Six More Years

Someone reminded me that I totally flaked re: election coverage.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf won the run-off with 90% of the vote. But between the boycott, the riot, the shootout and police chief's resignation, it was a bittersweet win.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory)

Meanwhile, my mother and Madam Sirleaf are off to Oslo next month for the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony.

I...am not.

Bjork

I've got a song on repeat today that goes:

If you ever get close to a human

And human behavior

Be ready, be ready to get confused

Observe.

The bottled drink you order in a bar or restaurant here will, without fail, come with a Kleenex.

The odds are that the cap will still be firmly in place.

The waiter, who is inevitably exasperated that you've asked him for...anything...will wait until you're watching and ask "OK?" before opening the damn thing. 

I have been collecting explanations for this for some time. The Kleenex is there to wipe the rim of the bottle, which apparently rusts over with reuse. Fine. But the whole "May I open this?" charade ensures that when someone roofies or, you know, straight up poisons you, it's entirely your fault. I'm all for going the extra mile to protect your customers, but I've also seen raw meat sit uncovered at high noon by the side of the road.

Speaking of roadside shenanigans, men pee shamelessly in plain sight despite murals crying "NO PEPE HERE." There is also a guy who wanders unchecked through traffic, shouting and shooting at phantom soldiers with his man-parts out.

Yet a cop pulled my friend over for indecent exposure -- he was riding shirtless on the back of a motorbike. At midnight. 

Help.

Photo of the Day

Hugo!

Front door, Monrovia, Liberia

(See http://truelifeliberia.blogspot.com/2011/11/expectations.html)

The Change

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

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

Everything slows just long enough for you to take notice.

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

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

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

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

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

Best. Heineken. Ever.

11.21.11

Today is my dad's birthday, a date I always need to be reminded of. I was especially thorough in my forgetfulness this year until my half-sister wrote to say:

Leave it to Dad to go out with a bang on his own birthday. Today marks twenty years.

This is going to be an irritating day.

Luckily, there are weekends. And weekends entail Occupy Wall Street dance parties that flood 14th Street with hippies and suits; learning Empire of the Sun is not, in fact, a prequel to Planet of the Apes; getting 100 points in the first play in Scrabble; realizing Top Ramen is the best imaginable Sunday morning food when you haven't eaten since Friday; secret beaches you wade through warm, waist-high lagoons to get to.

#winning

Photos of the Day

I stand corrected. This is what a date looks like here. 

Ducor Palace Hotel, Monrovia

Arrive at abandoned hotel.

Climb four flights.

Climb four more flights.

Reward self with cider on roof.

 Watch sunset.

Get cooked for.

Photo of the Day

So...this is what a date looks like here. Hate away.

Mamba Point, Monrovia

Photo of the Day

Alley Outside the Polls

Clara Town, Bushrod Island

Steinbeck

California in the '40s wasn't so different from Liberia today.

His name was Francis Almones and he had a sad life, for he always made just a fraction less than he needed to live. No matter how hard Francis worked or how careful he was, his money grew less until he just dried up and blew away. 

Expectations

There's this little frog that tends to hang out by the hinges of my screen door in the evening. I open the screen and it hops onto the tile, waiting for me to unlock the front door. I never let it in and I don't know what it's doing there but I don't mind since this is as close as I've gotten to having a puppy awaiting my return. I look forward to seeing it there.

There are a number of weirdnesses I now expect in Liberia.

If I go to a party, I expect it to be held around a pool, which will inevitably be filled with clothed Westerners come 3am. 

If I'm in a hurry, I expect there to to be five people slowly pushing a jalopy down the one road that goes anywhere.

If I go to a bar, I expect it to have a 180 degree view of the ocean (and, possibly, a stampede of Liberians sprinting to save someone from the vicious current of the aforementioned ocean).

If I go to a restaurant, I expect WiFi, Greek salad and to be able to sit there uninterrupted for six hours whether I order water or lobster. 

If I leave my mother's house on foot, I expect her guards to ask me for a treat I'm never going to return with.

And if I visit friends, I expect their guards to grill me but let the blondes and brunettes skip through. (I must be the only hooker in Liberia in Converse and knee-length shorts.)

Run-Off

I found myself stranded on one side of Monrovia Tuesday night due to tension near opposition headquarters.

I awoke on a sofa to an exchange between my friend and friend's housekeeper.

C: Did you vote?

Housekeeper: Yes. 

