Food is one of the great narratives of my life, and yet I am still surprised at how much the taste and lingering delight of a good meal can dictate the texture of my day and orchestrate the flavor of my mood.
Food. More than sustenance and survival, for me it is tantamount to joy. And so despite having no plans for what I might do for my birthday, I knew what I would eat.
French toast. A simple enough dish back home, is a little more involved here. For one thing, with no current during the day, I was forced to cook it outside on the coal pot. I can’t lie – little things like that- in moderation – bring me a certain silly pleasure. Pumping water from the well is one…of course when the water table dropped and it took so much longer to get the water to flow it became less cute and more pain in my…well…let’s just say it is only cute in small doses.
Because I’m lazy I don’t drag the coal pot out much. It is a tiny little thing, simple in its construction and use (especially since I can light it with one match!!!) but it involves fire for goodness sake…and it is hot…and it involves fire…and it is hot…I think you get the drift.
At any rate, my decision to make myself French toast butted up against a conversation I had with Gutz about American breakfasts…we were both reminiscing about our favorite ways to start the day. It seemed a great fit – he would enjoy it as much as me and I’d celebrate with a friend. From there it morphed. I called Emme and invited her and her honey. Then the Patron Saint of Peace Corps Volunteers and R (she couldn’t make it), Sierre Leone and Amarula.
It was a full house. And so I listened to laughter filtering out through the screen as I dodged ash and maneuvered soaked slices of bread across hot oil and real butter (compliments of the Patron Saint). Slice after slice came off the pot and was devoured in pieces or in its entirety by the group – some more enthusiastic than others.
Oddly, all that hot work was a delight. A delight to do for my friends who are always so generous with me, to share my day and prevent it from simply merging into every other day.
As we laughed and joked, one of Wine’s sons came to the door bearing her gift to me…palm butter (the son dropping it off actually cooked it) with fresh bush meat and fufu(pounded and fermented cassava) . Delicious!
I visited with Wine, played cards with friends, made falafel and sipped fresh passionfruit juice. There was laughter and more laughter and it was – at its core – a happy birthday.
Tags: friends, liberia, me-ness, transition, travel
The flames scream out from the parched earth. Ash mingles with dust and dances on the cooling air – night is approaching soft like a lullaby. The crackle and snap of burning brush soothes. The orange flames dance. The smoke conceals the smell of renewal.
The beauty goes unnoticed.
Pin pin boys race by on their motorcycles, heavy coats billowing behind them – caught in the wind. Boys with fire wood balanced on their heads, girls with bananas perched there, walk methodically along the worn path.
The sun sets deeper into the horizon, coloring the sky pink and azure, silhouetting the cotton tree lonely and bare in the distance. Mangoes, immature and green, languish unobtrusively on crowded branches.
Families gather in the shadow of fading light. Chickens squawk in protest of their anticipated place at the table. Coal pots drop glowing shards of orange coal to the ground as wisps of smoke unfurl into the trees.
Smiling children sing greeting, run to wave, to hug, to dance, to prove their bravery.
Another day fades…
Tags: liberia, observations, travel
Three liters of water is no small drink. Granted it wasn’t all at once but today I consumed about three liters of water.
It was that hot. That dry. I walked that far under that much sun.
After all, Saturday’s are my French lessons. And for the second week I went into Gbarnga to sit with my friend and teacher, Cameroon. He is a mostly patient always helpful man who is particular about my pronunciation and my understanding that “ça va” as a greeting is not to be taken literally…that many things are not to be taken literally.
And so we proceeded, me asking a million questions, him stopping me and making me repeat “quelle heure est-il?” until it sounded less butchered on my tongue and sunk in slightly what it meant.
At that point I was a little past a liter. But we had lunch and Cameroon decided to join me for another portion of my day. And so I walked to the market, up a long and dusty road under the blazing afternoon sun. I stopped a boy for mineral water and then bought pineapples for the evening.
