It's Always Sunny

I forgot to mention that I drive a taxi.

More accurately, because I can't drive stick, I sit shotgun in what appears to be a Liberian cab.

I am constantly being hailed; this week, someone nearly climbed in the backseat.

The car in question is a Nissan Sunny. I have never had a car and know, like, zero things about vehicles but of all possible cars, my mother gifted me a taxi.

With stick shift.

(My mom has a peculiar sense of humor.)

The Sunny -- and the three-month fog -- got me thinking a lot about all things bright.

I was in the Sunny the other day and the driver stopped for a pedestrian. The girl froze and stared into my car until someone honked and broke her trance. 

"She's looking at you," the driver laughed.

"I doubt that," I said. "She's looking at you."

"Why would she look at me, black as I am? She was looking at you. She saw another bright person and thought it was a mirror."

In Liberia, bright has nothing to do with smarts or luminosity: bright is a skin color. 

I have seen bright people and I am not one of them. Due in part to German ancestry, I think I fall into the red category, as was concluded in the maternity ward many, many years ago.

In Liberia, nearly everyone has exactly the same dark, gorgeous skin so outliers draw notice. And classification.

One day, I saw a car full of uniformed albino kids and wondered if they were being collected, like action figures. Albinism is unusually common Africa (1 in 4,000 compared with 1 in 20,000 worldwide). Thankfully, albinos in Liberia are generally well-regarded (unlike, say, here).

Skin color can be pretty incendiary, as President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf recounts in her autobiography:

Early on during my historic 2005 campaign for the presidency of Liberia, rumors began to circulate about my ethnicity. My detractors began whispering that I was an Americo-Liberian, a descendant of one of those first American-born founders of our land — and thus a member of the elite class that had ruled our nation for long. This was an explosive charge. It could not be brushed off or ignored, not if I wanted to win. It was crucial that the people of Liberia know my background was not unlike their own. 

Madam President is Gola, Kru and German.

She is hovering somewhere between bright and red. Maybe she's bright red, I don't know.

Etiquette

A guy came into my office to have a chat. But the chat wasn’t with me: he was already on the phone. And he stayed on the phone. For thirty minutes.

I didn’t have the energy to explain how strange this was so I put my iPod on and kept working.

Then he pulled my headphones off, which crossed the damn line. “You need an audience for your phone call?”

“No,” he said. “I have a question.”

“You can ask me when you're done.”

I went to the kitchen to retrieve my lunch and returned, headphones in place. And after I’d eaten, he hung up and asked why I hadn’t shared my lunch with him.

“You don’t even eat lunch.” (Note: this is true of many Liberians.)

“That’s not the point. You sat here in front of me and you ate all of your food.”

“This is my office.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

So now, somehow, I’m the ass in this story.

Not five minutes later, I walked into another trap.

“When are you going back home?” he asked.

“Home to the States?”

“Is the States ‘home’?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And when does Liberia become ‘home’?”

“When I feel at home here.”

“Will you stay long enough for that to happen?”

“I may check out East Africa.”

“Alone?”

“No.”

“With your boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

{Long silence}

“What now?” I asked.

“You need to soften your Western values with African ones.”

“What?”

“You can’t just move around the continent with a man you’re not married to.”

“Oh?”

“It’s not correct.”

“I’m not racing to get married so that Africans can sleep soundly.”

“Nor would I.”

“What if I got engaged? Would everyone be satisfied?”

“That would be fine.”

“What if I pretend to be engaged? How authentic does this need to be?”

“That’s between you and God.”

I feared I was about to blow his mind and ended the conversation.

A Recipe

I'm feeling hella prolific this week so I'm gonna go with it.

My mom's had about 400 boyfriends; of them, I've liked only two.

The first turned out to be very, very married, which put me off guys for a decade or so.

The other -- the current one -- is losing his leg right...now.

I am so pissed off.

Disaster

Cook Time: 2 months

Total Time: 2 months and 5 days

Yield: Serves 1

Ingredients:

2 cups diabetes

2 cups denial

2 cups Liberian machismo

2 cups procrastination

1 doctor

1 witch doctor

1 flight to the States

Preparation:

Combine. Wait. 

Phobia

On Sunday, while my friends were floating (drunk) down a river, I was at home, sobbing into a long-distance phone call because in my kitchen was a spider the size of my hand. (And, as Brian and Melanie will attest, I have massive hands for a girl. I could palm a basketball on a hot day.)

But I digress.

This monster was sitting on a box of Kashi that, incidentally, I can no longer look at.

I don't know if you've been to the tropics -- in truth, I have yet to go into the bush (uhh...forest) of Liberia -- but I'm pretty sure the insects are on steroids. And you really don't know what tricks they're up to. Do they bite? Will I die? Are there wings tucked away somewhere? 

So there I was, scream-crying as I beat this thing with a Windex bottle while the jerk on the phone just laughed and laughed. 

And now I don't sleep because surely there's an angry mate somewhere. Waiting. 

This now ranks #1 on a list of Traumatic Moments Since Leaving the States. 