C: Where is the ink?

Housekeeper: I took it off.

This exchange is fascinating if you know a few things. 

1. The opposition bullied Liberians into boycotting Tuesday's run-off election, so

2. Turnout was distressingly low (out of fear or out of allegiance). Furthermore,

3. Your index finger is stained when you vote and

4. The ink lingers for a month, so 

5. To thoroughly remove it in a day requires scrubbing with bleach for hours

6. And being scared enough to subject your skin to that

7. And voting anyway.

Sometimes I could cry at the tiny, wonderful things. I feel like the guy filming a plastic bag in American Beauty (though, ideally, I'm slightly less creepy). 

Photo of the Day

The opposition gathers around empty teargas canisters after Monday's riot

(Photo Credit: Josie Stewart)

Hmm.

So, this is may or may not happening on my street:

At least three people have been killed in an exchange of gunfire between Liberian police and protesters as a mass opposition rally in Monrovia, the capital, turned violent on the eve of a presidential election runoff vote. 

What should have been a leisurely 10-minute ride was a panicked 90-minute roundabout race to get home and hide our Government of Liberia vehicle.

I'm on Mom-mandated lock-down.

Welcome to Liberia.

Fun, fun, fun, fun.

Bond

Long before I became myself, I was just some shy kid watching the world. And my foster sister, Edith, was the best person to watch. She had sixteen years on me and, in my eyes, was a goddess in leggings. Once, she saw me studying her as she dressed for a party and said, “Someday, Vee, your friends will disappear, one by one, until you're left with two who actually understand you."

I looked at her incredulously and left to play Duck Hunt.

But the girl was spot-on.

So when I moved to Liberia, I didn't expect to make friends. Acquaintances, sure, but not friends. Imagine my surprise when I met a girl I dread being away from. What an effing coup.

Then, another realization: I understand outsiders in a way I'll never get my family. People ask me what it's like to meet relatives in Liberia. My response is always "Cool" but what I mean to say is "Quiet." If my growing up in the States built a wall between the family and me, the war here added barbed wire and a moat. Our lives have neither overlapped nor run parallel; the teens are as unknowable as the elders. I so want memories with them but can't get past stare, smile, glance at clock.

I wish Edith had also told me that someday, my family would appear, one by one, and we'd have nothing to say to one another.

Identity

I can count on one hand the number of times I've screamed the F-word at the top of my lungs.

Three of these incidents took place in the last year. 

F #3 echoed down Church Street when I crushed my finger in the front door. 

F #4 earned a stern look from my mother, who'd just beaten me at Scrabble by one point.

F #5 was tonight when someone left a little virus on my flash drive, destroying every essay, every MP3, every photo to my name.

For an hour, there was no record anywhere of my twenties. I went totally ghost. 

And my first impulse was to throw up.

My mind went to my birth certificate -- was I still on the grid? What is it about property that makes you feel you exist because of it? I am not my flash drive. I have memory, too. I didn't suddenly not go to India because I lost the photos. Elliott Smith is waiting for me on iTunes. And I write essays in my sleep. Yet I felt as though I'd actually float away.

My evil-genius ex somehow restored everything. (I basically owe him a child now.) Still, I think I'd like to spend less time behind cameras and keyboards and ear buds and more time actually being part of the world.

And anyone who asks to borrow my flash drive can go F himself. 

Tricks

In the States, Halloween was the one night that obliterated any trace of your day job. Wilma Flintstone over there with the PBR could be a sex worker or a surgeon.

In fact, you might lean towards "sex worker" based on the size of her costume and the way she's throwing herself at Shrek.

In Liberia, Halloween is a little less complicated. The costumed revelers belong to an NGO, a grad school or an embassy. That's it. Mystery solved. The prostitutes still dress like themselves and nobody blurs the line. (This makes it very easy to stalk your prey online later, but we'll address that another day.)

There are no bookstores or cafes in Liberia so, clearly, there is no shop from which to rent a costume. You get creative. I turned a bed skirt, an Ace bandage and baby powder into an homage to Bride of Frankenstein. Someone came as the 80s. There was a giant baby, a German rapper and Gaddafi.

It was almost like being in New York. There was even a girl in the corner giving a lap dance.

Except here, the girl really was a prostitute. And I'm pretty sure the guy was a government official.

Hmm. Nevermind. It was exactly like being in New York.

Treats

There. Not one more word about outfits or photos. But today is, technically, Halloween, so I was feeling frisky.