Sitting and waiting for Cameroon to join me, I bought another water…so went the second liter before I ever left town.
Dropped off at Cuttington junction, Cameroon spotted one of his students and so we wandered over to chat and I, being nosy, tasted a Liberian almond (some kind of fruit with a seed that is bashed in to reveal a little sliver of “almond”) and worked on my third bag of water.
I introduced Cameroon to Wine and we sat around discussing football (the African Cup final is tomorrow- Ghana vs Egypt, with Egypt anticipated to win it all) and politics and even education. Marcus, a friend of Cameroon’s fluent in french, wandered over and French was mixed in with ideas about how to make Liberia stronger and healthier.
By the time Cameroon headed home I was close to three liters and after dinner at the Patron Saint of Peace Corps Volunteers, with the Gbarnga volunteers and company, I was squarely over that mark I believe.
All jokes aside, and way too much information, I’m amazed at how infrequently I’ve been to the bathroom under the circumstances…three liters is a lot of liquid no matter how hot it is!
I’m not starving to death.
The bugs have not eaten me alive.
My house is quite sturdy and nice.
I feel like maybe I’m misrepresenting my time here without intending to. I know I have a running commentary on food and water or the lack thereof, but the severity I’m feeling is really in the contrast. My bay area life against here – my recollections of my South African village against this hospital compound. And it is different. And it is more challenging than my previous experiences, but I’m not wasting away into bone and skin and a mound of hair.
My friend Tom sent me a message that he wants me to visit him in Dar so he can feed and take care of me. And as much as I’d love to take him up on that, I hate to think that I have him worried.
I could eat differently. More abundantly. It is possible. My IFESH buddies over at Cuttington eat well. The recipe for more satisfying meals has a few ingredients…access to a freezer and larger refrigerator (ours is a little dorm style one), more frequent trips to Monrovia, money, and time.
The last two pose an interesting dilemma. I could spend substantially more money when I’m in Monrovia and bring food home – things that you generally don’t find in the interior. I could – but I don’t. equally, I could get creative, do more prep, be more invested, make things like bread like Ulitave (Emme’s sweetie) does-like I did in South Africa. The other day I had dinner with Ulitave and Emme and we had animal protein (chicken) and home baked bread…it was delicious. it is possible. I simply don’t do it.
For better or worse, beans make the most sense for me. I eat them often. Too often. I’m sure once I’m done here I won’t look at beans again for years. But coupled with rice it is a complete protein, and unlike pasta I’m not starving again in half an hour.
As for the water…the water table of our pump seems to have risen slightly. Folks have been hammering away at the pump again – although it takes much longer to draw a bucket of water than it did when we first arrived. Today was my first excursion to pump in a few weeks…I cheated as is my custom and waited until someone was finished up so that the water didn’t have time to retreat all the way back down before I started pumping. Even so I was pumping for a while to no avail.
A few minutes into my fatigued flailing two young men came walking down the path and gave me that quizzical look all young people give me when I’m pumping. One of them handed the small chick he was carrying to his buddy and took the handle from me. With energy and muscle I simply don’t have, he leveraged that pump up and down for quite a few minutes. When he slowed, his friend took over – neither allowing me to step in to help. My bucket full, they nodded and smiled and walked on their way.
so you see, even the water isn’t bad.
Millions of people grow and thrive and rejoice and mourn and succeed and fail and live and live and live…in Liberia every day. My musings are a moment in time…perspectives juxtaposed against my cushier incarnation…simply ordinary living for a good portion of the world.
Despite waking up at 6:30, I didn’t get out of bed until 10 this morning. I was in the nebulous space between exhaustion and sickness. I blamed my lethargy on the flu shot I was forced to take but it could just as easily have been dehydration – I only had one liter of water yesterday.
I lay in my bug tent, moving one leg in and out of my sheet as I was hot then cold then hot all over again, and I listened to that same chicken rasp my name periodically. I needed to wash but I couldn’t drag myself from my bed.
