It was about 2:15 as we stepped into our front yard – just enough time to see the wedding processional lurch slowly through the rutted street toward the church/outpatient department of the hospital. By our estimations we were right on time. We headed single file in the same direction, taking the pedestrian path that flanks the nursing school. Fancy was dressed in a bright pink linen outfit gifted her by one of her colleagues (a sight which Wry-ly, our other room-mate, decided made her look like a pink cancer patient) and I, in one of the ill fitting outfits I had made.
Even with the head start, the wedding convoy didn’t beat us. I mean technically it beat us to the church, but the wedding was far from starting. The bridesmaids, and somewhere the bride, sat huddled together in the backs of the cars. All around them, folks looked on, children giggled, babies stared, and every now and then – someone would dance.
An hour later and the procession began in earnest. The crowd parted and Bette Midler’s, From a Distance, began playing. Fancy and I exchanged bewildered glances as the song looped six times as the five bridesmaids and one maid of honor walked so slowly down the aisle their movement was almost imperceptible down the L shaped path.
It seemed a strange song choice – all the stranger on constant repeat- but the more I listened to the words the more I was struck by its appropriateness for a healing Liberia. “From a distance you look like my friend, even though we are at war. From a distance I just cannot comprehend what all this fighting is for…” there is more, about no weapons, no disease, no hunger, all the things Liberians are fighting now. And call it PMS or over sensitivity, but I was touched…less so as the song played over and over again, skipping in the same place like some musical version of the movie Groundhog’s day.
When the bride emerged, everyone stood up, which of course obstructed my view of anything but a bobbing veil and the backs of hundreds of heads. Perched at the back of the church on the very last pew, I busied myself by taking photographs of people focused elsewhere. As she inched toward the alter the heat closed in and sweat poured down leaving me feeling like I did the previous day in my corset-fitting orange shirt.
I escaped to the side, a seat with no chance of a view of the wedding but with a good view of the side action. A little girl, dress over her shoulders and panties around her ankles, peeing in the grass beside the wall-less church, a flurry of vendors selling everything from plantain chips to clear baggies of cold water – condensation clinging to their sides, and a grandmother lunging at a little boy and swatting at him – his timing just good enough to prevent a fall from the concrete ramp he was sitting on.
With so much to watch I almost didn’t notice the music had changed, I inched behind the wall of people toward the front of the church and strained to see over the myriad of heads. What I could glimpse in scrambled cable channel style, was women doing traditional dance at the front of the church – bending low, shaking hips, hands gesturing rhythmically. Occasionally, a man would join in, mirroring a woman’s movements, adding his own. The music sounded percussive, but not drum-like, but I never caught sight of the instruments. And just like that, the song ended and the rest of the ceremony continued: prayer, scriptures, sermon on true love, vows, and the saluting of the bride.
By the time the newlyweds were ready to sign their papers, we were ready to go. Having heard the reception was $10 a person – a heady fee by our PC standards – we headed home. Sitting on our front steps, I watched the wedding guests march to the dining hall about an hour later, and then listened to the music roll past us on cool winds and distant thunder.
I sat on the front steps this evening, watching the sky flash purple streaks in the cloudy distance. As the night threatened rain that never arrived, I felt the slight stir of a breeze carrying the cacophonous music of crickets, frogs, or whatever animals live in the moist darkness of a Liberian November.
Two men wrestled with the water pump to my left and the metal clanking against itself competed with nature for attention. Faster and harder, their exertion was finally rewarded with the slow and sometimes halting stream of water directed at their buckets. No neighbors sat on their steps or cooled themselves on front porches. No children shrieked with joy while joyriding in a wheelbarrow barreling down on a car sized puddle the color of cinnamon. It was a moment of stillness.
A few minutes later a few people passed on the winding rutted path the UN and NGO trucks have driven to temporary submission with their constant use. The screen door squeaked and bumped my back lightly as BushDiva emerged for a breath of air. And just like that, the night was unstill again and I rejoined my housemates for the completion of our day.
Where can I even begin on this? I didn’t pack many clothes. I was told before-hand that I could get stuff made and I was ecstatic. Some simple skirts and shirts would serve me well and would also provide some souvenirs upon my return home.
