Seinfeld

On Wednesday, Will had the neighborhood rooster assassinated.

(Oh, uh, Will’s my steady. He’s alright.)

The whole thing cost $15 -- $5 to acquire the wrong bird the first time around and $10 correct this.

Not one Liberian involved seemed to find this strange. They don't really question what the pale, silly expats do. 

Neruda

There's a laugh that emanates from teenage girls when they want to be noticed by boys. It's a vile, unnatural shout echoing right now in an American mall.

I heard an old Liberian make the same sound as she left a hospital flanked by friends.

Only the woman wasn't laughing.

And nobody noticed but me.

I wonder who she lost. I've never seen a grown-up weep with such shameless, public agony.

If I ever have to feel that way, may I live somewhere I can scream it out freely.

I watched her from my hot, parked car and thought of a poem I used to read and read and read.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her. 

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.

And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass. 

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.

My heart searches for her and she is not with me. 

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,

and this may be the last poem I write for her.

Angst

I'm one of those people who kinda looked forward to turning thirty. It's a nice round number. Thirty is when all your twenty-something restlessness flies off somewhere, when you can tear it up downtown or stay home with wine and whatever your weird hobby is.

Yesterday, however, I had a real Benjamin Button moment, took stock and began to wonder if I was actually my age. I mean, who's broke, house-less and writing off society at twenty-nine? I was a tat, a piercing and a missed shower shy of gutter punk.

I hoped that, today, the world would be done mocking me.

It is not.

I am currently trapped on a casino terrace under a dirty sky watching a man pee.

It's 3pm on a Thursday. 

Modesty

Yesterday, I saw a stranger naked.

It happened the day before, too. And the day before that. And just about every day since I landed. 

There's a strange mix of overexposure and modesty when it comes to the nude form in Liberia.

Liberians believe the universe will curse you if you see your mother naked. (And here I thought it was just super uncomfortable.)

But when you take away plumbing, privacy and electricity, you get a lot of families scrubbing themselves in alleys and on stoops. At night, your trusty headlights illuminate the nude and the soapy.

(Note: the bather, who can see in the dark, is more annoyed that you've blinded her than by the fact that you've found her bathing alfresco.)

Then there's the club scene.

I haven't even made it to the larger, randier nightclubs but wherever you go, there is a parade of women in what can only be described as underpants. For this and other reasons, many places are off-limits to UN staff. (It doesn't matter, though. The ladies will find you.)

You can imagine the look on my face, then, when the passport office told me to cover my arms, that I was indecent.

It's my fault, though: I forget this is 1840 and men lose themselves at the sight of my stupid, pointy elbow.

A Primer for Real Life

Someone wonderful wrote:

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. 

Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. 

Having done all of this, I would like to add:

Live in Africa. It will make you gangster. And you will need this after leaving California. 

I went to San Francisco trusting no one ("Why is this person smiling at me?") and left three years later having faith in most. 

That ended on Friday.

I made it to 29 1/3 without ever having anything stolen from me. I felt pretty good about that. It's almost CV-worthy. Then a "maintenance man" snagged my sweet, sweet Android during the few seconds it took me to walk to the kitchen.

Honestly, screw the phone. That's not the issue. It took all of 11 minutes to replace it. I even kept my number.

And the fact of the matter is that that stupid phone would cost a housekeeper two-months' pay. 

So if my phone feeds a family of fifteen for a while, cool. I will write it off as a charitable contribution. 

What kills is that someone climbed five floors above the bloody Maltese embassy, identified that I was alone, surveyed the room, sent me on a wild goose chase, entered my personal space, took something from me and then looked me in the eye before vanishing like Keyser effing Söze.

Damn you, California! You had me thinking the world was all high-fives from strangers on Fillmore Street.  I am ruined. I revert now to my original meanness. Nobody puts Baby in a corner.  

Delicacies

On New Year's Eve, I ate my first rabbit. Having owned and loved a bunny (Scottie!), it just seemed wrong.

