Thursday, June 27, 2013

Hands Away

A few days after leaving Liberia, I stopped crying long enough to visit a museum. In it was a piece called The Acquired Inability to Escape. I couldn't move away from the thing: I swear it was speaking to me.

A few days earlier, you see, during a layover in Brussels, I'd watched the strangest thing. A little boy stood on the outside of a moving walkway and, for no apparent reason, put his fingers on the handrail, forcing the boy to run alongside the moving walkway as the handrail dragged him with it. He screamed, but still he held on. And when his mother cried, "Just let go!" he seemed more afraid to do so than to see where the handrail took him.

When, at last, he did let go, he stood, shocked, stared at his hand and burst into tears.

This is how it felt to leave Liberia.

Liberia is all the things I never wrote about. I considered listing them here but decided to give you a reason to visit -- and give myself a reason to go back. With kids. I'll show them where to crumble crackers for sacred catfish, what to do while the bank teller flosses with Scotch tape, how to chug a hot Club Beer on a rainy beach. And when these kids have finally wrapped their heads around this place, we'll head to the airport and I'll say, "Just let go." They will look incredulously at me. And I will smile, knowing exactly how they feel.

Thank you so much for reading.

FIN

Monday, June 17, 2013

Swish

Once upon a time, when I first moved to Liberia, someone back home asked me how it was that I so gracefully orchestrated the ends of my flings.

"I've got a fadeaway jumpshot," I said.
"A WHAT!?"

It wasn't that the person I was speaking to didn't know what I was talking about; it was that he had no idea how I knew what I was talking about. (I cannot bring myself to watch sports, effectively making me the worst tomboy anywhere on Earth.)

My fadeaway jumpshot revealed itself again last night when I walked into a house party. I'd barely closed the door behind me when this fantastic stranger came over and asked, "Do you write a blog?"

Fear | Panic | Horror

"....Yes?"

"Oh my god. My sister's going to die. She's in the States. She loves you. Can I take your picture? I'm taking your picture." 

The three friends I'd walked in with exchanged a look that said, "How is this even happening -- Avril is the least cool person we know." 

I'm not going to lie: I am a magnet for unlikely experiences, but this? This was a moment. 

Allow me to set the stage: I'd just left my own going-away thing, dotted in tears, full of injera and regrets. I was in a dress gifted to me by the woman I thought would be my mother-in-law. My house has silent spaces in it where furniture and photos used to be. I was in no position to be sociable last night: I just wanted to control time -- fast-forward it, rewind it, pause it, anything. I had become obsessed with all the things I didn't get to do in Liberia, the things I'd taken for granted or said (or never said). I wondered why I'd put so much of myself into this blog only to leave Liberia feeling...unfinished. 

But then...the house party. And the girl. And the acceptance that I'm backing away from this country. And the knowledge I did something really dope while I was here. 

This is me, sinking the ball while moving away from the basket. 

Friday, June 14, 2013

Loverboy

There is a terrible song I never cared for until I woke up singing it today. The chorus is as follows:

Everybody's workin' for the weekend
Everybody wants a new romance
Everybody's goin' off the deep end
Everybody needs a second chance


These lyrics take on an entirely different meaning when you live in Liberia where, at the end of a workweek, everyone expects their Friday. "Where my Friday?" you will hear from guards and porters and gardeners and, sometimes, strangers. Friday is the extra dollar your boss-man or boss-lady gives you for, like, doing your job. ("Where my _____?" is also heard all weekend-long and around Independence Day, Christmas and New Year's.)

For the record, I do not subscribe to Fridays or weekends because, seriously, where is my bonus for making it through a workweek? One Monday, I was asked in front of 15 people to tighten and brighten my work attire to impress visiting guests. Twice in the same week, I was forced to sing duets aloud for walking into all-staff meetings after silent prayer. Once, at 8 in the morning, a man had the nerve to say, "Avril, you're adding up! Don't deny yourself." Kids, this means: "Damn, girl, you are looking extra fleshy today. Keep it up." Last week, I almost threw down with two enraged motorbikers as I made an unprecedented U-turn on Old Road. And Tuesday evening, already late, I found myself playing sweaty vehicular Tetris in heels when I went to retrieve my car and found it wedged behind two others in a parking lot; the only guy on-site didn't know how to drive (obviously) so he threw three sets of keys at me, said, "Don't scratch the Lexus" and went back to his chair.

I don't want a Friday: I want a full-on party. 

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Paper Planes

Last Wednesday. I leap out of bed at 5:32am to wait 7 hours (what!?) for an 80-minute flight. Now I'm sitting in the departures lounge of Spriggs and all the posters are telling me I'm probably going to die today. Nice. I'm boarding the UN plane to Harper, Maryland County, the southernmost point in Liberia, a place I've never been to but that's in my mom's blood.

Everyone visits Cape Mount, where my dad's family is from (left) but Maryland is a little less...obvious (right).


This place is half the reason I'm on Earth and I felt it all over me about five minutes after landing.

But back to the airport. We leave a freezing lounge and walk single-file like baby chicks across the hot tarmac. I am the only non-military girl in the group and all the Pakistani and Indian soldiers eye me strangely like the ugly duckling in an American Apparel hoodie. I know I don't belong and worry they'll boot me off the flight but then the doors close and the engines start. I'm flying south from Monrovia for once, over all the little shacks sitting in Matadi mangroves against all logic and reason. I find myself seated directly under a propeller. It looks like a deadly pinwheel. I plan what I'll do if it detaches from the plane and bursts through my wall. Three minutes in, we disappear into cloud cover and I think, "Well, there are worse ways to go." Then the sea opens up below and there is just so much freaking water.