           

Time

I spent three years in San Francisco getting calls at dawn from friends (on the East Coast) and family (in Liberia) with no understanding of how time zones work. I was eternally behind, expected to catch up.

Now it is me who is hours and hours ahead of my beloveds.

It's the worst.

By the time you guys are all simultaneously conscious (sometime around noon in Los Angeles), I'm deep in a mixed drink.

Time is an especially nebulous thing in Liberia.

A guy here told me, "If I have to wait three hours for a meeting to start and didn't bring anything to read, that's my own fault. I should have known better." I had no idea how serious he was being.

I'm invited to an event that starts at 1pm. Everyone else is told it starts at 12pm. I arrive at 12:15. No one else arrives until 2:30. I was ready to fault the organizers until I was invited to brunch.

Me: Picking me up?
J: Sure.
Me: When?
J: What time is it?
Me: 12:45.
J: I'll be there in 20 minutes.
Me: Cool.
J: 20 Liberian minutes.
Me: Oh OK. I'll see you in an hour.

(J arrives at 2:06.)

Understandably, then, the second number stored in my phone was for Alpha, a taxi driver described as "brilliant" because he is always, always on time. This is key when the after-hours alternatives are

a) social suicide (having your mother drop you at a party), and

b) suicide (getting on the back of an unlicensed motorbike on a street without rules).

Traffic? In a rush? No problem! You've got options:

a) Get behind the car with Ministry or Presidential plates and cruise through the lane that magically appears in gridlock, or

b) Just drive in the ditch (also known as the sidewalk). Pedestrians don't have rights!

Please forgive me if, when I return to the States, I show up places long after you've left. Or take out a family of five on my way. Force of habit.

Theft

There are a lot of ways to steal in Liberia.

The Minister of Agriculture described how new technology catches poachers (and pirates!) in Liberian waters. Gotta protect the fish.

As for individuals, everyone with the means lives walled inside a gated compound. The guards never leave. The windows are barred, giving everything within their shadow a hint of prison until sunset. I am "safe." But none of this matters from 6-7pm when I stand nervously on the balcony, waiting for the generator to illuminate the corners of the house.

See, my mother waited all year to tell me thieves descended from the ceiling and pilfered everything in her bedroom. While she was asleep in it.

The same happened to a girl across town this month. Only her own security was kind enough to guide the thieves to her bedroom. While she was asleep in it.

Yet there are worse things than burglary, as I was reminded by our driver yesterday.

Me: I only ever see people missing a leg here.
Jerry: Personal preference.
Me: Whose?
Jerry: Evil people.
Me: Oh.
Jerry: It could be worse.
Me: What is worse?
Jerry: In Sierra Leone, they would stop you and ask if you wanted short or long sleeves.
Me: Long sleeves?
Jerry: Long sleeves meant they'd only cut off your hands.
Me: What if you didn't respond?
Jerry: You got a muscle shirt.

Once, I heard a character say, "I can't bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother. It means too much to her." I feel the same way about thanking my mom when she follows me to the gate with a flashlight  in the dark.

Not in Kansas Anymore

Sometimes I forget I'm in Liberia. When I'm in a hotel restaurant; when I'm arguing with my mother; when the radio plays Blondie; in these moments, I could easily be back home.

Then there are other moments.

When you see two people handcuffed together and strolling with no apparent supervision.

When you see a blind guy walking arm in arm with another guy...who is also blind.

When your friend says, "UN Police party?" and you say, "Sure" and find yourself drinking punch from the inside of a cooler and dancing by a pool with half of Serbia.

When you spend a perfect Sunday for seven in blue-gold water at Cece Beach and return to a car suddenly missing its battery.

And you curse for a minute, think of the deflated soccer balls and rickety fishing boats you watched go by all day, and get over it.

High School

You know the awkward childhood friend you keep around when you become popular?

If Liberia is that band geek, the U.S. is homecoming queen.

No one knows they go way, way back.

A family friend made a documentary called Liberia: America's Stepchild which describes how, in the 1820s, the U.S. decided to send liberated slaves to Africa and chose Liberia as its dock (regardless of where anyone was originally from). "150 years later, Liberians were divided into two distinct groups: the often privileged American descendants, known as Americo-Liberians, and the indigenous [majority]. It was a division that would lead to political unrest and, ultimately, sow the seeds of war" (PBS).