Me needing to wash here has different implications than back in the States. The sheer degree of dirtiness for one thing, orange dust films everything and sweat from walking and sitting and just being alive, is not a sweet musk no matter what anyone says. I also have fewer clothes here. And, washing requires me to soak my clothes the night before. That means there is no turning back. No decision, in dire straits, that a shirt can manage one more wearing.
There is also the reality of water. Water, that mostly clear substance that rules my world. We’d been without water for about two days and since I heard my roommate in the shower this morning I knew that we had at least started the day with it. And water is a necessity for washing – vast amounts of water (at least three buckets for every bucket of dirty clothes).
Finally creeping from my bed, shaky and not quite myself, my mind immediately wandered to food and water. I gulped from my water bottle and pulled a can of generic ravioli from my shelf. Of course no electricity until 6pm means I popped the metal lid and armed myself with a fork before plopping down to eat my cold breakfast of champions (complete with roughly 500 calories and my full day’s allowance of salt).
Feeling a little better, a moved to the back porch to tackle the mass of clothing soaking in Omo (the best washing powder ever!). breakfast, a liter of water, and three loads later- clothes hang from the line and drip the occasional drop of water to the tile floor. I was still tired. I am still tired. But it is only 3pm, the rest of the day stretches out before me.
Privacy, or the expectation of it anyway, is a conceit of my privilege, a byproduct of my sense of entitlement. The notion that what is mine, tangible and otherwise, is mine…my garbage, the act of washing my clothes, or reading on my porch…merely an illusion in Liberia.
My frustration at being forced to share the intimacies of my life with the myriad of children that press their noses against the screen of the porch or the glass of the window, the intent stares as I haul water or shop at the market, is wasted. I can rail against the idea that I should warrant so much attention, that I should not be granted the courtesy of an averted glance, but I’m not unique in this.
As I walked from Cuttington University one evening my eyes passed over a man completing his bath, outside, only sheltered to mid chest by an enclosure of bricks. He paid me no mind as he wrapped a towel around his waist and disappeared into his house a few steps away. Further down the same narrow path I was greeted by a colleague sitting outside his house in a pair of long boxer shorts – no shirt. He smiled, shook my hand, and wished me well as I continued home.
It was in that’s moment that I realized that privacy is a luxury not everyone is privy too. In my village in South Africa my outhouse was a pretty good distance from the house. Every morning while I made my way there my neighbors would greet me and often, begin conversations that could not be completed before I reached the little metal house room. I’d acknowledge and tell them I’d continue when I was finished.
Of course that meant they knew when I was finished.
And when I was sick – they knew that too. But there, as in here, it isn’t just me. True, the kids don’t press their noses against the screens of my neighbors and I doubt they go through their garbage looking for oddities, but everyone sees everything – hears everything…went to town, sick with malaria, dating a married woman…
Realistically, I probably garner more attention than the average person in my community. I’m easier to spot and am prone to do far stranger things. Children sometimes cry at the sight of me, my accent is at once discernible in a crowd, and I’m temporary.
But my bathroom is inside so…
Tags: liberia, socialcommentary, travel
The ants have gone crazy. Maybe they’re thirsty. Maybe the heat has gotten to them. I’m not really sure, but this weekend I found myself drinking them as they tried to gather the sweet traces from the mouth of my water bottle – I’d been eating banana bread and they can smell even that. one or two ended up crawling up my arm and across my cheek before I realized what was going on. And of course, clumsy little devils, a handful slipped and fell into my nalgene bottle – that blue bastion between me and dehydration.
Water being what it is – a currently scarce necessity – I continued drinking and considered the little buggers an added protein source.
Then this morning while showering I saw a small trail of them walking across the shower wall. No big deal and not unusual. But then I looked beyond the shower curtain and realized there were actually hundreds of them. Think about a trail two feet long and four to six inches wide.
