“Côte d’Ivoire?”
I shook my head no.
“Cameroon?”
I shook again.
“Nigeria?”
Now he was reaching; unsure but determined to figure it out.
“American,” I offered with a smile. His turn to shake his head. “you are African,” he grinned at me, confident in his assessment.
He wasn’t alone in noticing me or in guessing my origins. Here, at least, the assumption is African. Later came Senegal and Ghana. But never American. Even after my more-than-butchered French with a helping of Spanish and a smattering of poorly pronounced Arabic – even after my perfect English – I was anything but…
Whatever I am, I have been well received. Walking through the medina in casablanca I came upon an open air bakery (one of the seven essentials for any Moroccan neighborhood) where women were expertly flattening dough onto hot griddles, dipping their hands in melted butter and then drizzling over the browning bread.
I’m from a long line of bread eaters so I was sold. Or rather I was trying to be sold. But the language barrier proved difficult to pass. The woman I’d been watching flip the long flat bread with such deft and precision pointed me to the counter. There, I tried some unsuccessful Arabic. A woman, purchase in hand and heading away from the counter, coached me on the pronunciation and then bid me farewell. Her kindness was followed by a man and his friend who helped me price and order – all while trying to figure out where I was from. Later, while I drank mint tea and happily munched on the simultaneously moist and flaky bread with oil glistening fingers, he sent over some Moroccan sweets.
The kindness continued. When I stopped to have some traditional Moroccan soup (different in every region) at a table amid a dozen other tables in the food portion of the plaza the old woman dishing out the tomato-based soup waved my payment away.
I ended my night evening with a hot shower…the first hot shower in seven months. Full, warm, and clean…sleep found me contented.
The dun colored expanse below was obscured by the thin haze of clouds. But the longer I gazed down at the ground speeding by I realized that it must be sand…not just sand but the sahara. And while I experienced my first taste of the sahara’s vastness in Egypt, there it felt contained. In cairo, despite air thick with sand and erupting with pyramids, the concrete and modern buildings provided a reprieve from the otherwise mind-parching reality of a desert as vast as the sahara.
But in morocco…in morocco the cities are ancient and the sand their oldest inhabitant. And so the architecture is the product and not the defiance of the sprawling desert.
I haven’t even seen it yet. Not in the flesh and brick and mosaic tile of it. Only photos sketching an immobile picture of life nestled between the ocean and mountains, and nestled in sand. Twenty thousand feet below me clouds continue to obscure my view of the seemingly infinite grains of sand below, and above the clouds I wait patiently for a formal introduction.
The humid air snuck through the thin cotton of my over-washed shirt and clung to my skin like a scared child. In the distance, thunderless lightning sparked like a dying flashlight in a dark room and I pulled out my sweater, unused in the last seven months, and wrapped it against the early morning chill.
This was my arrival in reverse. Cloaked in darkness, air rushing past open windows, the stench of rubber saturating the air, and anticipation…the persistent whisper, in every new thing, that something amazing was just ahead of me.
Only, disappointment followed me too. My lost nalgene bottle on the floor of the airport shuttle, the delayed flight due to ash so many miles away. And it is the incessant waiting that is brutal. The slow motion departure of sorts that leaves me still in Liberia at 5am with no hint of a goodbye.
And I’m still too close to make sense of it all. Still too close to see the forest for the trees. Right now I’m staring at trees so hard my eyelids have splinters. And so I sit in this terminal, the din of televisions destroying the early morning quiet, waiting for ash to settle, wind to blow, flights to land, so that my wooden myopia can gain some perspective.
He meant it as a surprise. Casual conversation destroyed that hope hope but still the sentiment remained. A kindness. A token to take with me wherever I go. And so last night was the party long in planning. People gathered in plastic chairs around a stereo system and I wondered exactly how it would go.
You see this wasn’t just a “hey come on over and we’ll hang out event”. This was beer and soft drinks stocked beyond any reasoning, heaps of jallof rice and a vat of goat soup. And then of course there was the program.
I hadn’t expected anything formal…but there was Jerry with the mic, cracking jokes and working through a short agenda before we got to the food. And so my imminent departure was announced – the reason for this gathering. I was introduced, followed by Sierra Leone – the guest celebrant and host celebrant respectively. I still find the title host celebrant unsettling…like he is eyeing my departure with an eagerness rather than reluctance.
SL spoke first…briefly, followed by my thank you to all those assembled for welcoming me to Liberia. Then Jerry picked up his guitar and played his faux Mende song a- as I’ve been requesting since the thank you party a few months ago.