We're still ascending; the thick yellow coastline gets thinner until it's just a child's sketch in white chalk dots.The river goes on and on like the long, mean slide in Chutes & Ladders. Everything else is green and there are no towns. The land disappears and suddenly there's only my pinwheel propeller and the ocean and sad, cigar bar smokiness; Gangstarr plays in my head. The sand and the river are snakes racing past trees that are dense and awesome like all the hair you never see sported in Monrovia.

21 people sit aboard looking bored, but me? I’m filling pages writing this.

There are weird splashes and stripes in the ocean but I've got no one to ask what's up so I tell myself it's a train of dolphins. (It's not.) From above, the waves are still sheets of salt lying just offshore. Suddenly, the forest turns into hilly plains and I'm bouncing involuntarily in my seat. I see a fat, red road that looks like an artery. People below wave up at the plane.

When we land, it sounds like a contract tearing in half and I think, "Seriously? I'm going to do this again in two days?" (I'm not, but I don't know that yet.) I uncharacteristically ask total strangers for a lift to town and get deposited at my buddy's place at the top of the hill, Up Cape. We go for a walk and I fall in love over and over again because there is nothing cooler than shipwrecks and trees growing inside abandoned mansions, here at the edge of the world.













I have a swell two days roaming my ancestral ghost town and pack my bag to head back to Monrovia but of course, because I'm me, the flight is canceled. Rain. Everywhere. Stubborn pools collect triumphantly in every room in the house and the roof cries quietly onto my nose over breakfast. The whole community is submerged in water. This somehow works out for me, though, because now I've got the whole weekend to get into trouble in Harper. I eat spaghetti and pseudo-Spam in a roadside tea shop and sip condensed milk and coffee as a funeral procession goes by. I watch my first (ever?) soccer match on a swampy field in the rain. I walk into a club and realize my shirt is inside out. I befriend dogs and children. I meet my doppelganger: she's got grandchildren and I want to be one of them.

Monday comes too soon. I'm on the back of a motorbike and am so grateful for the sand in my eyes 'cause now I've got an excuse to wipe them. I drag my feet through the airport gate. No one tells me I'm taking a helicopter home, though, so I'm all kinds of confused for a while. I've got on those ridiculous headphones and am facing ten other people. All the signs are in Russian and men's thighs are pressed up against mine. Great. I strap myself in. The windows are open. I fall asleep for the first hour. (What. It's like a loud rocking chair. Leave me alone...) When I wake up, everything below is soggy and Wednesday's flight plays out in reverse. I'm starving and being chatted up by two completely inappropriate people. No one has boundaries anymore. 

The helicopter touches down like a sparrow landing on a twig. It's soundless. I grab my bag and hightail it out of there, only slightly deaf. I hop on the back of a Malian's motorbike and am overwhelmed by how much is going on in Monrovia. It's the anti-Harper. I don't know how I feel about anything anymore.

I leave Liberia in nine days. 

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Break Fast

A week ago at work, I walked to the printer and passed the table where the cool kids eat big Liberian lunches. The girl seated there looked up and said, "I'm eating."

I stood there for a while, clinging to my printout and wondering if I'd asked her if she was eating. I decided that I definitely had not so I just stared stupidly at her and said, "Yes."

The girl took pity on me and explained herself. “That means, ‘Come join me.’”

WHAT?!

Then today, at 6:29am, I was jogging out of the compound to catch a ride to the airport when a stranger jumped into my path and said, "Morning! I'm having my breakfast." I don’t learn anything anymore so I'd already forgotten the previous week's lesson in code-talking. Luckily, the man added, "Join me?" and held out a Liberian donut. What I told him was, "Thanks but I’m getting on a plane." What I wanted to tell him was, "Bro, it is six in the morning. I'm not even conscious yet. Why are you giving me deep-fried foods..."

Unanticipated sharing leaves me feeling uneasy. Thankfully, the world attempted to right itself on Monday when, while collecting my car from a Mamba Point parking lot, the attendant handed me my keys in painstaking slow-motion and said, "I want bread."

Just like that.

What I wanted to reply was, "M*therf*cker, I've made, like, $11 this year. Please let me get in my car." But then I thought about all the San Francisco sourdough and Lower East Side bagels that dance on two legs in my dreams and said, instead, "Shit, man. So do I.” I finally understood all the uninvited giving and taking. I may leave this place a slightly less awful person yet.

Rat-tat-tat-tat

There is no beginning or end to this one so forgive me. On Monday, a Liberian waiter set a dish in front of me. I was the night's designated driver (…), which is the only reason I spotted the swastika tattooed on the squishy place between his thumb and index finger.

Someone – I beg you. Explain. Is this a thing? If this is a thing, I'm converting to Judaism. The world needs balance.

Friday, May 17, 2013

The Wall

There's a piece of art by Banksy that makes me feel...confused. Sad and happy at the same time. It's a painting of kids on the Israel-West Bank barrier.


In Liberia, I think of all the powerful people hidden behind high walls and wonder if the locals think something special is being kept from them, too. Last week, though, life imitated Banksy at the end of my street in the form of a thick cement wall with a metal door ajar showing a sliver of sand, grey waves and pink sky.

There was nothing else behind that door.

I tried to photograph it but I couldn't do it justice. Sometimes, there really is perfection on the other side of the wall. 

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Maypole

I could definitely have done without this month. Things were already unraveling around me when, on Sunday, I was relieved of a car battery in broad daylight. But this morning, on the back of a pehn-pehn, I thought I was flying.

I'd never been on a motorbike during rush hour so I didn't know that the bikers and their riders form a spontaneous posse. Someone smart was blasting music so there was shimmying on Yamahas, weaving through lanes, gliding around other bikes, spotting one another with that warm not-yet-rainy-season wind in your eyes as the car-people sulk, air-tight, in gridlock. This is Monrovia's maypole dance and it's worth getting on some loon's open-air machine for. 8 o'clock this morning felt like quitting time on a Friday.