But at dinner in the mountains of Morocco that night, my options were rabbit or anaphylactic shock.

I think I chose well.

The thing is, though, that I still feel a little dirty about it. (Scottie!) But people eat rabbit on the regular. It's not even exotic. I don't hesitate to order duck or quail or lamb. Yet memories of snuggling caramel fluff back when boys wouldn't kiss me in spin-the-bottle cloud my better judgment.

You will not get me to eat snail or frog; only last year did I accept oysters as an actual food. Clearly, my feelings towards what's edible aren't to be trusted. But other people, grown-up people, people with duller gag reflexes eat just about anything on a menu.

And so we enter the bushmeat arena. (My good friend Wikipedia will fill you in:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushmeat#Hunting).

I'm not going to go into the ethical particulars of bushmeat but conservationists want the hunted species to, um, live, while the hunters and sellers want to, um, make a living.

Personally, I can't make a meal of smoked primate arm but I invite those of you with more sophisticated palates to school me.  

Milton Bradley

"I'm sure you've seen her. She sucks at life," Brian once said about someone we knew. I think I laughed my ass off. I'd never thought of living as something you could be bad at. At 18, success seemed so easy -- I used to destroy people at Life™.

Later that year, masochism set in and I invented this need to impress societies that -- if I'm honest with myself -- make me ill.

Thankfully, my very secret, very epic laziness took the edge off.

But something about Liberia has inverted those two impulses. Suddenly I'm 18 again: excited about life and oblivious to strangers.

Maybe contentment isn't reserved for impossible Fridays in the future when I leave my loft for my country house or collect my kid from the school I name-drop.

Maybe, post-MBA, I set up shop on the Swahili Coast and raise kids who are more happy than impressive. Maybe contentment is a car that says, "Let's see your car make it through the jungle." Maybe it's opening your door to a fisherman holding live lobster and lime.

Yes, friends. You can be a winner at The Game of Life.

Meeting

Certain things really merit a heads-up.

For example: "Welcome to the team! Good to see you. Also -- staff meetings start with a blessing."

Nothing conjures confusion like unanticipated collective prayer.

The team prayed for a "good and productive meeting."

It was neither of those things.

Salem

I have a friend who lives in the forest.

When done with the chimps, she goes to the village.

And in the village, a woman is ill.

The woman is dying, but there's a cure.

All she needs is a ride to a city.

So a car is a called, but the village says, "No."

No? No?? Surely they mean Yes?

"No," say the villagers. "Leave her be."

It seems the woman's a witch, you see.

And so the witch dies at twenty-four.

And the car arrives an hour later.  

Dollar dollar bills, y'all.

This week I won a bet that Monrovia's classiest hotel would not accept local currency.

Let me repeat: there is a place twenty minutes from the airport that won't take a Liberian dollar (LD).

I kinda felt like a jerk setting the waiter up, slipping him 50 USD and 100 LD, forcing him to turn back to ask, "Madame, do you have a...different kind of dollar...instead?" He couldn't bring himself to say what I already knew.

A little background information:

1. There are no coins in Liberia.

2. Old LDs look like rice paper marinating in a jock strap. 

This is not the first time I've encountered bill snobbery. A woman was buying oranges from the backseat of her car (yeah...) and, upon receiving dirty "pieces" (small bills) in change, said: "I can hate to give clean money to the market women, oh!" The market woman just laughed. Crisp bills, I gather, only circulate among the well-heeled, with their wallets and ATM receipts. LDs get reserved for buying street produce, or tipping bartenders, or buying gum from the backseat of your car (yeah...), or paying off checkpoint cops, or thanking gardeners for jump-starting your car.

I thought I understood the system until the other day, when a street vendor tried to charge me a fee for buying pineapple with USD. My face somehow conveyed a "WTF, dude." Evidently, acquiring goods with USDs is kind of a pain in the ass where he lives.

Photo of the Day

'rovia Hills, 90210

The New Job

Nobody knows how to say my name. No one wants to talk to me. And I waved to my mother on the road but she'd already turned away.

