My sweet little man. That bright-smiled deep-dimpled love of my heart.
Elijah.
I at once craved and dreaded seeing my little angle. Excited because his smile, his laugh, his breast-fed plumpness and joy brings a smile to my face so easily; dreaded because to see him again means his mother is still sick.
And so my heart rose and fell when his aunt called out to me. He was asleep on her back, head partially obscured so that it took a moment before I recognized him. I cooed softly over his sleeping form and then turned my attention to the woman carrying him.
“does this mean she is still bleeding?”
A few weeks ago Elijah’s mother had presented at the Outpatient Department but was referred to the hospital. She had been bleeding since his birth – four months prior. They ordered a D and C and hoped that would take care of the problem. Seeing Elijah asleep under the tree meant it hadn’t.
“she is still bleeding,” the aunt answered me. “they have given her all of this,” here she opened her bag to show an assortment of baggies filled with different colored pills and four bottles of long acting penicillin.”
I asked a few questions, “Do they know what is wrong? What are the drugs for? Will she be cured?” There weren’t an abundance of answers and so I reached for the sleeping figure. His aunt jostled him lightly but I urged her to let him sleep.
He slept in my arms, heavy on breast milk, but soon began to stir. He stared up at me without recognition but didn’t cry. A few moments later, fully alert, he smiled toothlessly up at me, all gums and dimples and bright eyes. And so I sat and played with him, much more active this time – using his legs to spring about. People passed by and remarked on my little man, my tiny husband.
I exchanged phone numbers with his aunt and gave a final nuzzle to his soft brown neck before walking home. A little while later, camera in hand, I went looking for the family – eager to capture a photo of the child that captured my heart so easily. But they were gone. Maybe it is best…things that live in the memory are often sweeter than anything that might try to capture it.
Even so…I may venture out to the village where they live…maybe take some rice or fruit…say hello and goodbye to my little love.
In defiance of all generalizations and laughingly agreed upon norms among my Liberian and American friends, Liberians were the first to arrive at our party- well before any Americans showed their faces. First was Belecca, friend in tow, dressed to the nines in a lapa suit I’d never seen and a fancy head wrap.
I hadn’t even bathed yet and food was still smoking on two of the three coal pots assembled in the yard.
Murky water running off of my body as I hurriedly showered, I rejoined my guests and marveled as people continued to trickle in. it wasn’t even 2:30 yet. Never mind we’d said it all began at 2pm, food served at 3, we really hadn’t expected people before 3pm. We were, of course, wrong.
And so people streamed in, seating themselves on the periphery of shade that had shifted since we arranged the chairs. Men sat farthest from the house, the women down from them, natural separated selection like a 7th grade dance.
BushDiva birthed the idea of this “thank you/farewell” party a few weeks ago. We chatted about it and made imaginary plans but didn’t put anything into motion until about a week ago. Then all of a sudden we figured out it was do or don’t and wanted to do. Our first inclination was American. We began to sketch out a guest list. Even as we began to draw it up I knew it wouldn’t work – it wasn’t African and it surely wasn’t Liberian. And so invitations were extended to the County Health Department, Africare, Save the Children, and most people we have any connection to.
Of course the problem with inviting everyone is expense. And so we still held to little Americanism…there were folks who didn’t get an invitation to our dismay…but a good swath of the folks we know were invited and a good many were assembled in our backyard today.
Food finally served – jallof rice, bbq chicken, apple cider vinegar coleslaw, baked beans, pasta salad, and hot dogs- our friend from Cuttington offered up his voice and guitar playing to entertain those gathered. His efforts were met with enthusiasm. And so he sang and we listened and clapped and urged him on. The breeze picked up, cooling the afternoon heat and ushering in gray clouds that threatened rain overhead. But jerry was able to finish his last song and dessert was served before the first drops fell from the sky.
People scrambled home seeking dry space and a few of gathered on our porch, laughing and talking and snacking on leftovers.
Stragglers wandered in well into the night, and we served up food and snacked and talked and laughed. Wine’s sons came by mumbling “happy birthday” to me as they entered – unaware of the reason for the gathering. The little boy next door who sometimes fetches water happened by and received a bowl of rice and a piece of chicken (which promptly “rewarded” us with two other little boys standing at our door and looking expectantly up at BushDiva and anticipating food that was not left to give).