You've not beat me yet, May.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Wayne's World

A few months ago, my mother asked me to play wingman at another predictably awkward event hosted by some sisterhood of Southerners. There was singing and secrecy and there were sashes. They all wore white. So did I. I didn't mean to; no one told me otherwise.

This was the day I met the president.

I am not the star-struck type -- New York can jade a kid quick -- yet I literally had to be tugged toward this woman. Maybe it was because she’s my mom's boss, or because we've got that German blood, or because I knew she’d ask me why I’d waited a year and a half to lock eyes with her.

The truth is this: that all that time, all I'd ever thought was “I'm not worthy.” No fancy PhD, famous husband, fantastic job. Just me, standing there, tongue-tied, trying not to ruin the family name.

I refuse to go to any more of these things. My mom's just going to have to hire a date like the rest of us.

Bush Skills

Watching someone change a flat without a jack on Homeland made me think of all the bush skills I never learned in Liberia. I have no idea what's going on under the hood of my car. I can't tell one crop from another. I don't even know how to start a fire.

I can, however, behead, shell and gut a dozen spiky, spiteful lobsters. (My hands look like I went at them with a cheese grater.)

I figure that's worth something. 

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Things I Wish I'd Known From The Start

If a Liberian says... 
How de body?

It means...
How are you doing?

And not...
Is that your real shape or are you smushed up in Spanx under there?


If a Liberian says...
Dress small.

It means...
Could you move over a little?

And not...
Please wear less clothing.


If a Liberian says...
Do you see me?

It means... 
Remember my face. I’m watching your car. And I want a tip when you’re done shopping.

And not... 
Am I a hologram?

That is all. As you were.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

In Matadi

You know everything's going to be a little strange that day when you drive past a manned wooden booth with the words LADY'S MILK CHARGING CENTER painted on it. 

Monday, April 8, 2013

For Melanie

On Saturday, Will and I drove two hours on freshly-paved highway to the beach in Buchanan.

It felt like this...
and this.

I should have stayed home.

See, we stopped somewhere to get some lunch but all they had left was peanut soup so we let someone lead us somewhere else where all of us ordered the goat soup.

Everything was alright until my second mound of meat. My fork hit a hard place I thought was bone so I flipped the bone over and considered what I was looking at.

Teeth.

Not a few isolated molars, but an intact lower jaw.

A mandible of brown-white teeth
attached to a tongue 
attached to a nasal cavity. 

Like a seasoned medical student, I quietly studied this smiling goat half-face, set it aside, and continued eating as though nothing had happened. Only twenty minutes later did the full horror of the thing wash over me.

I had tofu and a pack and a half of gum that night.

Vegetarians, this is your window. I am yours. Talk me over the fence. 

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Things Fall Apart


A cool guy recently left this world so I’m using his book to teach someone to read.

We started today.

For the first time in three nights, Okonkwo slept. He woke up in the middle of the night and his mind went back to the past three days without making him feel uneasy.

Teaching English was never going to be simple – the language is completely messed up. I, of course, am teaching a trilingual dyslexic Liberian adult who only knows languages phonetically.  The end-of-class dictation went like this:

for the feest tam in thee nelts, Okonkwo slmst. His okpu in the mado of the nelt and his mand ownt bek to the pest tree day wivur maken Him feel wnuesr.

If I pull this off, I’m going to knight myself.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

SOAS

In January, I got into grad school in London. [Insert one-person dance party here.] It was one of the freeze-frame moments of my life. The downside to the whole thing, however, is that every day since has become a function of the day that I leave Liberia.

T minus ninety days.

Like anything one looks forward to, ninety days feels like a very long time: it isn't, though, given the I eighteen months I just spent here. My own family didn't think I'd last three weeks. I don't blame them.

Part of me stayed just to prove them wrong; the other part just knew that every day after the day I left here, I'd look back on this tangential life and think, "You did good, kid." I look forward to that feeling, too.

T minus ninety days.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Nimba

Last week, I decided to feign outdoorsy-ness and agreed to go to Nimba with Will. Nimba County is in the east and borders two francophone countries. The people there speak English and Mano or Gio; they grow lots and lots of food and are super clutch, agriculturally. Nimba also has a nature reserve and a mountain dug up by two eras of iron mining. This was enough reason for us to pack the Land Rover with tents and toilet paper and kidney beans and kerosene and drive the five hours inland from coastal Monrovia through Kakata, through Gbarnga, to Ganta.

If you haven’t spent much time in rural Africa, all of the major towns may look and feel the same but Ganta has a coolness and energy about it. The people are happy, you can find anything, food is good and cheap, the market women are friendly, the guesthouses come fully equipped for $50 a night. The marketplace is crammed with parallel and perpendicular bamboo stalls where you can can get a handful of this, a half-bucket of that or a mound of the other: there are no kilos or pounds here. In Ganta, I even began confidently sucking water out of the plastic sacs that accompany heaping plates of jollof rice.

Sleep.

The next morning, we drove from Ganta, through Sanniquellie, to Geipa. This should have taken three hours but took five because, after the fourth or fifth bridge made of planks and faith, we came to a tree in the road. I don’t mean an upright, vaguely inconvenient tree to be circumvented by using the other lane. There was no other lane: this was a dirt road in the middle of the forest and the tree was quite purposefully on its side. It was Friday and a public holiday but the men of the community had banded together to repair the bridge just past this tree. The bridge was made of logs – rounded, uneven things that rot and collapse at random. So someone acquired a saw but the saw had no fuel so someone got fuel but the saw wouldn't start so we donated our twine and the saw started but the tree still had to be measured and trimmed and rolled to the bridge and wedged into place and shaved smooth and tested.

We were the test subjects.

