Hmm.

Liberians have a different concept of time than I do so when I entered the living room yesterday I immediately assumed, "April Fools'?"

After a quarter century in New York and forty months in San Francisco, I have officially had my house broken into.

If you can call it that.

The only item taken, you see, was Super Scrabble. (RIP, friend.)

Photos to come.

The Boat

I have a friend who once decided to leave the States for two years. As he packed, I began to panic: what if he was The One? (In retrospect, this was a ridiculous idea; I think he's still laughing about it.) Google has failed me but somewhere there exists a dialogue to the effect of:

-You missed the boat.
-What boat?
-The boat that, when it comes in, is a boat but when it leaves, is a ship.

Below rear-window Madonna and Manchester stickers, many cabs in Monrovia have a little message. The messages are referred to as Taxi Wisdom. Taxi Wisdom is painted only on the back bumper, though, so you can't read it on an approaching car.

It only hits you as the car is pulling away.

Taxi Wisdom says a lot about Liberians -- mostly, that they are God-fearing people. My favorite is TROUBLE CAN'T LOOK FOR MAN.

I think it reminds me of friends who hand me their tattered lives and say, "Here. Fix this." Maybe it reminds me of me, making ships out of boats and forgetting I'm on a yacht.

A Life in the Day

One of the coolest stories I've ever read is six words long.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

I am never going to write anything that sad and perfect but a girl can try. I present to you: a housekeeper.

Loved books. Husband ran: scrubs flats.

The Crosswalk

Last week, after failing to find a pool hall, I passed a man standing proudly on his knees on the corner of Broad St. 

"Will, what's happening?"
"He's crossing the street."
"On his knees?"
"His legs are damaged."
"Why isn't he in a wheelchair?"
"I guess he prefers to walk."

I couldn't believe it: the streets are unnavigable enough on foot or by car. Under the same circumstances, I'm pretty sure I'd go the Homer Simpson route ("They have chairs with wheels? And here I am using my legs like a sucker").

I ran through all the reasons someone would make a difficult life more difficult. Then I thought of a friend who once confessed that his greatest fear was paralysis. (This had never even occurred to me as an option: my own recurring nightmares involve free fall and silent assailants.)

Could it be that some people, above all, simply want to carry their own bodies across this earth?

I didn't dare ask the man anything; I knew how it would go.

"Sir, why are you walking?"
"I'm too tired to jog."

"Sir, do you need help?"
"Yes. I've been waiting on this corner for you for twenty years."

"Sir, is your wheelchair nearby?"
"No. It's in the shop, along with my Mercedes."

Instead I went home, where I sat on a chair and talked myself out of a run.

True Love Waits

(Note: The title of this post is a Radiohead song. I have not completely lost my mind.)

Someone I know was on the prowl, met a guy and made the mistake of hitting it off before asking him The Question.

The Question is not "Are you straight?" (if you, yourself, are straight) or even "Are you in a relationship?" (which, apparently, is not a dealbreaker here).

"How long are you in Liberia?"

"Four months."

End of conversation.

I had a friend who was never quite sure who she was, having spent every second year of her youth somewhere new. This always sounded so cool but now I see the downside: people without roots seem strange, fly-by-night. They're poor social investments. The expats who are here long enough see friends and lovers leave in cycles and it can be excrutiating. Eventually, you assess whether people are worth knowing by their answers to The Question.

The thing is, though, that contracts get unexpectedly renewed and life back home can lose its shine from afar. Four months has been known to stretch three years. Plans change. I, for example, was supposed to be starting an MBA stateside this August. I assure you that that is no longer the case.

I blame this entirely on my answer to The Question.  I should have said "Not long" and been a social pariah, alone with my books and homeward bound.

The Walking Dead

I am not ashamed to say it: I have long feared a zombie apocalypse and went out of my way not to watch The Walking Dead.

It found its way into my room anyway, though, so I inhaled all of Season One in a day.

It was not my best-laid plan: I am now positive that the end is near.

Living in Monrovia doesn't exactly ease my concern.

Half the times I leave a parked car, I'm beseiged by beggars and amputees. They can smell the the guilt on me. And when I return, the car is being watched (read: sat on) by 1-5 self-appointed guards who then claw at my windows, enraged by my escape. 

I heard that someone visiting Monrovia once announced, "I am not here to nourish you!" Fair. I wanted to scream the same thing recently: sometimes, you see, the creature that wants a piece of you doesn't even approach you like a man -- it creeps into your water and eats you from the inside as I learned when I awoke looking well into my third trimester. Let me present my new friend, Giardia, a lovely little parasite that latched onto my intestine and fed its ass off.

Shooting it in the head wasn't an option and my pickaxe was not where I left it so I took a pill and hoped for the best.

There better be a cure for all of this (my irrational stupidity, included) in Season Two.

Chia

This week, I acquired a papaya the size of my thigh.

The market-woman was cradling it like a baby.

I don't know how effective this was but you never know: strange things happen during development in Liberia.

I think it's the heat.

According to Liberian legend, a woman noticed her housekeeper striding into puberty and promptly beat the girl's chest with a wooden spoon, hoping to stall nature (and her husband's advances).

The motorbike drivers, the wheelbarrow pushers, the roving ex-combatants -- tough-as-nails young men -- almost always look trapped in perma-youth like dolls or preserves.

And small children gyrate wildly to songs whose lyrics make me blush (or, you know, my version thereof). It's as though they were born with grown-up swagger (or, at the very least, moves like Jagger).

I wonder if, at any point, the housekeepers and tough guys and gyrating children got cradled as sweetly as that papaya (which, for the record, was amazing. I think it was the heat).

Talk

There are less than four million people in Liberia.

A third of them live in the capital.

And they all know each other.

I'm talking names, ancestors, youthful follies, family scandals. All your business is public knowledge because

            Small-town familiarity
      + Story-telling culture
+ Close quarters
            = High-speed gossip mill

Forget the internet: word spreads like wildfire in Monrovia.

First, there was the rumor that the Vice President died overnight in December. This belief had so thoroughly permeated the working class that I called my mother to confirm. She hung up on me, still laughing.

And there was the one about people buried on the beach and suffocating in containers during last year's riots. This so incensed the opposition that my journalist and governance buddies took police escorts and went exploring. (I sat in the car where it was cool and where I was safe from future lectures from Mom.)

There are, of course, the rumors that turn out to be true. And pics of political leaders in threesomes make fantastic roadside billboards. 

Photo of the Day

Between this and this, I think I'm beyond surprise this week.

So when I stood eating cereal at 7am and saw a frog leap across the living room, I didn't blink. I didn't even stop chewing. I just nodded, said "Of course" to nobody and watched the water for a while.

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.