And then it was just us. The dishes clean, final morsels of food stored. Moments frozen in digital space ready to be retrieved at our leisure. And although it was “thank you” more than goodbye, despite having at least a month stretched out before me, it was a glimpse into what I’ve built here and, ultimately, what I’ll leave behind.
Tags: food, friends, liberia, transition, travel
They are often yellow. Technically they are cars. The similarity between Liberian taxis and American ones ends there.
Even outside of California’s extreme, where the rules of vehicle maintenance seem to border on impossible to maintain, there are limits to the jalopy-ness permissible in a motor vehicle. All the more so if people will be paying you to ride in it.
But earlier this week I climbed into a taxi and patiently waited for it to fill. And fill it did. Four adults in the back seat – a common number, four in the front* – less common. Add to that a four-year-old, a tw- month-old, and two guys standing on the back bumper as we swerved around pot holes and other taxis, and it felt less taxi more clown car.
On the less populated front, today I rode home in a taxi (only seven people total inside and out) that had fumes streaming directly the car from the trunk and through the back seat. The faster we drove the thicker the plumes of gray smoke curled around our heads and left us dizzy and gasping for breath.
As one of my fellow passengers complained that it wasn’t healthy, the driver huffed an indignant reply about his car being broken.
Yeah, we could kind of tell that as we all began to suffer from carbon monoxide poisoning.
We managed the eight or so miles (roughly 20 minutes), but all the while I watched as pin pins laced their way between cars packed to the brim and hobbling along the cobbled road. How I longed for that fresh air ride…alas, only taxis are in my immediate future.
*in case you are wondering, you fit four adults in the front seat by sitting an extra person in each front seat. Keeping in mind that cars here are all manuals, which means that the driver has a passenger sharing his seat and he shifts gears around that person. And of course, there are usually two people in the passenger seat so that is a given.
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 blushing below the horizon, I heard the music in spite of the competing cricket serenade.
I lay in bed, the chill of the morning resting lightly on top of that voice sharing beauty – sunrise caught in song before catching in clouds, joy in sound, love in music.
I listened and then fell again to sleep, guided there by soft singing in the early morning.
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 bed. Please don’t get into my bed.”
It was silly even as I rocked on that chair near tears – maybe nearer than not. But the spider, the size of my fist, large enough to trigger footfalls on my concrete floor, inspired a conversation with God and whoever spiders answer to. And it was under those circumstance, under that specific “new to South Africa, the darkness, the loneliness” duress, that I struck the deal.
Simple.
The spiders stayed out of my bed, didn’t climb up my mosquito net and nestle inconspicuously on my pillow or beneath my covers, and I wouldn’t kill them. It was a live and let live deal. After all, spiders are helpful, they eat other insects. As the weeks and months passed I would marvel as I watched those spiders, flat and still against the shiny wall, termite or mosquito wings dangling from an invisible mouth.
I adhered to my original pact even when a friend came to visit, her shoe or a book poised to slam down on one of my 8-legged – if not friend, definitely not enemy. I honored the deal and forced her to leave that spider alone.
Ten years later and it is as much habit as belief in a fear-filled plea struck in the dark. Ten years later and I had not purposefully killed a spider…until tonight.
Charlotte has been living in my closet for a few weeks now. It wasn’t my favorite set up, she was prone to hiding out in clothes, her resting place only discovered as I tried to get dressed and was startled by her movements or the contrast of her large brown body against a green tank top or white t-shirt. Even so, despite my vocal chastising laced with profanity, I never thought about killing her. We had a deal after all.
technically she never broke our pact. I never saw her on my bug tent let alone in it. But tonight I opened my closet to find her hovered over something large and white. I’d seen it before on other spiders in the house and deduced (whether accurate or not) that it was an egg sack.
It made me gag.
I don’t know why. Spiders on their own don’t freak me out. The huge flying roaches aren’t my favorite, nor the myriad other crawling, flying, more-legs-than-me having creatures but…the white sack beneath her belly, her offensive positioning, made my skin crawl. I didn’t scream exactly but the sound I made was loud and disapproving. BushDiva was already zipping up her bug tent for protection as I entered her room.