So into Gbarnga to buy lapas (colorful cloths) and then to a tailor one of the volunteer’s uses. I was exuberant. I pointed out the desired styles on various posters spread across the table on her front porch, had my measurements taken while a bottomless toddler stared quizzically at me, and off I went to wait for my Wednesday pickup.
Finally I was going to be able to retire my brown skirt for a little while. Finally I could break out a few of my other skirts that lack appropriate tops. Only…the tailor was rouge and her measurements faulty. Enter a parade of skirts, that although largely not what I asked for, were cute. I began to recalibrate myself to South Africa…don’t sweat the small stuff cuz there is enough big stuff to go ‘round. The big stuff emerged in the form of the tops.
I had picked both the colors and the patterns of the tops carefully. I needed solid colors rather than prints so that they would be useful to mix and match, and simple because I’m not much about ruffles and flash. Enter the first top. It fit oddly across my shoulders and wasn’t the most flattering of cuts, but doable.
Next … enter a thin manila colored cloth meant to go with my peacock skirt (among others), she lined it with something striped so that I resembled a referee ready to call a flag on the fashion play. the stripes were accented with a wide printed lapel and space enough for breasts – if i were prepubescent and my boobs were at my collarbone.
But the ultimate example of my disappointment and sense of humor has not yet been described. I searched diligently for a solid orange lapa. I pissed off many a market lady as I bought only one lapa at a time rather than the usual three or tried to mix and match the lapas I wanted. But I had visions of an orange shirt I could wear with multiple skirts and simply because…well, it is orange.
Imagine my surprise when what greeted me was not a plain orange shirt but an orange shirt with colored and puffy short sleeves adorning each arm and a colorful tie ready to be bowed at my back. While definitely not horrible (in South Africa my yele was an understated navy with an obnoxious gold glitter brocade at the arms and across the chest) it was more than I was expecting. Fancy shook her head while BushDiva rocked in her chair unsure of where to begin her commentary.
For my part, the excitement dripped away like the sweat on my brow. I figured I’d wear the skirts and continue searching out readymade tops. But the absence of water left me in circumstances that would change all that.
I need to wash. Most likely I’ll wash often here. I don’t have a lot of clothes and it is hot here. I sweat. The dust and mud kick up. And even after I wash it takes some time to dry in the already saturated air. But washing is water intensive and so we usually reserve it for when water is running plentiful through our pipes. But like I said, no water. No water means no washing.
So, readying for work today, I looked down at my choices and resigned myself to a puffy-sleeved fate. BushDiva zipped me up (the zippers are all placed in places that don’t allow me to dress or undress myself) and smiled repeatedly. I noticed the top was snug, leaving little room for my ample bosom but I figured it would loosen over the course of the day or I would get used to the new feeling.
Some things you can’t get used to.
I was called to a 10am meeting at around 10:15. By 10:30 I was eager and excited to be a part of what would prove to be a four-hour meeting in a hard wooden chair in a screened in porch with no breeze. The first two hours weren’t exactly easy, but I was able to concentrate and participate. By what should have been lunchtime (no one seems to eat lunch here) I was having trouble breathing.
My first thought was asthma, and I contemplated pulling out my inhaler, but after roughly 20 years as an asth spaz I can read my signs and it wasn’t a wheezing thing. Rather, it was a constriction thing. The more I concentrated on my breathing the more I realized that my cantaloupe-sized breasts were shoved inside an egg crate which was in turn pushing against my lungs. Think opening scene from Pirates of the Caribbean.
And I must have looked like I was going to swoon because BushDiva raised a concerned eyebrow at me over the table to check in. I responded by hiking up the front of my shirt so that the part at the bottom, with excess material, could provide more space to my plastered breasts. This really only resulted in me looking like a crazy person. Bright orange material crumpled under my neck; me, slunk low in my chair; puffy sleeves still visible in my peripheral vision. It wasn’t a good look.
By the time the meeting ended I was ready to burst. I made it home in time to avoid that fate but I won’t be wearing the orange constrictor again.
I get around on foot a lot here. There is really no reason not to, this place isn’t especially huge. And the portion of it that I deal with, the hospital compound, the university up the road, is all reachable by foot. Sometimes the trail is obscured by lakes of water pooled at the foot of every incline and in the muddied crevices left by overzealous four wheeling Toyotas hurrying through this crisis despite the crisis’s plodding pace.