The previous #1 took place a week into my stay when a see-through lizard fell from the ceiling. Of my 5-by-5-foot bathroom. Needless to say, the Sonicare went flying and a showdown ensued because you cannot -- cannot -- just go to bed or forget about it. No: the enemy you were kind enough to overlook might crawl into your sleeping mouth or lay eggs in your face (thank you very much, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark). 

No: you remember the Native American's story from Natural Born Killers that goes,  "Once upon a time, a woman was picking up firewood. She came upon a poisonous snake frozen in the snow. She took the snake home and nursed it back to health. One day the snake bit her on the cheek. As she lay dying, she asked the snake, 'Why have you done this to me?' And the snake answered, 'Look, bitch, you knew I was a snake.'"

Amen.

It's a jungle out there. And not that concrete nonsense -- a real jungle. And I want it far, far away from me.

In other news, I work in environmental conservation.

Kerouac

There are several -- but not many -- kinds of people.

Among them are the Dean Moriarty types, "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."

And there are the Sal Paradise types, about whom the Dean Moriartys say, "Don’t you think, Carlo, there’s a kind of a dignity in the way he’s sitting there and digging us, crazy cat came all the way across the country."

I’m that guy.

I don’t go to parties: I watch them. I flew clear across the world just to do what I do: lean against things and chronicle while the people around me enjoy themselves.

This makes me a real freak of nature in Liberia, where talking -- that is to say, stringing words together at length for some unfortunate captive audience -- is the national pastime.

Instead, I type. I scribble. I snapshot.

This is blog post number one-hundred and one.

Makes all my leaning against things worthwhile.

Dr. Spock

Last week, I watched two people hail a cab in Monrovia.

Each was 7 -- maybe 8 -- years old. 

(And I thought I was pushing it on subways at 13.)

Despite VICE guides and World's Worst lists and Wikipedia articles, Liberians confidently send their little ones out into the world each day. 

There are no known kidnappings.

Parenting looks very different in Liberia: there are no school buses or foam-padded playgrounds. (There are, however, plenty of Crocs.) Every day I spot youths selling single sticks of Winterfresh between lanes of cars during rush hour. Babies tied to their mothers in cloth take six-person taxi rides and motorbikes. Almost any elder is "Pa" or "Auntie" and you can totally spank your niece or neighbor: the child belongs to the community. (DNA be damned! Apparently, it takes a village.)

Parenting took on a new form today on my way from work when I spotted a woman (a first!) selling newspapers between lanes of cars during rush hour.

She was 7 -- maybe 8 -- months pregnant. 

Invasion

This morning, I woke up covered in ants. That was new. It was also extremely annoying. On the plus side, the ants were of the non-biting variety but that's beside the point. I don't like the unknown creeping up on me.

Understandably, then, Liberians wouldn't come within 24 feet of me the week I had the flu. (These people will trek to work in the throes of typhoid but an American-style fever freaks them out.)

Alien things can be scary.

For example, a Swede brought this ridiculous thing into our home. It's fish in toothpaste form. It is now the first and only thing I see when I open the fridge.

It's scarier than the ants.

Gibi

One day, Will drags me to see Mount Gibi.

Why boys need to spend a Saturday driving to a sad, creepy mountain, I don't know. It isn't tall or even interesting apart from the fact that the mountain is haunted.

But that's another story.

We stop somewhere to ask for directions and villagers all but hide when they hear where we're going.

At last, we ask a rational-looking young man if we're on the right road. And he says, "Yes."

Will asks, "How far from here?" and the villager says, "Three hours."

It's hot and I'm miserable so I'm ready to strangle Will when I remember something clutch about him and about Liberians. So I ask the young man, "Three hours...on foot?"

"Of course."

"But we're not on foot," I say from the Jeep. And the villager nods and says, "Correct."

"My friend, how far is it by car?"

"Ten, maybe fifteen minutes."

Insight: I miss you, old pal. 

Protect and Serve

Today I got pulled over for, seriously, no reason. And the cops hovered outside my window, waiting for me to pay them off.

It was 9:14am.

I'm well aware of the way things work in Liberia: X earns Y dollars/month and expects Z to supplement it, which Z does in order to get to Q on time.

This happens over and over again in every aspect of daily life.

So now you've got a lot of undercompensated people throwing around what small power they have to get a few extra bucks or a free beer or whatever. Often, they don't even have to ask for a bribe -- people can smell it on them. So citizens roll their eyes and toss money out their car windows and speed off and the behavior is reinforced. Extortion is so easy, it's stupid. And one day, you find yourself doing it just for fun, because nobody stops you.

Personally, I wouldn't give five Liberian dollars ($0.07 USD) to a cop so I sat there for 45 minutes calmly playing Tetris until they got bored and let me go.

I'm probably going to get my ass kicked one day. The fight against corruption is a lonely one.

Makeshift

Gas station + chairs = bar

Fence + mirror + clippers = barber shop

Table + fruit + cookies = deli

Strapping young men + wheelbarrows + housewares = Walmart

One motorbike + three Liberians = taxi

One van + fifteen Liberians = bus

One pickup truck + fifteen well-dressed Liberians = wedding party

Underwear + ocean = swimsuit

Tree limb + hangers = thrift store

Teeth + beer = bottle opener

Intuition + ingredients = recipe

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.