I lingered there, in front of her tent for a while before heading back into my room armed with the saccharine smelling insect spray. Charlotte seemed to understand this would be our final showdown. She positioned herself in front of one of my bags lying on the floor of the closet and seemed to have more than eight legs as she arranged herself.
The spray only seemed to graze her. I watched her scurry away, climb onto my camera case and then onto a plastic bag and out of sight in my closet. I retreated to BushDiva’s room again to wait out the wrath of Charlotte…after all, I broke the pack.
But there was no wrath, just Charlotte, her legs curled beneath her and the white sack, still and lifeless on my closet floor.
BushDiva helped me sweep her outside and I promptly zipped myself into my bug tent fearful that all the spiders in the house – understanding my treachery – would descend on the mesh of the hut in protest.
Even aside from that expectation I feel guilty. Silly I know but, Charlotte’s only crime was being huge and carrying the next generation of herself around on her belly. It is too late for guilt now, she has surely been washed away in the persistent rain that has been falling for hours…I may have to find a new chair, hug my knees to my chest, and sing a new spider mantra under the dim light of a 50 watt bulb…I hope not.
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 Grace. Hydrocephalic. Abandoned.
The nurses named her Grace. And perched behind her shallow bed is a cardboard donation box with, “help take care of me” scrawled in black marker. Grace lies quietly. A winter cap stretches over her head much as her skin stretches over her skull. Tiny blue veins are visible beneath her near translucent latte-colored skin.
I spoke softly to her, cooing in what I hope was a soothing tone, stroked her tiny foot – smaller than my smallest finger, and prayed a quick prayer that she is painless. She was silent under my voice, my touch, my prayer.
The nurses named her Grace – I hope grace finds her.
Tags: health, liberia, observations
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 the bread was moving and I recoiled in horror.
Ten years later this story floated to my memory as I prepared dinner for myself in a darkened kitchen in rural South Africa. I poured pasta into boiling water and noticed dark flecks floating atop the white foam. I shrugged, stirred, and said to myself, “they’re only weevils.”
I have seldom made my mother laugh as heartily as she does when she recalls my recounting of that moment in a letter home.
Alas, the bane of my Liberian existence is actually ants. Found in various destructive variations there is one tiny breed that infiltrates everything from maggi cubes to sour patch kids (no matter how well they seem sealed or far removed they are hanging.
Of course my most recent run in with the little cretins is my own fault. BushDiva has made it her mission to ant-proof everything and so now we store our sugar in a glass jar with a screw top. We’ve had no problem…but then of course I got distracted one day while making lemonade. I left the lid partially off and returned to find ants by the hundreds plunging one after the other into their granular paradise.
AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
What to do what to do?
Drink the little buggers. And so I do. Tonight a glass of lemonade sits beside me and I sip away on my protein fortified beverage. After all, they’re only…well…they aren’t even weevils, they are only ants!
It isn’t the grossest thing I’ve eaten (a pilchard, mayonnaise and bean sandwich at a South African event beats out mupani worms, weevils, and ants for that glory) or the strangest. Since I’ve been in Liberia I’ve taken on some – we’ll say different – eating norms. Tonight’s dinner consisted of spaghetti with boiled eggs (gotta get my protein) and my new favorite treat is an improvised pad thai courtesy of a friend at Africare (cook ramen noodles in just a small amount of water and mix in the flavor packet with peanut butter, add sautéed onions, garlic, and hot peppers, and a scrambled egg and enjoy). Not bad not bad at all…
Even so…I can’t wait for a big thick juicy rare steak with a loaded baked potato!
“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 tone is testicles.”
“so your favorite kind of mango is named for sheep balls?” laughter was rising up in my chest and I was barely containing hysterics.
“when I first heard the name I wondered, because tone is a very crude word in Creole. So I bought it out of curiosity and compared it to a sheep’s…you know…” he paused here, “it does look like sheep’s tone,” Sierra Leone smiled deviously and added, “and they are delicious.”
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 traffic or the “don’t rape” posters plastered at clinics and on billboards beside the road, the speed to anger and the shell of towns alert me to a not-so-distant past.
Last week a missing young woman’s body was discovered in Voinjama. Shot. Dismembered.