I’m not sure what it is but on the rare occasion that Will is convinced we’re done for – like driving a 4x4 over logs half-assedly positioned by quarreling farmers--, I’m completely Zen. And so it was that we flew across the bridge and the river below didn't claim us.

We cleared the backseat and gave four of the men a ride to Geipa, where we met the Forestry Development Agency guys we were about to entrust ourselves to. First, however, we had to go into a hut, meet the village chief, and sign the visitors’ book. The chief turned out to be one of the plainclothes guys we’d just given a ride to. The visitors’ book was so sparsely populated that Will spotted his own 2010 entry on the previous page. The chief asked us to give him twenty dollars but we didn't: the government has its own profit-sharing deal with the community. We left the hut to find the FDA guys, each of whom had our belongings effortlessly balanced on his person.


We walked past the wood-shuttered clay houses of the community. Everyone was standoffish. Perhaps I would be, too, if the government leased part of the forest I hunted in to miners and decided another 13,500 hectares were now to be protected, patrolled, and off limits to me.

I traded my flip-flops for sneakers and we trekked from the slashed-and-burned community area to low grassy areas to tall grass and bushes to meek trees to thick, tall, canopied rain forest. The world around me got less and less sunny. We hiked an hour – climbing over trees, crawling under trees, crossing creeks and rivers on moss-covered rocks and felled logs, freeing ourselves from vines and thorns. Every once in a while there was some fantastic flower but mostly everything was shades and heights of green. The lead guide balanced our cooler on his head and, with a cutlass in his right hand, hacked away at zealous overgrowth. He was an artist with that thing: the upcountry equivalent of a bionic arm. An hour can be very long depending on what you are doing; after a while, I was propelled uphill by sheer delirium, downhill by gravity, and forward by momentum alone. By the time we got to the camp site, I wanted to die. We set up our tent, pulled stinging ants from our socks, and goofed off by the creek for a while. 

I fried okra and rice for everyone over our coal pot and listened as the forest got very dark and very loud. I don’t remember falling asleep but I do remember thinking “I am the most selfish person I know...” before doing so. 

At six the next morning, everything was wet with dew and heavy with almost-rainy-season weight. We had instant oatmeal and coffee and pineapple and trekked an hour and a half to a waterfall. By the time we got there, I wanted to die. The waterfall was sweet – nothing flashy, just clear water running through vines and straight down the side of a rock face. 


The rangers left us alone for a while and went searching for tree nuts. Everything was cool until I found myself shivering and surrounded by bees. Everywhere. They had even burrowed into the carefully-folded clothes we’d left on a rock. Now, I've already detailed my beef with spiders and ants but bees…bees are different. I've never been stung by a bee which, I realize, is probably a rite of passage for most 7-8 year olds but whatever: the truth is that I've seen the end of My Girl and my throat seals shut on me from time to time so the thought of being brutalized by bees a 2.5 hour walk from the nearest village was just too much for me at 9am. I ran down the rocky path and stood, doubled over, crying tearlessly, as Will inspected my t-shirt and jeans before throwing them to me from the eye of the swarm. 

By the time we found the rangers, the last bee had lost interest in us and wandered off. We then crossed paths with a man collecting NTFPs on protected land. He was startled and scolded and told he'd be reported to the chief. With his sack across his body like a sash, his cutlass in hand, and the very weird look on his face, though, I briefly feared he might take a “leave no witnesses” approach to the situation. (I really need to stop watching television.) I kept my eyes down and speed-walked away and didn't speak again until we reached camp an hour and a half later; I was drenched in a vile combination of humidity and sweat and waterfall and fear. 


We did the previous day's work in reverse, putting out the campfire, taking down tarpaulins, and hiking the hour back to the Pathfinder. We cleared the forest and I was blinded by all the sunlight that had been obscured by trees. We left. My forest clothes were covered in filth so I changed in the car as we approached our old friend, the patched log bridge. I hope never to cross it again. Out of the forest, out of Geipa, and on to Yekepa we drove, into the ArcelorMittal concession area, and all the way up the Nimba Mountains. I don’t have words for the thing that lit up in me up there: it's all abandoned prewar mining equipment, terraced mountains, sky, green lake and grass. 




And back through Yekepa, through Sanniquellie, to Ganta, where I stocked up on the kala to which I had now become addicted. Kala, depending on where you get it, looks like a zeppole or an old-fashioned donut and if you get one straight from the oil, lord save you and your figure. They are five Liberian dollars apiece – that’s less than a dime.

I was happy I had treats with me when a stranger signaled that we had a flat tire somewhere between one town and another. Two men sacrificed their freshly-washed clothes to get down in the mud and change it for us. I was sitting backwards in the passenger's seat, watching Will learn from the volunteers, when suddenly the car horn sounded. This was more than a little alarming given that there was no one in the driver’s seat. I turned to my right and found a teenager, looking just as shocked as me, withdrawing his hand from the driver’s side window. I laughed, which I guess gave him permission to laugh. He had never honked a horn before. I like to imagine the jolt of power must have given him: he quickly became the talk of the town for the growing crowd of kids.

We stopped somewhere to patch the split tire and a teen with headphones called out to me.

“American.”
“How you know I’m American?”
“You American.”
“My pa Vai.”
“You pa not Vai.”
“Then how I name Massa?”
“Massa!”
“Da ma second name.”

“I seh!” he called to his friend. “She say her pa Vai oh!” And thus spread perplexity across faces of the men of the garage.

I am not sure what offends me when Liberians look at me and inform me that I’m American, or what annoys me when I explain my heritage and locals scrutinize my face and shake their heads no. Twice on this trip, the strangest thing happened. The first time, we were crossing the road in a big town so I didn't quite hear it but Will did and laughed. The second time, though, was clear as day. Again, sitting backwards in the passenger's seat as our flat tire was swapped, an old man wandered to the road from the village and peered into the open driver’s side window. I didn't notice him until he said, “Hello, white woman.”