My feet work well despite the heat and rain. But public transportation is still necessary. And while South Africa had its network of minivans scurrying the tar and dirt roads like scavenging ants, Liberia has taxis and motorcycles.
The motorcycles are all driven by solemn faced young men and were apparently an exchange for arms during the disarming and reintegration of combatants. Now they use them to pick up passengers and ferry them about or to ride quickly, recklessly, and raucously through winding dirt paths and racing any other traffic on the road.
PC isn’t allowed to ride them but that doesn’t stop their drivers from urging us to jump on or keep me from eyeing them as I walk by the Ganta taxi area in Gbarnga where they congregate and wait for passengers. Often they have stickers on them – for a while every one I saw sported an American flag. Today’s theme seemed to be religion, “god makes a way where there is no way” or “in Jesus’ name”. And of course there is the safety gear. That ranges from nothing at all – no helmet and flip flops or white jelly shoes just inches above the ground as they fly by. Others have helmets that dangle wildly from the front bars. And then there are the helmets. Sometimes they look like bicycle helmets and other times like it was snatched from a much younger/smaller or older/bigger brother. Ill fitting but perched atop shiny heads at jaunty angles or held in place with taught buckles.
But the taxis are the best.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of cars so dilapidated. I can’t speak for Monrovia because we barely saw anything while we were there but just 80 or so miles east and the cars look like a mongrel litter of battered and malnourished puppies. Windows are broken, mirrors missing, seatbelts unheard of. The other day our taxi turned into the “gas station” (a spot on the road where men sell petrol in clear glass two gallon mayonnaise jars) and funneled it somewhere directly into the engine and never touched what I usually take for granted as the gas tank.
But the real genius of the taxis is the number of people it holds. I assumed three in the back and one in the front would count as full enough to leave, and depending on where it is going it will suffice. But much as in South Africa, full is relative to the desire of the driver. The other day we had four adults and two children in the back seat of a tiny car and two women in the front. Even that doesn’t really constitute full as one of the other volunteers commented that she’s seen three passengers up front – one was sitting with the driver, and apparently it isn’t unusual to ride on the roof. I saw that for the first time while visiting one of the clinics. I was amazed to see a man riding so nonchalantly there- but all the more so because the taxi was hauling it as fast as you can go across pitted and pocked dirt roads.
Of course today our trip into town involved none of these. The hospital has a bus that makes a few scheduled trips into town and everyone…and I do mean everyone…tries to squeeze into it. Today that meant at least five people in seats designed for four and multiple people squeezed up front at the door. But free is free so people endure.
The way home was a mode of transportation that isn’t uncommon to PCVs from what I can tell. NGO vehicles. The truth is that I see more of those and UN vehicles than anything else. As a result, if people recognize you it is possible to get a ride like that. Today Fancy saw one of the hospital’s trucks heading out of town so we ran toward it, greeted appropriately and enjoyed a quiet and unclaustraphobic ride home.
I showered with Fred tonight. At least I think that is his name. He didn’t tell me otherwise as I urged him to stay on his side of the stained tub. He complied and clung to the whitish tile, close to the window, and didn’t say much that I could hear. Normally I shower with Charlotte, but tonight she was nowhere to be seen and I wasn’t in the mood to look for her…all the more so because I was distracted by Fred.
Fred is the collective name I have given to the large flying roaches that pepper our lives here. Whereas under different circumstances I might wait him out – let him shower first and then follow in his wake – water persuaded me otherwise.
The water here runs on no particular schedule. We usually hear the toilet start to fill – a loud clanging and whining as if a petulant child, furious at being interrupted, is throwing an escalating tantrum. Sometimes the kitchen faucet leaks, and drops land loudly against the metal sink and reverberate misleadingly through the house so that I am unsure which room the sound is coming from.
So when I heard our petulant child begin to wail, I was ecstatic that tonight would not be a sticky night but a shower filled one. Imagine my surprise (and his) when I threw back the shower curtain to find Fred scampering up the wall and clinging desperately to the thread of blue plastic twine that dangles our anorexic curtain over the bathroom window.
No matter, I quickly looked down for charlotte – the spider that lives in the drain – and with her absent, washed up speedily while keeping one eye cocked towards Fred in case he decided we should become better acquainted.
