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It was exquisite. Despite sleep still pressing lightly on my senses, I could hear it in the distance. I mistook it for a call to prayer – the voice clearly singing Arabic – but the sound was not a call to prayer, it was music. And at the far reaches of 5am, the sun still […]
Soft like the final raindrops of a lingering storm – its rage exhausted – I heard the patter footsteps. My paraffin lamp pinned my shadowed self to the dark walls while my flesh self crouched on a wooden chair hugging my knees and repeated a whispered mantra over and over. “please don’t get into my […]
She didn’t make a sound. Her small eyes looked left and right, not quite fixing on any one thing. But she didn’t cry. She was noiseless. It was larger this time. Ill-fitted to her tiny body. Her soft feet and hands seemed so insubstantial – weightless – against the enormity of her swelling head. Little […]
An 8-year-old Chad D. has had a lasting impression on me. Twenty years ago, when I made a rather lucrative teenage living from babysitting, I was preparing a snack for that precocious little boy when he uttered, “they’re only weevils.” My hand was in a bag of bread preparing to make him a sandwich, but […]
“do you like mangos?” “in Sierra Leone we have different types,” Sierra Leone said. “there is one kind, sheep tongue, that—“ In interrupted him there, “sheep tongue?” I made a face, “That doesn’t sound like anything I want to put in my mouth.” “not tongue, tone. T.O.N.E.” “oh, that’s better,” I smiled. “see, in Creole […]
There are times when the generosity and kindness of Liberians makes it easy to forget that the country was ravaged by war – or the crisis, as it is often referred. But little things prick the memory and I am reminded. More than the pin pin boys on flashy motorcycles dodging in and out of […]
The falls the falls People have been talking about Kpatawee since I got here. Eyes glaze over in a look of pure joy and heads shake in wonder. That show of enthusiasm is followed, most often, by a promise to organize a trip to take me. A promise broken more times than I care to […]
I’m on a porch in the cool evening. The last orange embers of the cooking coals smolder in the distance – light without illumination – their glow does not penetrate the black. The lightening has subsided. What had been an amazing show of God and nature, flashing streaks of white against purple in the curiously […]
The smell is what got to me. Despite the buffet of assaults to my sight and sensibility of norms and expectations, it is always the smell of antibiotics – thick as smoke –that permeates the hospital. In the past it has stopped me from venturing beyond the admin area, but today I had purpose that […]
generosity
She looked at me a little confused. Her nose, in the center of a clear teak complexion, crinkled slightly as she shook her head. “hair is something we do as friends, you don’t pay for it.” I had pulled out LD ready to pay her as much for her cornrowing skill (I have more hair […]
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