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.)

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.