Returning to my dark room (BushDiva retired early tonight after waking up at 4:30am to cook her lunch before the power went off), relieved to have avoided a more intimate encounter with the roach, I fumbled around looking for a place to put my stuff. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something fluttering about. Figuring it must be a moth or anotherFred I squinted toward the window – the almost full moon casting a bit of shadow through the window – and recognized the outline of the frantically beating wings.
Stanley.
Stanley, is the bat that is supposed to live in our pantry. He seems to be getting a little too comfortable in the house, darting out on multiple nights and now venturing beyond the living room for an unobstructed joyride. Unable to turn on the light for fear of waking my roommate, or to spot where, in all of my confusion, he landed, I am weary to return to my room. I don’t think my rabies shots are up to date and I’m really not in the mood to find out for sure.
Fred, Stanley, and tonight’s excitement aside, there is also Clyde (and his female companion Bonnie) my names for the myriad lizards and geckos of varying sizes.
That exhausts my list. I haven’t bothered to name the mosquitoes. I mostly try to catch them in midair as they dive-bomb my head and ankles. And I generally leave the ants alone (I’m watching a lone one try to carry off a dead moth as I type this), except this afternoon when one found its way up my skirt and clamped down on my thigh. That one had to die. But in general I lead a live and let live kind of existence…as long as their living doesn’t too much overlap with mine.
Like I said, thank goodness for bug huts.
You’d think I’d have pulled it together by now. But I’m still in transition mode because everything is still pretty much in flux. A perfect example is today’s food intake: a piece of beef jerky, half a little baggy of plantain chips, and some water. At least that was the case for the first part of the day.
We were waiting for PC to show up for a myriad of meetings; to meet with the old volunteers about some concerns, to meet with our counterparts at Africare about our future work with them, and to meet with us all about safety and security. They dragged on longer than expected leading me to miss internet access (I was so close to posting a blog earlier today) and to become light-headedly aware of how hungry I was.
Once we wrapped up with PC – complete with a parting gift of Halloween chocolate and biltong (a South African delicacy of dried meat!!!)- still waiting for the power to return, BushDiva and I made the short trip to Starbucks and the Strip Mall.
Lest you think I’m living the high life out here in Bong county, let me explain. My community is nestled beside a road that runs between Monrovia and Ganta. On both sides folks sell food and taxi’s assemble to gather passengers. The previous volunteers dubbed one side Starbucks because in the morning a woman sells a hot drink concoction of tea, condensed milk, and chocolate tied in a plastic bag (that is on the menu for tomorrow). I dubbed the other side the strip mall as we’ve since learned that there are some handy things sold there – including popcorn.
But today’s true treasure discovery was fish. After grabbing some popcorn and other sundry items to snack on tomorrow I was distracted by the cutest baby sitting on a makeshift counter chewing steadily and looking quite content. He never smiled and he never stopped chewing but he would glance at me from time to time. All the chewing lead us, in our ravenous state, to ask what he was eating. As it turns out, it was grilled fish purchased at Starbucks.
Sure enough, a woman over a coal fire grill stood quietly turning whole fish on skewers, periodically poking the eye of the one we requested to see if it had stopped oozing – signifying, by our best guess – that it was done. Sure enough, a final poke and we were served piping hot fish with a side of pepper sauce and onions.
30LD (less than 50 cents)!
This could become a delicious habit. Of course the question becomes…where did the fish come from? We’re more than three hours from the ocean. But I have been assured that these are river fish and there are rivers somewhere around here – even if I haven’t spotted one yet. So for now I’ll be thankful for the animal protein and work that into my weekly daily diet.
Sundays are rough. The other volunteers warned me. And whether it was rough because I was anticipating the antithesis of smooth or because, well, Sundays are rough – is a moot point.
The problem began with me waking up earlier than I would have liked. I had to pee. and if I were at home in my old apartment then I would simply roll out of bed with my eyes mostly closed and shuffle my way rather expertly to the bathroom without a light and without really waking myself up. Then I’d do the whole thing in reverse and not miss a scene in whatever dream I was having. Here there is a bit more of a challenge. First, I’m still on the floor. There is a volunteer that is moving out but not for nine days so I’m sharing a room and sleeping on the floor inside my bug hut.
A bug hut is the most glorious of inventions. Essentially it is a single person tent made out of mosquito netting – important because malaria is endemic here. Important also because there is an active wasps’ nest above my head and more giant roaches than you can shake a stick at.