I've just relived the first day of school.

Playing Wii alone at home is really starting to regain its luster...

Little Children

I'd hit 12 Liberian kids if I threw a stick in Monrovia. (No, I am not in the habit of launching sticks at children.)

As I've mentioned, there are many expats in Liberia (Westerners, Indians, Lebanese, Chinese) brought here by work. Where they send their children to school, I don't know: I never see non-Liberians in the 6 to 26 age group.

But today I saw an American preteen in a schoolyard and nearly pounced on her from the terrace. "What are you doing here?" I wanted to ask. "And where are the rest of you? Did you escape? Is there a fence?"

Yesterday I came across an old message board posting from a guy wondering whether he should move his wife (bursting at the seams with triplets, mind you) to Liberia. The response was a resounding, "No, dude. Keep your crazy ass wherever you are."

It's not that you can't raise children in Monrovia: you can. It's community-oriented and has plenty of  inexpensive labor. (The 300 USD you're about to spend on a smartphone gets you a nanny, a driver and a housekeeper. For a month.) But imagine New York City. Take away all the parks and libraries. Keep all the concrete and add long, unlit dirt roads and notoriously inept drivers. Add occasional sidewalks with open manholes. Subtract top-notch health care. Add malaria.

Nothing puts you off procreating like a Dutch boy riding his tricycle in circles in the parking lot of a treeless compound. 

Out

One of my favorite lines from Six Feet Under (and there are many) is this:

Nate: "Does this party seem a little weird to you?"
David: "On a scale of 1 to 10? 90."

I'd give San Francisco a 90 out of 10 for "cities in which you can be comfortably gay."

Manhattan gets an 8.

Monrovia is hovering around 2.5.

It is illegal to be gay in Liberia, yet I'm the only one dumbstruck and scratching her head when grown men on a walk hold hands, happy as clams.

I suspect this cultural peculiarity is a loophole to allow everyone a little undercover PDA without granting actual, you know, rights.

(My buddy Robbie nails it, here: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-obama-administrations-bold-but-risky-plan-to-make-africa-gay-friendly/254086/)

Dos Mil Doce

Being back in Monrovia after nine days in Morocco is a little disorienting.

For starters, my wool scarf went back into the closet. Immediately.

Today I saw a Liberian balancing hand-wrapped snacks on a platter on her head. I see fifty such woman a day but this woman dropped something and, without removing the platter, bent down, felt the sidewalk for the AWOL packet, found it and carried on. She did all of this without breaking eye contact with me.

I have never felt so uncoordinated.

Wait, that's a lie. I was falling all over Marrakech, with its uneven sidewalks and inexplicable stair separating living space from bathroom. (Who remembers a stair in the middle of the night??)

I decided to assess the Marrakech vs. Monrovia situation.

MARRAKECH	MONROVIA
Has winter.	Has no winter.
Has rich kids who look like Jersey Shore extras.	Has rich kids who look like Jersey Shore extras.
Culinary linchpin: tajine (for roasting).	Culinary linchpin: mortar & pestle (for smushing).
Has cinemas.	Has no cinemas.
Strangers demand money for things you didn’t want.	Strangers demand money for, like, no discernable reason.
Likelihood that you can communicate with a local in at least one language: 87%.	Likelihood that you can communicate with a local in plain English – 11%.
Medina kids misdirect you, hoping you’ll follow them in circles and pay them for their services.	City kids stare blankly at you, then remember they’ve been pulled out of school to earn money.
Girls and women giggle side-by-side on their own motorbikes.	I have never seen a non-male drive a motorbike. Ever.
Old men ride bicycles.	Old men don’t even cross the boulevard.
People stare until you notice, then shyly look away.	People continue to glare at you long after you’ve noticed.
You deprive a seller of fun if you don’t haggle.	You deprive a seller of funds if you haggle.
The muezzin reminds you it’s time to pray.	An empty wallet reminds you it’s time to pray.
If your hair is hidden, it’s tucked under a scarf.	If your hair is hidden, it’s tucked under a wig.
Customer service is an actual thing.	Customer service is a figment of my imagination.
Soccer is best in flip-flops, anywhere.	Soccer is best in flip-flops, anywhere.

