a unique shame in rolling up on a country and living better than just about everyone. It makes you do strange things. Once a month, I drive my mom to a proper supermarket where she spends $50 on food she'll actually eat and $150 on food she'll gradually give away. Don't be fooled: my mother isn't charitable. It's just makes the next month of relative extravagance palatable. 

In an episode of a series I'll pretend I never watched, the main character reflects on the torture that is med school. "Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop."

Happy Eid to one and all. 

Price Check

I have never heard a Liberian say the words, "No, that is not something I can do."

- Can you clean?
- Yes.
- Fix my car?
- Sure.
- Cut hair?
- Definitely.
- Tailor clothes?
- Of course.
- Plumbing? Carpentry?
- Without a doubt.
- Massage?
- Absolutely.
- Drive?
- I'll learn overnight.
- Cooking?
- That's my specialty.

(Note: do not actually hire one of these people to do all of these things. Trust me.)

This is one of the many reasons I have concluded that I am not, in fact, a Liberian. Not only do I have zero areas of 'expertise' ("Da ma area!" Liberians like to exclaim), but I have no compulsion to overstate my abilities.

Despite all of this, my on-paper Liberian-ness is really cramping my style.

Thursday, August 9. Potential Employer #1: "Avril, I know I promised you a permanent position with a respectable salary but the people at HQ can't justify paying you as an international." Translation: You're Liberian and should get paid like one.

Thursday, August 16. Potential Employer #2: "Avril, I don't think this is gonna work out. The last time we hired a Liberian from the States, the environment turned very quickly." Translation: our local staff will eat you alive when they learn your middle name and hear your accent.

Let me explain something.

1. If you hired a local Liberian and an 'international' to do the same development job (and why would you?), you could pay the local $800/month and the international (foreigner) $5,000/month.

2. American citizenship makes me, now and forever, an international.

3. Liberians who hear I'm Liberian decide I must be Americo-Liberian (less affectionately known as Congo), the non-native, minority elite who ruled Liberia for a century and a half. I am not.

4. Ignore the public service announcements: you can still taste the resentment between indigenous Liberians and the descendents of the old elite.

I came here expecting to be super useful and in-demand; really, all I do is upset the natural order.

I left the States, where "parents were too perfect at parenting. You're just so sincere and interested in things! There's a confidence in you guys that's horrifying. You're all A.D.D. and carpal tunnel. I'm freaked out by you kids. I hope I die before I end up meeting one of you in a job interview" (Greenberg).

I arrived in Liberia thinking I was one of those people but I am not. I'm no wunderkind here: I'm just some lucky kid in someone else's way. I no longer saunter into interviews with a spring in my step, but with my tail between my legs. Every day, I contend with "the deference of educated young people towards their unschooled elders" (Richard Dowden).

The way I see it, I've got three options:

1. Hide behind my passport and weird features and lie when asked where my parents are from.

2. Proudly wear my "Hi, I'm Liberian" sticker until payday; sell out immediately.

3. Forfeit American citizenship. Officially become Liberian. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $4,200.

FML.

1950

The other day, someone asked me how things were going in Liberia; I described it as an "opportunity to do things like cook and read and decorate and hum."

I was immediately horrified.

Unless you're blessed with a short memory span, there isn't a ton to do here for the 0-99 age group so when I moved into my new digs last week, I just about burst with glee.

Swimming pool. Exercise room. Uninterrupted power. A waffle iron. Washer and dryer. An oven that isn't trying daily to set me on fire.

So now I get a real kick out of watering plants and baking cookies and hanging pics and barbecues. I don't know if -- in the parallel life I'm living somewhere in the States --this would have happened anyway, this...softening.

Yuck.

A younger version of me is turning in her grave. 

The softening (yuck) only happens within the confines of my house, where everything is clean and safe and beautiful; where I can choose whether the hammock overlooks the palm treetops of the Lutheran compound or the real world.

The real world is a place where you go to an interview that should be in the bag but isn't because you're the wrong gender and ethnicity. (This, in an African country with a woman president.) The real world entails sprinting from the supermarket door to your car and still not beating the blind old man and his cherubic guide as they plead with you to help wi' sunting, Ma. The real world requires gesticulating, armed only with your best Liberian English, on Center Street at the amputee who has voluntarily "cleaned" your car. In the real world, friends' laptops get fished through the bars of their bedroom windows or plucked from coffee tables as they sleep. The real world is mud, potholes and car repairs. It is sending your curtains back to the tailor three times because he can't read his writing because he can't read or write. It is averting your eyes from the child excreting a few yards away. It is giving directions that include the words "...go over the Chinese bridge along the poo-poo beach..." because absolutely everybody knows it used to be the most public of public toilets. Locking the car door before you've closed it; putting your purse on the floor and not the passenger seat; watching the meter at the gas pump because rumor has is Super Petroleum will cheat you-oh; making acquaintances who turn cold when you return from abroad empty-handed; having your accent mocked before you're out of earshot; never knowing how much things really cost because you look like you could use a good fleecing. The real world has public schools with four-hour days that offer little more than babysitting and free lunch; it pushes hills of trash from the main road to one just out of the way.

So I'll keep my postwar America illusion and go soft and domestic in my nest: outside, out there, I'm a machine.

Verlan

A few years ago, I went to Nepal,
'bout which I made sure to read nothing at all.
Inquisitiveness in reverse is rad:
the trip becomes yours and not one others had.

But eleven months into being 'home',
I wish I had left fewer things so unknown.
Verlan is French slang that flips words around;
I, too, am reversed in my days in this town.

Staff at Monroe Chicken shout, "You're welcome!"
as I walk through the door, confused, looking dumb.
I haven't said "Thank you." Where was my cue?
Is all of Monrovia just messing with you?

Boatman to island to see chimpanzees
says, "I know deh river, but it not know me..."
implying one drowns or loses one's hands
in rivers that plot against innocent man.

Few people signal, wear helmets, pay tax:
most everything binding society's lax
and orderly people like me are cursed
when laws are made last, and peace is made first.

But how can I lecture when I, at noon,
learned the beach I look onto from every room
was where thirteen officials were tied, shot.
A knower of Liberia's history, I'm not.

I think that my mom, for better or worse,
buried the news clippings deep in her purse;
all of the facts I should already know
were glossed over, sugared, dulling the blow.

So now I'm devouring a book that explains
the stories of places I've been and their names,
their truths and their myths, their villains and ghost --
I'll leave knowing more than the quirks of this coast.