Needless to say, I zip myself in every night before drifting off. But that means first thing in the morning when the feeling strikes, I have to heave myself up, unzip the hut, crawl out, rezip (lest there be friends awaiting me when I return), head to the bathroom and do a quick scan to make sure I’m not interrupting a roaches convention – after all, they were here before me!
At any rate, by the time I returned to my hut this morning I was still sleepy but had fumbled through my sleep window. So my day started at 9ish. Not terribly early I know, but given that there is no electricity, my roommates were either sleeping or quietly tending to their own things, and the day was overcast and threatening rain…well, that left the whole day stretched out before me.
Reading and writing and the usual stuff filled a good portion of the day, as did a nap. But things got particularly festive when we broke open the Uno cards and BushDiva and I sang 80s songs to our hearts’ content. That was followed by me singing some Dixie Chicks (by request!) and eventually dissolved into whatever randomness crossed my mind.
Six pm brought electricity and torrential rains, and an hour later F showed up to take us to the other volunteer’s going away party. It was an eclectic mix of people- missionaries, volunteer doctors, Peace Corps, and IFESH folks- eating a meal of: canned ham; mayonnaise, egg, cheese, and artichoke heart salad; rye bread; and fresh pineapple. A veritable feast among women given that it contained both meat protein and cheese. Cheese! I’ve reverted to my PC self – or at least have begun the process because my hatred for mayonnaise is deep and devout like other people’s prayers. But there I sat reaching for second helpings.
The thing is that there isn’t a lot to eat here.
South Africa didn’t have diversity, but in the village – and at the very least in the township – I could get my hands on some fruit (oranges, bananas, and mangoes, peaches and avocados in season) bread, eggs, and peanut butter to snack on– all reasonably priced. Here, the extent of my eating options seems to be boiled eggs, bread, and bananas.
As a result my caloric intake is way down, which explains the zeal and appreciation with which I consumed both mayonnaise and canned meat.
Back home and settling in for the night with a full stomach, BushDiva and I were greeted by one of our many nocturnal friends – Stanley. Stanley is a bat that we discovered last night…or rather, he discovered us as we sat chatting in the living room. BushDiva casually mentioned, “I think that’s as bat.” Which I summarily dismissed as her expression and position did not change. This, after all, is a woman who will not even look at a roach – dead or alive – and calls for me to remove them from wherever she is. But sure enough, a few seconds later a fluttering rat with wings flew spastically by. I squirmed toward the wall covering my head while BD sat quietly chuckling at me.
Tonight I was less dramatic. Stanley only made one entrance before retreating to his home – we think it must be the pantry ceiling – and I guess we’re all settling into each other because I didn’t even cover my head this t
Still new to Liberia, I find myself trying to find a pattern to the people, the behavior. I continue to fight against what I knew to be true in South Africa because it is worlds away and does not apply here.
Everything here is a product of the war. Or at least that’s what humanitarian and development folks say. Locals too, but I can’t tell who says it first. If foreigners are echoing what locals say or locals have simply resigned themselves to our interpretation.
No one greets me here. I expect the staring but it feels sullen without any greeting to temper it. Even the children smile and wave less, although more than adults.
Given what I’ve always been told about West Africa, how warm and inviting, I find the silence jarring. In my head I “intellectualize” it. The easiest answer is the war. Of course.
But is it?
It could be foreigner fatigue. We continue to stream in, living in homes removed from the village at large, range rovers with whatever logo painted to the side barreling recklessly down roads and kicking up dust and puddles. We tend to speak quickly, our strange accents obscuring what we’re saying. And we are usually telling people that what they are doing is wrong. It may not be the war at all…maybe they are just tired. War is the easy rationale .
Beyond the Monrovia roads into the bush are less roads, more packed clay- red and pitted, with trenches where the rainy season has had its way and won. Homes are often dilapidated. Mud bricks beginning to erode with rusted tin roofs barely peeking over the edges.
And the war raged everywhere. Just up the road from where I am now was a Charles Taylor stronghold. The fighting eventually made its way into the capital but it began in the bush. The rural areas endured the looting, destruction, and injury first. The war wreaked havoc.
So when people say the bad roads, lack of electricity, and poor education are the product of the war, who am I to argue – I wasn’t here.
