Liberia
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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