“What!?”
“White woman.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“We are the same color.”

He looked down at his arm, studied it for a while, then looked at mine.

“We are different color.”
“We are the SAME COLOR!”

He walked away, amused. 

Apparently, in the bush, I change ethnicity altogether.

On the way back to Monrovia, people held up delicacies for sale to passing cars: snake (or eel?) and grass-cutters and bamboo bugs suspended in liquid. We stuck with watermelon.

Back in Gbarnga, we took a detour to a waterfall pronounced Patta-way by foreigners and Kpa-ta-wee by Liberians. It is split into three falls and is lovely. I hopped barefoot between hot stepping stones to the boulder in the center. 



We ran into fourteen American twenty-somethings who'd left home specifically to tour Liberia. This, for me, was the icing on the cake: that this tiny country might actually draw others, like me, who aren't afraid to come here and get a little dirty.

Monday, February 25, 2013

Capote

Today, I finished a book I'd always wanted to read but never did. (A murder in wheat country? Yawn, man.) But I got my hands on it here and couldn't not read it because it's fantastic. The author turned a two-paragraph news story into a 300-page masterpiece about a wealthy Kansas family killed on their farm by strangers; the town is beside itself. This is a true story.

I thought abut this story two weeks ago when the following happened.

There are too many children in the Monrovia school system so morning sessions end at noon and a different mass of children goes to school in the afternoon. I was sitting in my lifeless car at a gas station midday when a homeward-bound Liberian girl paused near the pumps and took out a notebook; I put my head on the steering wheel and waited for a mechanic to come. Then the girl knocked on my half-open window and threw a crumpled strip of paper at me. "I don't want this," I told her but she ignored me and continued down the road.

The note said, "I like you. Please call me. [Telephone number]."

What?!

I have been trying ever since to figure out what made her think I was a safe bet. I'm not the beefiest girl in the world but I could probably still kidnap a lanky school girl, right? I play squash now; I have tricks. But the girl saw me through my dirty windshield and decided that that was enough information. Maybe she'd seen me before or knew she'd see me again -- Monrovia, for all its one million people, is very, very small. It's that  big-town vibe that makes people, once acquainted with things, let down their guard, sink into the dulling tropical heat, trust in the people they share these familiar corners with, and let their bags get stolen on a beach. I watched this happen to someone I know.

Growing up in New York can put you permanently on edge. It made me the kid who'd rather carry her parka around an Amherst party than leave it, undefended, behind a sofa with everyone else's. And Liberians have lived through many things, things you'd think would make a person extra cautious. But there I was, weighing a teenager's phone number in my hand; I eventually let the wind carry it away. (Have you seen To Catch a Predator? No thank you.)

A week later, I was in my parked car again, waiting for a friend. The excited attendees of a sunset church service were streaming out of the Christian Fellowship and someone knocked on my window.

"You remember me?"
"No."
"I gave you my number."
"For cryin' out loud..."
"Why you did not call me?"
"I don't call strangers."

She started saying something but I'd stopped listening and wished her a goodnight when I heard her pause. She walked away dejectedly.

Chick doesn't know this yet but the world is bigger than her well-tread grid from 12th Street to 9th. Villains find even isolated farmhouses in the middle of the night. 

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Money for Nothing

Last week, short on cash and going more than a little mad, I allowed myself to be roped into event coordination for the UN's Post-2015 High Level Panel Development Agenda Monrovia meetings.

A mouthful, right?

All you need to know is that England, Liberia, and Indonesia decided to lead big talks on how to make the poor less poor. Each co-chair hosts an international conference in his or her respective country. Last week was Liberia's moment in the sun.

And oh the frenzy, my people.

Roadblocks. Gaping holes in roads and sidewalks magically patched up. This thing going up almost overnight. Communities of zinc-roofed shacks bulldozed on the boulevard. Thriving street markets shoved into corners. Road lanes suddenly lined with cat's eyes. Placards (still drying) crowding intersections. Soldiers, guns, journalists.

And a dozen solar traffic lights.

WHY. There is now traffic where there never was.

I will refrain from describing the indoor chaos of the conference itself. Suffice it to say that the next time the  "Special Assistant" to a dignitary or his wife barks at me because she wants fifty color copies of a twenty-page document in five minutes (in Liberia), I will cut her.

The whole production got me thinking, though. Why wait until the foreigners flood the city to make the town shine? And why tuck away all the things that make post-conflict Monrovia what it is? The city seems to say, "Dear world, thanks for all of that free money. Just look at how much we've done with it. But...umm...please don't cut us off -- the rest of the country is totally falling apart."

A certain delegation did not get the memo that things in Monrovia are really looking up: they brought their own mattresses to lay on top of the mattresses in the hundreds-of-dollars-a-night hotel.

Slow Down Your Neighbors

I don't know if you've ever seen Modern Family but there's an episode in which a woman loses her mind trying to get a neighborhood speeder to drive more sensibly. She plasters the area in signs that no one understands:


Last night, I watched from my balcony as a beast of a drunk American let lose, encircled by horrified tenants and security guards.

In Liberia, you don't really expect your Friday night cartoon indulgence to be interrupted by a man screaming, "Don't you ever honk at me. Don't you ever disrespect the white man." And that was just the beginning. There were references to blackness and simians and violence. It was vile.

This is 2013.Why do people move to Africa when they clearly, clearly hate Africans? Is there nowhere else in the world to do business? Oh, to have been a sniper last night. I'd have slept like a baby afterwards; I am not a turn-the-other-cheek kind of girl.

You're a Monster

Liberia
ICE 2

Your Neighbors!

Friday, January 18, 2013

Henry III

This week, my brother Emailed me to say he was coming to Liberia.