After that it was all about food…food, drinking, and dancing. And so we ate and danced and danced and danced until around 11pm…then the trickle of people leaving turned into a steady stream as folks realized the current would be switched off in the next hour and they still had to find ways home and get settled into bed.
And so it ended. Out with a delicious dancing bang. My time here closing around me as I swivel my head for last looks. And on the horizon…what next echoes to me with no response.
Tags: friends, liberia, transition
It burned my finger, forcing me to drop it back into the bag to wait for it to cool. Impatient, I picked it up again, and when the heat became too much I put it between my teeth, blowing out to speed the cooling process. A few seconds later and the soft yellow-brown flesh succumbed to my bite. the caramelized edges crunched slightly and I swallowed through my smile.
They were perfect. Ten LD of perfection. Roughly 16 cent for sweet plantains hot from the metal bowl of palm oil nestled amid white hot coals.
Hot plantains are among the things I’ll miss when I leave here in a little over a week. Sweet plantains and wheelbarrows rolling down dusty streets hiding limitless surprises in their metal depths. I’ll miss strangers letting me hold their babies simply because the child smiled and I asked, and eating fresh mangos plucked from a tree – sugar-sweet pineapples taken straight from their bushes. I will miss colorful lappas on sale for 125 LD and the easy smile and soft laughter of people simply because I said, “e mama” (thank you in kpelle).
That says nothing of the people…nothing of the kindness and laughter and sometimes frustration that has greeted my time here.
Of course there are things from home that I anticipate (a lot of it food related), spinach salad with sun-ripened tomatoes and bacon. Hot water that flows from pipes with only the turn of a knob and ever-present electricity that does not succumb to the gasoline thirst of a generator. Transportation options and the absence of malaria.
That says nothing of the people…nothing of the love lavished on me long-distance and the embraces I look forward to melting into.
Tags: food, liberia, transition, travel
“he’s inside, sleeping,” she called to the vehicle. We had settled to a stop in front of a mud home with a woman, colorful lapa held loosely at her waist, bare-chested except for a red bra. She had been bent over cooking something on the open fire in the front yard.
“that is my older brother’s wife,” my colleague smiled proudly at me; then he shouted out the window to her, “go get him!”
More than the exchange itself, I was struck by the clothes…or rather the lack of them. When the brother emerged from the house, he was shirtless. A man easily in his 60s, I am still startled by how un-sixty bodies can look here.
Wheelbarrow bodies. Or water hauling bodies. Or washing bodies. The list goes on and on because everything here takes a strength and stamina that is enough to make my lazy body tired. Dinner is less a fast food sprint more slow food marathon. After walking to the market and carrying food back to the house there may be slaughter and plucking involved, coal and coal pot hauling, lighting and stoking, pounding of peppers or rice, more water hauling. And that’s just dinner.
No wonder the bodies here are so disproportionately beautiful. Long limbs and supple backs, and washboard abs all housed under beautiful dark red brown skin that mirrors the polished hardwoods harvested here.
And there is no age distinction – eight-year-old girls and 63-year-old men each do their share of the work and carry their share of the load and so have their evolution of that toned and fit body of work…hard work under the almost-equator sun.
And they are on display. nude ones washing themselves at the bank of the plentiful rivers, or slapping clothes against flat rocks to get them clean; children glistening under the sun as they take their morning baths or women breastfeeding, fat babies pulled close to them. Sometimes it is men relieving themselves on any number of objects (fences, trees, signs) or nothing at all – full frontal as I pass, or old women tending to their daily chores, lapa wrapped around her waist, with her flat breasts swinging low against her stomach.
I don’t know how all the skin I’ve seen fits into the modesty – or lack thereof – here. Generally, women wear long skirts that extend well beyond their knees but men, depending on their occupation, are often shirtless – farming and hauling wheelbarrows lend little need for a covered torso. I often see lapa wrapped women walking about tending to their morning or men in only boxer shorts idling beside their homes and greeting me as I pass.
On the spectrum between burquah and bare, I’m not exactly sure where Liberia falls.
Tags: fitness, health, liberia, observations, travel
The mine
Dark and dingy, we sat down at a table in the middle of the sparse room and were immediately greeted by one of two women behind the counter. Beers were ordered, and at insistence, a fanta for me. I eyed the place knowingly. Despite the two women and sundry kids – including a 10-year-old with a fat breast-fed four-month-old hoisted to her hip – I was uneasy.
As my male colleagues continued to drink leisurely, relaxing from the long day, I watched two separate groups of young and slightly agitated young men with elevated voices demanding beer. That never translates well – whatever the language.