I’ve given up trying to hold them at bay in any conventional way. when I have sweets I put them in a container, on top of a cup that is sitting in a bowl of water. It is the only thing I’ve found that works…those suckers will even endure our refrigerator!
The spiders aren’t much better. They are slowly trying to take over my room despite repeatedly destroying their delicate dust-filled webs with a broom.
At least I’m never lonely…yeah…that’s what I’ll tell myself.
I picked up the palm frond from the makeshift parking lot beside the hospital. There is no paving there, but the hospital and county health department vehicles often park there when not in use or when they are being worked on. The patch of parched earth and scraggly grass was almost empty and the hospital behind it lulled quietly – no wails of lament or pain.
More than a tree’s discard, the frond was a symbol of death. The long green stems are twined into the grill of trucks carrying dead bodies away from the hospital. It looks more festive than it is – like a misdirected participant in a Saint Patrick’s Day parade or something. But really it is a reminder that hospitals – especially remote, underfunded, and overcrowded hospitals – cannot save everyone.
Two months ago I wouldn’t have seen the frond. The green lines would have blurred into the scenery with every other green thing. I’m just beginning to translate the details, and not merely the broad strokes, of my surrounding. Decode the mystery that doesn’t appear to be a mystery.
Every place has them. The things people know because they know them. Because they have always known them and can’t understand how someone could not know. Like when I first moved to South Africa and I asked my host mother – after several messy and waterlogged attempts – how to take a bucket bath. She laughed at me outright, and when I continued to look at her expectantly she kind of cocked her head quizzically to the side and patted me on the arm as if we were sharing a joke.
How could I not know?
In Liberia I am learning that the well sometimes goes dry, the mangos appear around May, that the Friday market happens on Thursdays when Friday is a holiday. That the white birds will migrate before the rains reappear, toppogee will make your stomach run (if you aren’t used to it), the exchange will drop from 70 to around 60 during the December holiday season, and palm fronds on the front of a car means a dead body is being transported.
Tags: liberia, observations, travel
I heard the siren. We all did. And so necks craned and eyes strained through doors and windows to see the ambulance racing up the road to the hospital. Some speculated on what or who…but mostly we took note before returning to whatever held our attention just moments before. While not common, the blue lights of the white ambulance are far from unusual.
I forgot about it. Its significance undermined by my acquisition of Microsoft office – finally.
Until…
Talking with my friends at Starbucks, my impromptu Kpelle lesson was interrupted by Cecilia talking over my head to a distracted looking woman. Others chimed in and the woman began to run toward the hospital. Animated conversation continued with women weighing in(in rapid Liberian English or Kpelle) on something I had no comprehension of.
Finally there was lull enough for me to ask, for the umpteenth time, “what happened?”
“her son was the one hit by the UN truck. He is in critical condition,” she explained.
I was still confused, having been told the accident involved a motorcycle I was trying to piece it all together. “so the motorcycle hit the UN truck and the UN truck hit another car?” I asked.
“no,” Cecilia explained more patiently than she probably wanted. “the UN truck hit the boy on the motorcycle and then drove away. It was her son.”
Horrified, I repeated, “he drove away?”
Others chimed in that it wasn’t uncommon. And later we saw a UN police car leave the compound and then return. Cecilia was confident, “they are looking for the driver who fled,” she said.
The reality sobered my afternoon as I walked home, my thoughts scattered. Andn as I trudged home I saw a familiar face. The popcorn vendor with the son I call the Obama baby (he has Obama’s ears and a similar complacent expression). We greeted warmly, having not seen each other in the new year. And when I asked about Obama he pointed to the hospital. “he’s with his mother, her cousin was the man on the bike.”
All I could do was offer my condolences and ask after his relatives healing.
“he’s trying,” he said, “at least he is talking now.”
