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.

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.

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.