Firsts

My mom only vaguely grasps how much she lucked out with me: I was the teen least likely to get into trouble in Manhattan. (Caveat lector: this does not necessarily mean I was well-behaved.)

Imagine my shock when, for the first time in my life, I had a curfew.

It was city-wide.

I also went to sleep with a live duck in a burlap sac in the kitchen.

Yeah. It was a weird night for everyone in Monrovia.

Riot #2

Yesterday I did a really stupid thing, also known as "getting on a motorbike taxi in the middle of a riot."

It was awesome.

Do not tell my mother.

(Full article: http://www.iol.co.za/news/africa/youth-riots-erupt-in-liberia-1.1203535)

December 22, 2011 - Monrovia - Hundreds of young people took to the streets in the Liberian capital Monrovia on Thursday, angry at the government's late payment of casual workers' wages.

Demonstrations began peacefully but descended into riots during the afternoon. Tires were burnt, rocks thrown and at least one government-owned vehicle was set on fire.

A student who worked as a street cleaner for several days in early December told reporters, "The government owes me 30 dollars. They promised us we would be paid today, but nothing happened. They can't keep treating the youth badly."

Photo of the Day

Tell me this isn't a tree-person from Lord of the Rings.

Robertsport, Liberia

Chucky

There's a business downtown with a mural of Chucky (http://tinyurl.com/4svgou) on its gates. It's, like, the opposite of a welcome mat.

It gets me thinking about Liberia's own "Chucky" Taylor (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2963086.stm).

I came home to find my roommate's housekeeper and driver discussing how Mr. Taylor would fare in a hypothetical election.

Both insisted that they'd vote for him. (Nevermind that he's, you know, on trial for war crimes.)

They also suspected he would win. 

Bear in mind that Mr. Taylor used to brag that you'd still vote for him if he'd killed both your parents (because in many cases, he had).

Surely, I asked, Taylor would win out of sheer fear?

"No," they said, "He would win fairly." 

This was one of the worst things I've ever heard before 9am. 

Why would you vote for a man held responsible for wars in not one but two countries, you ask?

Rice.

Or, rather, the price of rice.

From The Atlantic (full article: http://tinyurl.com/7kq5bb2):


In town, not far from a road sign that reads "The war is over," Rachel McCarthy, 28, leans against a wall nursing her baby son. Although Liberia is now at peace, McCarthy said she preferred the Taylor years -- in large part because staple foods, mainly rice, were less expensive. "Yes, there was war, but we had food. Today, although we're free now, and we have peace, it's not easy." 

I heard a Liberian say once that rice and footballs were all you needed to start a stampede. In retrospect, this was not a joke: rice is the life force in Liberia. Without it, my people believe that have not actually eaten anything.

I understand less and less about this country each day. 

Clubs

My friend was taken into custody for taking pictures near the American embassy. The cops were cool, though, and let the poor thing go with a warning. At the station, a question on the officer's report caught my friend off-guard.

Cop: Tribe?
F: What?
Cop: Your tribe?
F: I don't have a tribe.

The cop looked up, remembered he was speaking to an Austrian, and laughed.

There's something to be said about having a tribe.

The New York Times ran a story about the thousands of Native Americans being cast out of California tribes on a technicality (http://tinyurl.com/buosr9f).

They receive the news by mail.

Officially, I'm a member of three tribes. (Four, if you count New Yorker.) This is something I'd forget in the States and find myself constantly convincing other people of in Liberia. My middle name used to be something only long-term boyfriends earned the right to know. Here, it's a membership card, a secret password; it says, "Nevermind my accent: I'm one of you."

It also says, "Do not rip me off. I have people. And we will find you."

So to every Liberian I meet, I'm not Avril: I'm Massa. "Massa" rhymes with casa and broadcasts the tribe and county my dad was from. The listener always nods knowingly. Then I wait for the inevitable "Do you speak Vai?" which precedes the inevitable look of disappointment when I reply, "No. Not yet."