I don’t know how he fared tonight -if his talking was the beginning of recovery or a false sense of healing. I hope…as we all hope whenever we hear the sirens…that it looked worse than it is.
Tags: health, liberia, socialcommentary, travel
foreign in language
“how old is he?”
The he in question was toddling about, intermittently crying for no particular reason and grinning at me from behind his cohort Samuel.
“he is two.”
“and…?” I pointed at Samuel.
“he is 18 months. Breastfed,” my neighbor said pointing at Samuel, “not breast fed,” she declared of the other one.
I’m not sure what made me ask their age or her answer with breastfeeding information. Maybe because in some ways they looked like they were the same age and in others they didn’t. Samuel with his round full face always waving frantically when I am at a distance and then hesitating, cautious, when I approach; his full belly and sturdy legs poking out from the top and bottom of his red shorts.
His cousin was smaller, about the same height but thinner. His face long, his legs lean. My neighbor, a nurse, shrugged and said, “I don’t know why they don’t listen about breast feeding.” She sighed and continued spooning cassava leaf into her mouth, isolating a shrimp from the bowl and sucking out the meat.
It was just one of a myriad of random conversations I have on any given day. This afternoon, the sun blazing and making me loathe to head to the market despite my need for dinner supplies, I sat briefly with my friend Belecca and the other women on the hidden market. We joked as always, them trying to teach me Kpelle. My attempts bringing them an abundance of laughter.
Suddenly someone asked me, “what tribe is your father?” my brain whirred for a moment – finally deciding that no one wanted a monologue on the American slave trade so I said, American. “What tribe is your mother?” someone else posed. Again, I responded, “American.”
“Then how are you not American if your mother and father are both American?”
I was confused and said as much. “When did I say I wasn’t an American? I’m a black American,” I stated plainly.
“But when the children call ‘white woman’ you tell them that you are not,” Belecca shifted her head slightly to the side and waited patiently for my explanation.
But how to begin? The notion of white and American being synonymous in a literal sense and not just an assumption when traveling, left me dumbfounded. I stuttered, and started, and stuttered again.
How do you explain whiteness when the working definitions are different?
I opted for hair.
“You know how some people have straight hair?” I asked tentatively. “Pale people with straight hair?” one of the women nodded enthusiastically and translated my English into …well…English, as was so often the practice. I continued, “In America, those people, with the straight hair and light skin, are white. I am black. Black American.”
Race is an arbitrary concept, a construct at best, I realize but I pressed on. “In America we are the same,” I told Belecca, holding my café au lait arm up to her espresso one. “In America I am black like you.” She smiled but I’m not sure she bought it– not sure any of them bought it. To them, I am white – I am American – they are the same thing.
All my conversations aren’t verbal, the understanding or misunderstanding not always the result of language in the conventional sense. My friend Wine has a houseful of sons. One of them, T, is deaf and unable to speak. For years they struggled to communicate with him until he attended a school in Monrovia that specialized in his needs.
Communication became possible.
Sitting outside Wine’s house she explained to me how he still has a lot to learn, they all do, and how her other sons are the best at communicating with T. They spend the most time together. And then she shared some of the signs – their family signs. A gesturing of breasts and then a hand held high denoted her, the same gesture with a lower hand her daughter.
Now that I’ve met her sons I see them everywhere, coming from school, heading to Cuttington, sweating after a football match. On this particular day I was approaching the house when T greeted me warmly, all smiles and finger snapping handshake as is the Liberian custom. He gestured the breasts with height and shrugged his shoulders to ask if I was going to see her. I pointed toward Cuttington in response. He moved his hand in a writing gesture and looked up. I nodded. Then I motioned that I would be back later. He smiled warmly and went about the rest of his day.
Not a word spoken, but we both understood.
words or no words, I spend a lot of time talking here…a lot of time trying to understand and trying to be understood.
Tags: family, liberia, observations, race, socialcommentary, travel, volunteer