Let me unpack that sentence for you.

1. I have a brother. We have the same mom. (Allegedly.) He's 38. He's a loner. He teaches himself to play instruments.

2. My brother and I have no idea what to say to each other in person so his recent acquisition of Email and FaceBook accounts has changed my life.

3. My brother hasn't been to Liberia since 1988. I was beside him on that flight: I puked all over my denim jacket. When he finally stopped laughing, he woke up Mom. (The snitch...)

4. My brother hasn't been on a plane since 1994. In the beginning, this was due to the usual early-twenties lack of funding. But then he was a cabbie in New York in September 2001 and that was the end of that. (Some time later, he got a tattoo on his neck of a Boeing. He won't tell anyone what that's about, either.)

So while my mother's not holding her breath that he'll come, I'm already thinking up things to show him. At the top of my list is Rita.

Rita is the coolest girl in Liberia. I could drop her into a party in the States in her mauve skinny jeans and no one would notice. She is 32, gorgeous, and single with no children; she lives alone. (Sometimes, I wonder if she's actually Liberian.) She bought property outside of town and carries her deed and bank book everywhere. During the war, she fled to Lebanon with the family she'd been working for; she lived there for ten years and learned to speak Arabic. She's sharp and funny and warm and doesn't take any shit from anyone. She's fantastic.

And Rita can't read.

This is one of those things about Liberia that is both beautiful and sad: you've got communities set up to help people get through life without ever becoming literate.

The most endearing thing about Rita is that she's not even secretive about the fact that she can't read. She says it confidently and casually, the way other people say things that just are.

I forgot that people fall through the cracks elsewhere, too, until I was squatting in arrivals a week ago, filling out  immigration information for this traffic-stopping Gambian and her kid. "I don't write," she said, vaguely regal and annoyed, to the customs agent distributing the forms. The way she phrased it -- not "I can't write" but "I don't write" -- made it seem like a choice rather than an unlucky draw. But I looked into her passport -- born 1983 -- and I thought about her and the rest of her life.

I decided I'll ask Rita to let me teach her to read.

Then I'll ask her to let my brother take her out.

Then I'll tell my brother to suit up for his first date in a decade.

Then he'll give my mom some grandchildren and take the pressure off me.

(What, you thought this was philanthropic? Please.)

Monday, January 14, 2013

North by Southwest (or, Three Weeks in Senegal)

This year, like last year, I spent Christmas in a Muslim country. I’ve never been big on holidays to begin with so there’s something oddly satisfying about being somewhere strange, surrounded by strangers who also have no idea what day it is.

It is December 20th. I get off the plane in Banjul, the Gambia. (I don’t know why the country insists on being called the Gambia. No one else gets away with that. But I digress.) The Gambia is a sliver of a country that cuts Senegal in two:


There are 1.5 million people there. They speak English. All of the tourists are English and everyone thinks I'm English. The airport is shaped like the bat signal. The Gambia dubs itself The Smiling Coast. It feels safe but everyone is entirely too friendly. Our guesthouse is owned by a Swede with dreadlocks that graze her heels. The room has no hot water; the windows don’t lock; the curtains (where there are curtains) are made of white lace so all activities take place in the darkened hallway. Lunch overlooks a crocodile swamp. Crickets fly over the dinner table. (Crickets fly.) The next day, on a green lawn, a four-foot lizard strolls across my path – I skid to a stop and book it in the opposite direction. One of a thousand self-appointed tour guides strolls two blocks with us as we walk to dinner. He has a business called {Something} and Skippy. He's Skippy. The lasagna at dinner is very good; the owner is Italian and he has coffee with us. He, like the taxi drivers and the rest of the country, will not so much as whisper a criticism of the government. There is a checkpoint every twelve kilometers and a photo of the president every six. (Beyond that, I, too, will hold my tongue for fear of disappearing in the night.) I watch Easy Rider for the first time.

We rent a Daihatsu 4x4 that rattles like tin cans strung together and pulled down a road. It’s perfect.



We head south with a weathered map and cross the border into southern Senegal. There are 12.5 million people there. They speak French. Most of the tourists are French or Belgian and everyone thinks I'm Dutch. I can no longer speak English to anyone but Will. Somewhere along the way, the tar turns to red dust. There is no A/C and no radio so every window is open and the iPod dock is running on AAA batteries. We are coated in dust when we get to Kafountine. All of the men are rastas or Muslims. (Or both? Can you be both?) We are lost in a maze of roads, looking for a guesthouse that may or may not exist; we’re scared. We’re wondering if the locals are messing with us, sending us deeper into nothing, but we find the place and resist the urge to high-five one another. The lodge is beautiful until the next morning when I learn that spiders the size of pancakes descend from the roof in the night. I spend a while coping with that. The crepes help, though – they are unreal. There is a bridge past the baobab tree that leads to a path that winds through hedges and empties onto the beach. The sand crunches underfoot just like packed snow. It’s the best sound. It is December 22nd. I watch Midnight Express for the first time.

The owners of the lodge are French and Senegalese and have a son who is four. He makes me think I’m looking into my own future. I avoid him; he gets it. We head to the village and brake hard when a pelican the size of an eighth-grader walks into the road.


There are no gas stations in Kafountine and the fuel gauge is purely ornamental so we accidentally buy diesel (called gazole) instead of gasoline (called essence) from a man with a funnel and a jug by the side of the road. We hightail it ninety minutes to Bignona, through bleak salt marshes and mangroves, past cocky soldiers who want money for nothing. We acquire the correct form of fuel but even this is a lesson in frustration: the gas station attendant won’t acknowledge me because I’m the wrong gender but Will can’t speak French and keeps referring to me to translate to the guy who won’t acknowledge me.