Understandably, the U.S. feels a certain...responsibility...and has spent billions to stabilize post-war Liberia.

Liberia is one of the two African nations that was never formally colonized but the influences from abroad are palpable.

The earliest explorers gave Portuguese names to entirely too many things. French is spoken along the borders with Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea. There are two tribes (including my dad's) that are descendants of North African traders and account for Liberia's large Muslim population.

American and British English are mashed up in vocabulary and pronunciation in Liberia. My mom has a really absurd accent, which I blamed on her 30 years at the U.N. I forget she grew up listening to the BBC long before boarding school in England and college in the States; she really never stood a chance at sounding like a person.

The capitol, Monrovia, is named for the fifth president. Of America. Some indigenous Liberians -- my family included -- acquired the Anglo surnames of the local missionaries. And much of the architecture and cuisine scream Gone With the Wind.

Basically, you want to stay on Liberia's good side: it quietly remembers the phases you pretend you never went through. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_days). 

Happy

I'm gonna go ahead and reference The Simpsons again.

Milhouse, for anyone who didn't grow up with the show, is Bart's sidekick. No one knows why they're friends. Wikipedia describes him as one of the only characters with "visible eyebrows." He has no game whatsoever and is allergic to everything.

Basically, he's me.

And one day, at last, his crush notices him. He then falls off a cliff, is caught by an eagle and exclaims, "Everything's coming up Milhouse!"

Well-said.

Today I awoke before the alarm (also known as Someone Screaming My Name). Papaya and pineapple awaited me. The rainy season has ended. I acquired no new ant bites. My phone has more than five contacts in it. There were no unexpected animals in my hall. And water poured from the faucets at noon.

Today I didn't even have to use my AK / I gotta say it was a good day

Chores

When you first move out of your parents' house, there are things you're sure you're done with.

Like washing dishes...on cue.

This wouldn't be quite so brutal if we had, you know, running water.

Everything here is as manual as humanly possible. (I was floored when I found myself in an automatic car; an English girl promptly reversed it into a wall.) The clean, dry laundry I used to spend an hour on takes three days in Liberia. This is especially irritating because we own a washer and dryer. I can see them, yet everything gets hand-washed and hung to dry. (This is as good a time as any to mention that this is the rainy season.) We're ahead of the game in that we have a covered balcony from which to drape our business: I've seen many a load of laundry drying on roadside boulders and patches of grass.

I've never used a lawn mower but it's got to be easier than the alternative which is, apparently, hacking wildly at the grass with a sword. Liberians call it a reaper, which sounds about right: if I had to stoop in the hot, hot sun with this thing, I'd probably just start taking people out.

Still, my free time revolves around stockpiling and rationing water in all its forms:

• Rain (for cleaning)
• Bought (for drinking)
• Spring (for cooking)
• Well (for bathing)

My mother wept when I finally understood the meaning of all of this. It was a pretty Helen Keller moment for us. 

Attire

As my friend Theresa will attest, I have five distinct wardrobes:

• Winter (which never saw the light of day in San Francisco)
• Summer (which never saw the light of day in San Francisco)
• Resort
• Weekday
• Real-life 

In Liberia, I have two:

• Everything I acquired in Liberia
• Everything I acquired elsewhere

As far as Liberian women are concerned, only one of the two is appropriate for a respectable lady. Most days, I compromise and go half-Liberian but, like my mother, I find myself more and more inclined to concede defeat entirely. 

How to Go Liberian

Have your half-sister take your newbie ass to the market at Waterside on a sweltering day. Dodge puddles and pickpockets. Peruse hundreds of lappas (massive swathes of fabric). Let your sister haggle in Liberian English. Trek uphill (remember, it's a scorcher) to your preferred tailor. The tailor will ask, "Neat?" and you will reply "Sure..." because your sister is on the terrace and because you don't know what this means. The tailor will eye you and commit your measurements to memory. Have your sister hand him an unknown number of Liberian dollars. Leave without giving any additional information. Return two days later. Proceed to zoot (be enviably stylish). 

The excess fabric is often used for a head-tie, which is exactly what it sounds like. There are no rules for tying a head-tie -- it's all very interpretive-dance. I haven't gotten around to this head-tie business but hope to man-up someday.

There is no pauper-chic hipster aesthetic in Liberia. If you're upper-class, the locals can spot it a mile away.

The whole system confuses me, though, having seen Prada and Harvard gear on a janitor.