Sure enough, half an hour later I watched that animation turn to violence as voices began shouting and punches were thrown. I peered after the crowd that sprinted from every direction in order to watch the seemingly hoped-for carnage.
After the fight and mob had moved beyond the storefront a police officer finally appeared and carried both offending parties away. We drove through the dwindling crowd, my eyes resting lightly on the graying gutted concrete skeletons that had once been homes, and the pitted asphalt that once was smooth.
Bong Mines used to be a “beautiful place” I was told. Before the war. “down there was the bank, that building used to be the administration building. More than 100 rooms, but most of them were underground.”
There is hope for reclaimed beauty and functionality. The Chinese are taking over the mine operations. A group arrived that day by train (lucky them, that road is brutal) to assess their investment. Rumors abound about changes…
Bong Mines, fighting aside, is buzzing. Hope simmers for jobs and infrastructure. For newness. For starting over. For an “after” to lessen the blow of the war’s “before”.
They were scattered beneath the sprawling shade of a lone tree reaching for the far-flung gray clouds in a blue sky. When our Toyota pulled up and we all clambered out, no one shifted anything more than a gaze. A child continued to suck from her mother’s breast, another crawled away from his twin, and women from a range of ages, talked quietly to each other. The air cooled dramatically under the shade of the tree, and in that shaded cool, a few dozen women and children waited.
They had walked for two hours; instructed to come to this place by the door-to-door polio teams, armed with drops of the live vaccine and chalk to mark the doors of the vaccinated – in some scrambled prevention Passover. Liberia is in the middle of a Polio Campaign. After being certified polio-free in 2008, 2009 brought 11 cases in six counties. This year there is one confirmed case – a four-year-old girl who has lost most of the use of her legs. And so this three-part campaign (march, april, may) was launched to fortify Liberia’s failing defenses against the ravages of polio.
Measles was added as a quiet outbreak sweeps slowly through the country – affecting those as young as 1 month and as old as the 22-year-old mother of two left blind from her bout with the disease.
In rural Liberia, however, vaccinations aren’t simply a matter of stopping by the doctor on your way to work – or even catching children at school. The roads, where they exist, are mostly dirt and rock, the walking paths narrow, the schools –few and unable to reach all the children. So the vaccines – along with the de-worming medicines and vitamin A – move up-country, into the expanse of landscape with villages and lone houses nestled randomly amid the green.
OPV, the oral polio vaccine used here, is portable in a way that measles, an injectable one, is not. Limited trained administers, dangerous biohazard, and possible reactions, forced the measles teams to anchor themselves to specific locations with children coming to them. And so the women under the tree had walked for hours through the heat, children hoisted onto their backs or walking slowly by their sides. and they waited.
Only, the measles’ team had moved to another village. An austere budget – the planning and monetary synergy of WHO, CDC, UNICEF, and the Liberian government – could only afford to fund 50 measles teams (two people per team) and 200 polio ones for the entire country. The result was a lot of walking.
Polio teams mobilized and walked hours, even days, into the dense green bush; rocky brown roads narrowing to serpentine foot paths beyond the reach of cars and motorcycles. Mothers and children in a reverse journey of rural to town, searched out the often distant measles’ sites.
Each day a new set of challenges. Grumbles abut insufficient team numbers, flowed into ones about insufficient vaccine quantities. By day five, the final day of the polio campaign (the measles will run for seven days) word came down from the Ministry of Health, in Monrovia, that the age-range for measles vaccinations had been increase from 9 to 59 months to 6 to 59 months. What about all the children that had already been missed? What would one mother think when her seven-month-old child was not vaccinated and another’s was?
But age issues weren’t the only concerns. Tally sheets were scarce. Training was assumed unnecessary because the first round campaign took place a month prior. Targets were insufficient, which lead to inadequate Mambendazone (for de-worming), vitamin A, and OPV supplies. Ice packs were melting.. And supervision was almost impossible.
Supervision was my part in all of this. To ensure that teams were busy meeting their targets the County Health Teams and partner representatives dispatched district supervisors– in complement to the national ones. Of course the logistics of this were complicated. Each morning the team of supervisors gathered at the County Health Department (CHD)before making their way to that day’s district. After driving, sometimes for hours, the teams usually arrived at a measles’ site because those were stationary.
the polio teams proved more elusive. Chance was the greatest predictor of supervisors meeting up with polio teams in the field. Instead, we looked for clues of their previous presence. The darkened finger on the left hand of the children who had received the vaccine; the chalked notation on the door or window; the brief chat with people washing clothes in the front of the house or napping under a tree – “were your children vaccinated?” then a pantomime of dropping the OPV into an open mouth or dispensing a shot into the arm.