The car is a smoky, stuttering wreck for a few days. Christmas is awful: a forced lunch at a banquet table with hateful, hateful people. We are traumatized and don’t come out of our room again until check out the next morning. It is December 26th. There is a festival beginning today but we have been dissuaded by the swarms of European hippies roaming Abéné. At a check point, a soldier asks if we mind transporting an old priest to a neighboring town. We decline despite the obvious bad karma of doing so. We drive to Cap Skirring in the very south of southern Senegal.


We accidentally find the sweetest nook of the trip (excluding that night's dinner, which is an unspoken pageant of rich French kids). There are steep stone stairs down the cliff to the beach and it is so, so cool. The locals have been selling their family land to the French and Belgians, who build beautiful things that are nothing like our guesthouse, which is Senegalese-owned and feels like home.

It’s morning. Will says he’s grouchy because of the roosters next door but I think he’s more upset that his Nescafe comes in a bowl. There are piglets foraging in tall grass and bored cows standing in the surf.


We have shrimp in a hut on the beach. We find the only place that’ll sell us bottles of beer – it’s an upstairs bar above the main strip. We pretty much swear in blood to return the empties; the woman watches for us from the balcony for the next two days. We are now hooked on Flag beer. WiFi is down all over, making it impossible to translate what is wrong with the car to a Wolof-speaking mechanic under a tree. (Note: this is the first of five times our car requires immediate medical attention.) Ten dollars later, the car is worse than it was before so we rent bikes and have an argument. Have you had an argument while cycling through the streets? It’s almost funny because you can just speed off when you’ve zinged the other person. I get to a beach and we’re still fighting. It’s hot. I drag the bike through the sand to a lone tree and we’re still fighting. The bike and I are now both without a kick stand so I kick sand at poor Will and I ride home. A shiny, shirtless carpenter asks me for a sip of water; he doesn’t mind that there's sand in the bottle so I gladly give it to him and go.

René, the guesthouse owner, takes us on a tour of his garden and a tree pollinates Will in a fat yellow stripe down his face. He has no idea and I’m a jerk so I don’t say anything for a while.



We eat a fruit called carosol that I’ve never seen before. We return to our bungalow, where a creature is rustling in the quilted ceiling. I figure it’s a bird. Then a long, scaly tail curls down from the ceiling. I scream and throw my sandals at it as the creature (which I’ve now decided is a possum) scratches its way to safety on the other side of the room. Now I’m crying because the thing is clearly going to fall through the quilting and onto me in the night. I sit in the corner and follow Will’s gaze up, up to the gap in the quilting where the ceiling is exposed and there’s a ledge at the top of the wall. There, friends, is a reptile a yard long. I sleep on my stomach and under the mosquito net that night; nothing’s clawing my face in the dark.

In the morning, there are goats dodging the heat by pressing themselves up against cool stone walls and hiding under bushes. There is a trail of cowpats across the road. We go hunting for croissants and tartes tatin and fail. It is New Year’s Eve and Will is sick. We miss everything. We go to the infirmary at the police station where a man in a sweat suit shoots Will with drugs, straight into the muscle. Will, trembling and sweating and empty, stares pleadingly at me but there are so many little things I don’t know how to say. We go home and don’t leave. We watch The Wire. René makes a cure-all cocktail of marshmallowy fruit I’ll never see again. René realizes we haven’t eaten all day and brings us crevettes and langoustines and frites. He leaves his own birthday party in order to do so. It is December 31st.

We leave Cap Skirring in search of English-speaking doctors. We are speeding back to the Gambia with the windows down and the wind gets under my sunglasses. We are kicking up dust. We are stopped at a check point. The soldier likes Liberia and we continue, back through the salt marshes and mangroves and angry red roads. At another check point, the soldiers ask for money to make tea. We decline. We are playing Steppenwolf. I lock eyes with a pissy preteen girl who spits water at our passing car. We cross back into the Gambia. The customs agent realizes he did not stamp my passport when I first crossed the border. He says it’s all good. (It is not, but I don’t learn that until days later when I’m on a sofa, trying to cross the northern border, being blackmailed for $3 US and chips.)

There are seventy pairs of unattended slippers outside the mosque as we enter Banjul. The women here wear headscarves. There are mountains of watermelon every thirty feet. Signs declaring the people’s duty to and love for the president don’t miss a beat. A cowherd is leading his steer across the highway: a cow gets caught between two lanes and inadvertently enters a game of Frogger. “This is every cow’s worst nightmare,” says Will. I don’t think cows lose sleep over things like that, though. My body aches and Will is still an inhuman shade of grey so we do it up at a posh hotel. We are now hooked on Julbrew beer. We sleep.









The ferry and the border are shut for the day so we trek four hours out of the way to the  alternate ferry crossing (also known as Plan B). We are stopped every fifteen minutes by very feisty soldiers. We stop at a gas station that has a manual hand pump like a well. The attendants then violently rock the car (with me in it) to ensure that the tank is completely full. It’s not quite a day at the amusement park but it’s free. We get to Soma and, among the overstuffed trucks, get packed like sardines on the ferry.


We cross the northern Gambian border with less money (and pride) than originally budgeted. We are heading north through Senegal this time, north to Dakar. Somewhere along the way, the donkeys are replaced by horses that cart people and the things that people collect. The sun has set.



The accelerator cable snaps in the middle of the night in the middle of the road yet we inch our way to a general store. The whole town is alive in the dark. The shop owner is from Mauritania. He doesn’t speak French but he does sell wire. We park beneath the storefront light. A miracle named Mamadou wanders over and patches up the car in silence with my cell phone's flashlight hanging from his mouth and using a kitchen knife we’ve been carrying around. I could kiss the kid but I don’t. We drive. We cruise down the European highways and empty boulevards of Dakar. It is 1:30am. We’ve skipped lunch and dinner. We find a hotel. I shower off layers of red dirt and pass out.