I am grateful there is no proper postal service lest they cast me out of my tribes by mail.

Tolstoy

The three of us sat in the front seat of an off-road vehicle to Cape Mount a few weeks ago. V manned the radio while I found myself happily feeding bites of flatbread to J as she drove in the dark. At one point, J mashed "chick" with "duckling" to describe how she felt.

Yesterday, I had another chickling encounter as I stood on Tubman Blvd, looking for a gap in traffic. Tubman is a 4-6 lane free-for-all with neither an an island nor traffic lights. It's a beast and crossing it is like playing Frogger. It scares me thoroughly.

I am 29.

So I'm sweating on the corner of Tubman and a little person appears beside me. It's a tiny girl. She's not even 7. She's in her uniform and she's looking up at me with huge, hopeful eyes. I'm a terrible person so I assume she wants to sell me something but she doesn't say a word. I step off the curb and forget all about her until I'm standing on the double yellow line in the middle of the road. Then I notice she's still standing next to me. And I realize she just wanted someone to cross with. She's got her that look on her face again so I wrap my fluffy wing around her and flip off drivers and we cross the rest of the way.

She forgets all about me when we reach the sidewalk and I watch her go.

Later, watching Into The Wild, I thought of my chicklings everywhere as the narrator quoted Tolstoy:

I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. 

A quiet secluded life in the country, 

with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good.

Photos of the Day

Spending two hours broken down here...

...on your way here...

...can be kind of fantastic.

BFF

Evidence suggests that adulthood is just high school, over and over again.

Personally, I'm starting to believe that we never leave kindergarten.

A friend got into a shared cab in which this happened.

Stranger: Hello.
Friend: Hi.
Stranger: Do you want to be my best friend?
Friend: Well, we've only just met. But we can get to know each other.
Stranger: So, you don't want to be my best friend.
Friend: We should probably hang out first.

Stranger flips out, muttering something about stingy foreigners.

On Friday, I was caught off-guard on a beach by a pack of 'tweens.

Pack Leader: We want to talk with you.
Me: OK. What do you want talk about?
Pack Leader: We want to make friends.
Me: Fine. We're friends.
Pack Leader: No, we want to be best friends.
Me: Oh. Well, that takes time.
Pack Leader: No, we can arrange it now.
Me: How?
Pack Leader: Well, we want to eat.
Me: And I see your associate has a basket of donuts beside her.
Pack Leader: Yes. Those are to sell.
Me: But you could just eat some, no?
Pack Leader: No. We want to sell to you.
Me: But I already ate.
Pack Leader: It is not for you to eat.
Me: Who is it for?
Pack Leader: For us.
Me: You want me to buy your donut and then give it to you so you can eat it?
Pack Leader: Not 'give.' Offer.
Me: But what kind of business is this?
Pack Leader: Not business. Friendship.
Me: I don't buy friendship.

The pack exchanged confused looks and backed away slowly.

It's exhausting to be asked for things all day. I'm going to be the worst parent.

Feist

Walking around Monrovia makes me hum this lyric all the time:

So much past inside my present

One of the coolest things about Liberians is their ability to refer to The War as though, in retrospect, it were just some ridiculous blip. The people are so strong: reminders of the death of a tenth of the population are everywhere.

I'm walking past a building I've passed countless times to and from my friend's house. Friend points it out one day.

J: See that church?
Me: Yeah.
J: Once, there were hundreds of bodies piled inside.
Me: What!?
J: It just became easier not to move them elsewhere.
Me: Wait - was it a church then?
J: Yep.
Me: And it's a church now?
J: Yeah.
Me: A church people use?
J: Definitely.
Me: So, it's not a monument?
J: No.
Me: Did they tear it down and rebuild it?
J: No!
Me: How could someone worship in there!?
J: Your people are very practical. 

Photo of the Day

Evidently, I camp

Buchanan, Grand Bassa, Liberia