It is a feat of epic proportions that is done often in the country. There are routine vaccinations that the CHD administers throughout the country in addition to these emergency campaigns. And they meet the same obstacles. In fact, someone mentioned that in a few weeks the whole process will begin again for hepatitis vaccinations. And maybe a little after that, the final leg of the polio campaign – set to comply with the hoped for global eradication date of June 2010.
It is impossible to tell how successful it has been. Instead success is fragile game of waiting to see if in a month or a year another four-year-old girl or seven-year-old boy nestled in a hard-to-reach corner of Liberia’s lushness loses the use of limbs…in the absence of that, we are cautiously optimistic.
Scents seize me. Hold me hostage to a moment- a memory. Sometimes the relationship – time and smell – is uneven, smell weighing so heavy against my senses that I can’t recall the memory itself. Cloaked by the heady emotion, I find myself pulling at the edges of my mind, coaxing that morsel of my personal history to recapture the cool smoothness of its texture or the tender hurt, a finger pressed lightly into a new bruise.
Strange scents call to me, things that are so simple or strange or common. The smell of Obsession for men– my freshman year crush who gave me a hug each day before algebra II last period. The mingled mothball and Chloe scent of my grandparents’ Beaumont home lingering quietly in the drawer of an inherited end table in my sister’s. The moist woody aroma of Muir woods on an overcast day with the hint of ocean somehow simultaneously close and distant. Ripe mangos sneaking their way through the sickly sweet assault of the overripe ones that have fallen to orange mush on the ground.
And then there are colors…the steel gray of a cloudy florida sky bleeding seamlessly into the gulf at panama city beach, the blinking san Francisco skyline against a wet indigo night, the orange of the backpack that has been on every international trip I’ve taken in the last 10 years.
But sound…sound is a more complex companion.
There is the mundane accompaniment to any day…cars racing down MLK in my Oakland existence, guinea fowl bantering with chickens in this one. My name dragged out affectionately by old friends – distorted to “Linda” by new ones. And then there is music.
I can go for months without seeking out music. I may hear something in passing, bob my head or even sing along, but for months I won’t scan radio stations or play favorite mp3s despite having them in abundance. And then something will strike me – a feeling, something ethereal, or insubstantial will resonate somewhere in the heart of me and I’ll reach for a song, an album, a melodious mood and play it over and over. A conversation my heart begins without my ears.
In South Africa it was Blk Sonshine –buoyant and resonant, New Zealand was Rascal Flats, sentimental and melancholy, my last semester at Tulane it was P!nk’s I’m not dead and Lupe Fiasco, loud and bassy enough to drown out the memory of Katrina rains and an uncertain future. This section of my life is filled with 10 or songs, in addition to all things Brandy, that play on eternal loop in every car, from every radio, and the one club I’ve been too.
Oddly, as much as I’m sure those will remind me of Liberia…it is Youssou N’Dour and Duncan Shiek’s, Wake Up I’m Going Back to Sleep. It speaks to me about Liberia. Maybe the conflict of title or the feeling that it inspires – something uncertain and unnamable, something apprehensively beautiful.
Tags: liberia, observations, travel
Last night I had a small meltdown. This was not a “no wire hanger – ever” kind of affair. In terms of melt, it was like stubborn government cheese; it gave around the edges but stayed mostly as it was. But still…
It wasn’t anything spectacular or big or especially heinous. Instead, I found myself responding strangely to something I’ve dealt with a hundred times: the current going out. It turned off as scheduled. It was midnight and I was sprawled across the bed bored and waiting for sleep. But as the room fell to unfocusable black I realized I hadn’t organized myself properly, I wasn’t sure where my flashlight was and I couldn’t find my house shoes; both necessary for padding to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
And so I had a mini – mostly internal – tantrum. All of a sudden I wanted electricity. I wanted to know to be able to flip a switch and have a room encased in shadow flood with light. I wanted my night to be dictated by my personal clock and not by the generator’s gas guzzling belly.
If I hadn’t extended my time here by three weeks I’d be in Monrovia right now preparing to depart Liberia. And while I’d still be held hostage to generators’ whims I would be a little closer to unblinking internet, potable water pouring forth gratuitously from faucets, and leafy green vegetables (and rice krispie treats) brimming from my plates – yes plates, as in plural!
It passed quickly. My little cheese hissy-fit passed in a moment and I drifted off to sleep. This morning I started the day with no hint of cheese on my face…three weeks and counting, I’m holding the cheese at bay.
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