Friday 2nd May: I’m sitting writing this in the back of Tearfund Cruiser 13 with all the doors open to keep it cool, as we wait for a bridge to be repaired along the dirt road on our way back from Sinoe County to Monrovia. This journey’s already been a bit of a mission since we were due to fly back yesterday on the UN chopper, but only one of us was down on the Passenger Manifest and since we had to be back in Monrovia for an important meeting with donors from ECHO and DfID on Saturday, we decided to set off at first light this morning to drive, hoping to arrive in Monrovia before night fall. Three hours in, and we’ve hit an impassable chasm in the road ahead, but there’s a team of guys working with machetes and pick axes to fell trees, and a lorry load of sand to fill it all in, so hopefully there’ll soon be a bridge and we’ll be on our way within the next few hours.
Wednesday’s chopper journey down the coast to Greenville, the capital of Sinoe county, was fantastic. After a couple of weeks learning all about the projects from Tearfund HQ in Monrovia, it’s been great to get out and see some of Liberia, and the communities that Tearfund is working with. We flew in the UN helicopter, sat on long hard benches along each side, luggage down the middle, with the other passengers – mainly Ethiopian UN troops and other UN staff from the WFP. Not that many NGOs work down in Sinoe because it’s so inaccessible: when the rains come, the only way in is by chopper because the road is so bad, and the chopper doesn’t always fly because of the storms. The young dark haired Russian military personnel in a light blue jump suit with tin can headphones languidly gave us yellow ear plugs and safety instructions then went back to reading his Russian hard back novel. The round port holes on either side were open to the air so you could look right out and down, back over Tearfund’s compound and the nearby recently renovated Samuel Doe stadium, which used to be an IDP camp until not too long ago. Flying along the coastline, the narrow deserted beaches were picture perfect, with dense jungle breaking into palm-fringed deep orange sand. Inside the chopper it was warm and very very noisy, with the sweet hot smell of bodies and petrol, the strobing light from the blades giving the impression of an oncoming migraine. The vibrations, of everything including my teeth, were soporific apart from the odd alarming jolt, but I figured that unless the Russian looked up from his book, everything was probably alright.
Greenville is beautiful, with a few attractive old style buildings in the style of the American deep south, and is much more rural than Monrovia (which shows signs of extensive construction in the past year – a promising sign of security and of development), with more present evidence of war and poverty – burnt out and neglected buildings, rusting machinery and many thatched wattle-and-daub type communities.
On our drive back to Monrovia on Friday, and since we’d had warning that the road might be cut up ahead, we decided to stop in a large village along the way called Jacksonville, asking permission of the head of the local Community Development Committee to visit their swamp, which Tearfund helped the community to develop for rice farming last year, and which the community have extended themselves this year through the work of Tearfund-trained community agricultural Extension Workers.
To reach the swamp, we trekked through tropical jungle, fording streams in flip flops – hoping to avoid the leeches – passing women, faces marked with the white chalk of sande secret society ritual and bundles of cassava sticks on their heads, past tall tall trees, cycads, palms, reaching up close on either side of the narrow dirt track. Roger the Extension Worker showed us the nurseries where they nurture rice seedlings before transplanting them into the swamps which resemble rice paddies. He told us of the lack of man power, since there’s a number of NGOs, both international and local, with different interventions – building a new school, a new clinic, swamp development – that finding the people to work in the swamp is tricky.
The discovery that the road up ahead was cut prompted a flurry of radio action to explain where we were and plan how we might get back to Monrovia for the major meeting on Saturday. A cruiser was dispatched from Monrovia base in case that the bridge couldn’t be mended, to meet us on the other side, but the whole situation was made more complicated by the fact that we are not allowed to travel once it’s dark for security reasons, mobile phone reception is nonexistent once a certain distance from Greenville or Monrovia, the dispatched vehicle didn’t have an HF radio, and we couldn’t reach Monrovia base radio operator directly but had to relay communications between Greenville, Nimba and Gbarpolu bases all around the country. My communications training back at Tearfund HQ in London during induction was put to good use as we used a combination of Thuraya Sat Phones, radio and mobiles to communicate the plan, a highly entertaining version of Chinese Whispers, further complicated by the Liberian accent, radio language abbreviations (“Golf Mike, let’s Tango on the Charlie Papa”, anyone?), and the bad reception.
After the bridge was mended, we drove for another 7 hours, through primary jungle and then as we left Sinoe County and passed into River Cess and then Gran Geddah Counties, the tree level dropped and we passed instead through sparser secondary jungle, the result of many years of destructive logging under Charles Taylor, the timber exported to Malaysia, and the money drained into Taylor’s pockets and used to fuel the war.
Liberians’ dependence on bushmeat was evident, first in a community we passed through – a monkey hung by the side of the road, tied like a handbag, tail looped around its head – and later, a tawny wildcat or civet draped across the concrete culvert of a bridge-building gang, clearly the lunch of the bridge workers. An overloaded van we later passed had a live (and rare, I think, possibly soon to be rarer…) Colobus monkey perched on the roof – a late lunch for the passengers?
Passing thatched huts with drawings from the war, dogs in the road, chickens playing chicken, UN and police checkpoints, we eventually neared Monrovia after bumping and crunching for 12 hours along first dirt roads and then potholed tarmac, reaching Firestone rubber plantation which is the largest in the world – row after row of white rubber trees, every one with a black cup pressed against the bark tapping the sap, and pickups carrying the dried latex lumps. And reached Tearfund base as it grew dark, tired, dirty, hot. But I loved every minute of the trip, and can’t wait to get back out of Monrovia, to Gbarpolu next week, and to Nimba where I’ll be permanently based the week after.
After lots of dirt-scrubbing and a very good night sleep I’ve uploaded this blog and some photos of Monrovia and the trip to Sinoe County here!