I researched Liberia before coming here and most of what I read or watched centered on pre-war Monrovia. Monrovia, with her paved roads and single stoplight, her tall buildings and societied urban sheen…She was a trophy wife. Now she is a battered one.
I heard and read little about anywhere else – everywhere else. What I inferred, between the lines and in the silence of what wasn’t said or written, was that the rest of Liberia didn’t fare nearly as well – even before the wars. My guess is there were pockets. Bustling urban centers, maybe one or two in each of the 15 counties, but I never had the impression that the country at large was part of a systematic highway connecting rural to urban or that there was a substantial investment into schools and hospitals in the bush. So I wonder…with all the work being done, needing to be done, is the damage all the product of war?
I remember riding with someone through post-Katrina New Orleans and listening to the disbelief in her voice as she shook her head and lamented, “look what the storm did, l can’t believe all this devastation.”
Only it wasn’t storm derived devastation she was looking at, it was poverty driven and had been there for years. But the visitors, the temporary workers, shook their heads, called it storm damage, and lamented the force of Mother Nature.
And maybe it doesn’t matter. Or maybe it is best to leave war and storm preconceived notions where they ferment in peoples imaginations and draw them to action drunk with possibility, because there was little help and less attention before. And if I am right, if the roads people speak of as being destroyed in the war actually never existed, at least now, in the name of unity and recovery they will exist.
Of course, today BushDiva came home fresh from the market with a local midwife trainer. Freed from the pack of foreigners we make up when the volunteers are all together, she was told that before the war chickens were only 4LD (Liberty dollars) and now they are 400LD…war has its price.
When we took the left the paved road ended abruptly. The throng of vendors and people milling about thinned and the green of long grass and leafy trees took over. The range rover spit out the occasional gust of black exhaust and kicked up red dust obscuring the view from the rear as we bumped and bounced into the bush at 30km/h.
The rear, where I was perched precariously on padded bench facing the row of side windows that framed more greenery and more trees, allowed an expansive view in all direction. The occasional cluster of homes, random goats resting in the road or darting between trees, placid pools of water with a single coral pink lily floating against the surface, and of course the requisite UNMIL facility complete with traffic calmers (as if the winding dirt road weren’t enough) and barbed wire perimiters.
I, and three Liberian Africare staff, were headed to Gbalatuah, site of one of the 14 clinics in Bong county run by Africare. We were headed in to assess the progress they’ve made since the last national accreditation and to prepare for the next one in about two months. It was also an opportunity for me to see the situation in the more rural areas- accessible only by sprawling pitted dirt roads and four-wheel drive.
The facility was small and sparse but seemed to house the essentials: an obstetrics set-up, dispensary, vaccines, and a dressing table for any wounds. It wasn’t glamorous, but as we ran down a list of evaluation questions, most of the answers were an impressive yes.
After working through some paperwork and the pleasantries of our exit I was also given my Kpella name, Nyeculo- the bright one (as in color…it seems the “high yella” tag follows me wherever I go!). laughter cloaked us as we headed back to site.
Our hurry was for naught as we learned the funders we were meeting that early evening were late. Two meetings behind! But I lingered, despite my stomach’s protests (having only ingested a roll at that point), eager to hear what they had to say about the work being done and the work needed.
The 4pm meeting turned into 6pm meeting and wrapped up after 7pm…late by local standards of dinner time. So the group decided to motor the loooooonnngggg seven or eight miles to Gbarnga for a meal. And over goat soup, fried greens, smoked fish, and rice we mused about our travels, work in Liberia, rugby and the world cup – all the while bobbing our heads to what appeared to be MTV Africa blasting good music in the background.
There is promise in this place…I see it stripping away bit by bit…a shoulder exposed here and a bit of leg over there. It’s ok, I can wait.
donor pendulum
The delicate balance between need and dependency is a pendulum that easily swings too far in one direction. Helping people pull themselves from the ravages of war, starvation, and poverty does not lend itself to platitudes about God helping those who help themselves. Babies die. Men are broken. Women weep…and in those moments they cannot help themselves…
In those moments.
Later, crisis mode averted by a day or a month, and the transition from crisis to development begins. The infestation of aid workers descend, taking over the roads in their shiny white land cruisers with interchangeable logos. The markets adjust, local items share space with foreign ones and prices shift to accommodate the influx of cash NGO workers have at their disposal.