It is difficult to get reliable information but what I have cobbled together is that for some reason the Christians in the area blamed the Muslims, and so they burned the mosque. The Muslims, in retaliation, burned the Catholic Compound. And then a collective chaos broke out – burning and shooting into the night and the days to follow.
Peace Corps finally evacuated its volunteers from the area. One, previously evacuated from two other countries, was familiar with the religious tensions in the region. “it isn’t an isolated event here in Liberia,” she said. “in fact, when they told me I was going to Voinjama and I looked at a map, I had a bad feeling.”
So she and another volunteer are headed down to Monrovia- and probably home. Meanwhile, I call america to ask friends and family to investigate online what I have difficulty finding out on the ground. According to the radio today, a policeman shot someone and then was burned by a mob. I’m still unsure of that incident’s connection to the religious tensions but…the quickness to anger is commonplace.
This weekend at Kpatawee, as we prepared to leave, we watched as a small man was held by several other men and someone kicked him repeatedly. Gutz stepped in, angry and shouting, and soon there was shouting and posturing all around. It seems the beaten man was driving his motorcycle with the man beating him on the back. They fell. The man was angry.
But beyond the flashes of anger, there is a quieter reminder of the crisis, the war, the gap in liberia’s growth and development.
The concrete skeletal remains of houses and schools and churches. Cars, stripped and rusted and overrun with Liberia’s interminable greenery. Driving along a narrow strip of dirt road, splashing up puddles the color of Thai iced tea, the feeling is often as if our car’s occupants are the only people for miles-for ages. And then we inch by graying houses, no windows or doors, papaya trees sprouting from the living room. Or we see the caved in roof of a church or school house, crumbling mud brick, corrugated tin scavenged and carried away. And the feeling is all the more isolating. All the more lonely.
In some cases, people have returned, commandeered the ruins of a previous home and begun to erect their own. But it still feels lonely. Still has the appearance of occupying someone else’s clothes – or better- someone else’s skin.
Driving by one such village, its remains sprawling for a good distance, I tentatively asked eric if this was the result of the war.
“yes, Bong Mines was affected. People left and the area was looted and set afire.”
And so we drove on. Me looking at what remains, what is being remade, and wondering what it looked like 20 years ago; wondering if any of the people sitting in doorways or under palava huts (thatched roof open sided shelters) have come home to reclaim their pre-war history or are simply creating a new one from the ruins.
Tags: health, liberia, observations, politics, socialcommentary, travel, work
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 than most people know what to do with but she managed and managed quickly) as for her patience (I was extremely late). But she smiled softly and went to freshen up.
The other women all smiled in agreement, and I was left with a handful of bills and a feeling that I should somehow return her thoughtfulness…fearful that I would never be able to. That I would…steal it…steal is the wrong word but somehow I feel if I cannot pay it forward that I am a thief of kindness.
She finally relented and let me pay for her taxi to SKT but in hindsight I wonder if I slighted our new friendship, if my need to leave her with something cheapened her gesture. Sometimes things are lost in translation – even when everyone is speaking English.
It plays out with more than hair. People always offer to share what they have. In fact they buy more than they need in anticipation for sharing. In the field at one of the rural clinics – no food in sight – and Mary smiled and offered me a butter pear (avocado) and bread. When I demurred she commented on my unwillingness to eat with her and so I relented and made a quick sandwich which quelled the hunger rising in my belly. Gutz, Sierra Leone, Dimples, and so many others have done the same at different times. People share – full meals to snacks, rides to hair, I feel as if everything here is seen not as mine or yours but ours.
I am struck by this generosity. I don’t think the people I come in contact with on a daily basis would even name it that…would even categorize it as anything other than what you do- what is always done. But for me it is a generosity that I fear surpasses my own.
It is not my natural inclination to buy more than I need – to make more than I need in order to share. It isn’t my instinct. My instinct is to consider how much I will need and weigh that against how long it will take something to spoil in the heat. And that is what I buy.
But I am inspired, in my own little way to try to be more Liberian; to buy water or peanuts or shortbread or pineapple, not because I want it but because others might.
I wonder if kindness can be acquired over time. I hope so. I hope that I manage to ingest the innate munificence that I have been privy to and bring that home as the quintessential keepsake from my time here.
Tags: friends, liberia, me-ness, observations, socialcommentary, travel