Downtown Dakar by day is intense and heavy with harmattan haze. We’re stuck in traffic. A man taps the window to show me his wares: a barred crate full of baby sparrows. What I’m supposed to do with one of these at eleven o’clock on a Thursday, I don’t know, so I just stare at them until the light changes. There are no signs for anything anywhere in Dakar so we spend a lot of time going in circles. All along the waterfront are whitewashed walls of graffiti censoring something naughty about the president. Midday, Dakar becomes an outdoor mosque and men run through traffic with undersized rugs or strips of cardboard to join a hundred others in sidewalk prayer. We flee the city center for Almadies. We have lunch in a restaurant on the third floor of an art gallery and everything is fantastic. We get a hotel with a slice of a sea view between two buildings. The people in Dakar drive with even less regard for self-preservation than Liberians do so we cheat death a few times; one motorcyclist manages to skid himself beneath the trunk of our car. A shiny BMW switches lanes to pass a man on a horse-drawn cart. Only now do I notice that the carts are rolling on thick, rubber car tires: there is nothing Romantic about them. We get stuck behind a cab with one absurdly small rear wheel. We get a drink at a beach bar; I watch a Senegalese man sweep trash and leaves from the sand and throw them into the waves like the guy in the myth with the rock up the hill in hell.

We leave Dakar. The second I remark that no one has hassled us in days, we get pulled over. I watch a horse eat the load he’s supposed to be carrying while his driver, unaware, fixes a flat tire. My dress earns a nasty scowl from the gas station attendant in Thies. Adding insult to injury, I am faced with one of those impossible hole-in-the-floor toilets you just hover over, a toilet that was clearly not built for a girl; it ends badly. We get back on the road and the landscape gets dry really quickly. The lush green trees of the south become scratchy brush and arched, withered perches for vultures as we near Mauritania and all of that desert. There’s a lone camel under a tree and a new ethnic group enters the scene. A couple of signs appear only in Arabic. It is the middle of the day and the donkeys are pressed up against the cold brick walls. We drive to Saint-Louis, in the north of northern Senegal.


Saint-Louis is an island wedged between the mainland and a peninsula; once a year, it hosts a rather epic week-long jazz festival. This is not that week, though, so we find ourselves in a waterfront ghost town. The buildings look like Crayola Cuba, or Miami on Zoloft: washed-out shades of pink, green and orange and old wood shutters.


I taste the best lamb I’ve ever had before it’s ruined by swarms of tenacious flies. We pass young goats fighting over a piece of cardboard and cross two bridges to find our hotel.


Everywhere, the sheep are as big as I am. As we squeeze down the road between the fish market and the cemetery, two huge eyes and tiny fingertips appear in the passenger window – it’s a kid saying Hi. In the early evening, there are Muslim women gathered under a tent wearing all the colors of Christmastime. It is January 5th.

I wake up freezing the next morning and every morning thereafter; this, apparently, is normal in the Sahel. We go to the beach and drink Flag and keep to ourselves. We leave Saint-Louis early and head south. Our trusty map is in shreds. We take a one-hour shortcut through scorching savanna with few signs of civilization and pray we don’t get a flat tire. We encounter the red dust again and crispy trees and goats on their hind legs nibbling on leaves and donkeys and massive steer with curved horns a foot long. The horizon is so steamy that I swear a wood post with ribbons is actually a child waving from afar. We hit a town (YES!). I ask a well-dressed man for directions but politely say No when he asks for a ride and I feel bad about this for the rest of the day; I vow to stop watching Law & Order. By now, Will and I have gotten into Zenn and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance-style communication and just silently nod to indicate things of interest. We pass road workers huddled with women under a tree, all eating lunch from a big bowl. The paved road disappears whenever it damn well chooses but we don’t stop until we cross the Gambian border.


Everything is alright for about four minutes.

Then our car gets a thorough cavity search by the Gambia Drug Enforcement Agency. These guys are in plainclothes but they do not play -- fondling my unmentionables to find my Epipen, locating hidden pockets in book bags, demanding an explanation for every vitamin supplement, feeling for packages embedded in the seat cushions. I've never felt so dirty...until fifteen minutes later, when we queue up for the ferry at 3:35pm and find ourselves still parked there -- in our filthy, unventilated car -- at 9pm. We are sitting ducks for the cold drink sellers and begging children and ferry workers awaiting bribes from incensed would-be passengers. Will watches me start to go a little mad, trapped in a car, weighed down by hungry, curious eyes. With no other option and only a boat ride standing between us and white cotton sheets, we add our ten bucks to that of the Gambian guy and German girl in the car behind us and weasel our way onto the last ferry of the day. It is the best thirty minutes of my life. We get a hotel, order cheeseburgers and pass out. It is January 8th.

Breakfast is a sea of happily burnt English people. We attempt to do normal, end-of-the-holiday things. The mini golf course is a lumpy cement afterthought; the swings squawk.


I want a massage until the gym receptionist walks into the room – knee socks, slippers – with his hesitant hand in a tub of grease; I sprint past him and out of the room and don't look back. After returning our beloved Daihatsu to the dealer, we decide to go for a drink on foot. This is a mistake in Banjul, though, as we end up surrounded by Gambian sellers in star formation, barking at us from five directions. I very publicly lose it, swinging my arms and screaming obscenities. Everyone is scared now, including Will. We make it to the bar and sip our drinks and strategize a return to the sanctuary of the hotel. “Go along the water. They don’t go that way,” the waiter says, overhearing the plotting. So we run, full speed, full of beer, down to the water’s edge and another two minutes across the sand to the hotel. Everyone is watching us but we don’t even notice anymore. We are laughing hysterically and out of breath and so, so happy.

We leave the next day.