And it is the irony and the contradiction of this work. To try to preserve what was here – what remains of it anyway; and at the same time dramatically changing it by nature of an outside presence.
The education system here is beyond crisis mode. The past 20 years of uncertainty in governing and funding, and the subsequent departure of those (often educated and/or moneyed) who could leave did. What resulted was a brain drain followed by a disruption in the normal schooling process. Fifteen years of actual conflict sent people fleeing from their homes, to border countries where they lived as refugees, and always in transition – from, to someplace. The children were scattered; some took up arms. Systems collapsed around them and were never resurrected and education was a casualty of the war. After all, war doesn’t make time for math and English.
The peaceful elections signaled a new start. And education, like healthcare, was at the top of the list. But where do you start? How do you rebuild when the whole country is suffering from a sort of arrested development.
Fancy, one of the other volunteers, was teaching a class at the local university. The papers she was grading, when not copied directly from the textbook, were written on a third of fourth grade level. Nonsensical sentences, inappropriate use of vocabulary, lack of comprehension for the subject at hand. And she was floored. What do you do when university level students can’t construct basic sentences or even understand the textbook they are reading?
You can do triage, repeat information until people seem to have a glimmer of understanding to work in whatever field they are pursuing. But those students won’t be truly equipped to do the work, and subsequently will be responsible for teaching the next generation. I saw this in South Africa in rural schools where the teachers were sometimes only marginally educated themselves, making it difficult for them to teach concepts like critical and creative thinking because they were unfamiliar to them.
You can start from scratch, count those in the system as lost and begin again. Import teachers and start with grade one, insuring a strong foundation. But how sustainable is that? What country with an 80% unemployment rate can justify outsourcing education – a major source of employment –to outsiders, and where would you get enough teachers? And what of this generation – what would they do?
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the problem for a few weeks now – clearly I am new to the party and Liberians have been wrestling with this issue for years. And there is no answer yet.
The absence of an answer looms large because education touches everything…nurses that are ill trained, entrepreneurs without the skills to create, educators unable to properly educate. Another professor asked her students what they wanted to do after graduation from university and found the resounding response to be – to work for an international NGO.
But International NGOs are not meant to be the solution to unemployment or even long-term development of the countries they are aiding. At least on paper NGOs talk about building capacity to create sustainable change, restore infrastructure, repair damage to sectors like health and education…to work themselves out of a job. NGO careers, at least the way I understand them, are meant to be transient across multiple countries, not permanent sources of the only middle class income in a healing, and eventually healed, country.
International NGOs (INGO) are not known for staying forever. There are other crises to be averted or the aftermath aided. Here, MSF (Doctors Without Borders) has almost fully withdrawn and others are marking their benchmarks and creating their timelines. Even UNMIL, 10,000 troops strong, is expected to pare down to 8,000 in the next six months and withdraw completely pending a peaceful election and transition of power in 2011.
And it isn’t that I’m against an NGO presence. America has nonprofits. But they are made up of Americans who understand the nuance of living in America and where the services and support we have falls short. They create jobs in communities and can become viable institutions. If Liberian students were thinking in these terms I would be less troubled.
But the desire for an INGO job speaks to me of a bigger and more subversive one…the delicate balance between need and dependency. Need is accessing the help that is available, dependency is resisting the opportunity to help self. One of my Liberian colleagues recounted a story of a village she was working with through a non-profit. They needed to clear some brush between the road and the village and asked the community to do it. The people responded, “what will you pay us?”
She was distraught. The non-profit was brining services that the community needed and yet they were unwilling to help themselves receive those services – to participate in the process. The path of least resistance is human nature. If people are willing to pay you to do what you might otherwise do yourself – why not take the pay? And if there is a ready-made INGO “industry” that guarantees entrance into the fledgling middle class why be a civil servant or entrepreneur? Hell, why even stay in Liberia when getting out is so much easier?
Blue passport and visa stamp announcing how temporary I am here, it is easy to do the work that I can stop doing whenever the feeling strikes me and expect others to do the same. But it isn’t the same.
Maybe I’ll stay in Liberia when I’m done with PC or maybe I’ll move to some other country doing similar work – maybe I’ll even go home. Wherever I end up I will still be haunted by the swinging pendulum that is the nature of my career, at once rendering aid and simultaneously creating a dependency that external development can’t fix.
Tags: liberia, socialcommentary, travel, volunteer