The Route: Tappita to Greenville and back

The Great Tappita to Greenville Rally

 

I feel it’s about time I told of the mammoth trek we made nearly 2 months ago now with a team from the Nimba base down to Greenville in Sinoe, for a weekend retreat with the Tearfund Sinoe team. It was during this visit that our logistician Anthony died, so I haven’t felt much like writing about the whole trip before, but the journey there and back was itself such an experience that I want to tell the story. Paris-Dakar? Forget it. The Tappita to Greenville trip (equivalent to the distance between, say, Bristol and London) was far more of a challenge than any paltry 7,000 mile trek across the burning Sahara.

 

We set off in high spirits early early, the sun just rising on a misty Tappita morning, in a convoy of two Tearfund land cruisers and a pick up. The drivers took their roles seriously, all three with a selection of fingerless driving gloves, sunglasses and desert boots, and Prince – the driver of the pickup I was in, squashed into the front seat between him and Anthony and a variety of winches and potent fuel-filled jerry cans – in an eye-catching blue and orange Gulf jumpsuit.

 

The road was rutted, bumpy but dry until after a few hours we passed Zwedru, in the north east of the country near the border with the Ivory Coast. Then as we turned south towards Sinoe and the coast, it began to pass through forest; overhung by jungly trees it became a mud bath, and the vehicles began to meet their match. Dancing, sliding, rocking, the back end of the vehicle plane-ing across the slippery mud like a dog’s hind legs on ice. All muscles tensed to stay in your seat, thrown around from side to side despite being jammed up tight against someone. At times we were tipping well over 45 degrees to either side, the chassis slamming into the mud banks at the side of the road – it’s a miracle we didn’t roll any of the vehicles. The drivers certainly earned their wages: they were in, out, around the cars, fixing tow ropes, winching us out of muddy pits, climbing on the vehicle roof to get more rope or to untie the pieces of tin to put under the vehicle wheels for grip, pushing, heaving, covered in mud, Prince’s blue and orange jumpsuit progressively more orange than blue.

 

 

For a time during the rainy season, only motorbikes can pass among the tiny villages we passed, driving on the slippery ridges between the water-filled ruts, and then for a while after that even motorbike travel is impossible, and foot becomes the only way of travel between villages cut off from all motor transport. Some villages in the remote areas of Sinoe County haven’t been reached by car for over 24 years. We barely saw another vehicle, apart from 2 lorries, a hundred kilometres apart, wheel-rim deep in mud, irrevocably stuck. As the day wore on, and as our vehicles became stuck once again in gloopy orange mud, wheels spinning, orange mud splattering and black exhaust billowing, the high spirits began to slip. Every few kilometres we reached another section where the drivers would get out, assess the situation from all angles, then one would lead the way through the mud ahead whilst the others carefully observed the route he took, waiting to see the outcome before venturing through. Each time the road became worse and worse, and at one point the occupants of all three vehicles got out for a muddy roadside meeting, unsure what to do since it had begun to spit with rain, and we did not know whether it was better to turn around and try to go back, risking a night or more in the bush beside 3 irretrievably mud-buried vehicles, or to press on, with the same fate, all the while with the thoughts in the back of our minds about the return journey along the same road after a weekend of rain.

 

We pressed on, racing the rain to Greenville, and eventually the stretches of good road became more frequent.  On these parts we got up quite a speed, sending black chickens skittering across the road in all directions in front of the vehicle with the determination of old ladies picking up their full skirts and running for their lives. We passed ‘bokabore hills’ – termite mounds – and wattle and daub buildings with open window frames and painted walls – lines from scripture, declarations of “Jehovah lives here”, white-daubed circles and dots and pictures and patterns. As we neared Greenville, we passed a young man wearing a splendid ladies fake fur coat teamed with a red baseball cap, swinging a golfing umbrella and picking his way through the mud like a country gent, and another running full pelt through the rain wearing full green theatre scrubs. By that stage of the journey, I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating. Let me tell you, dear Reader, I have never been so happy as when we arrived in Greenville after 11 hours of back-jarring bumps and mud, 11 hours of sitting lopsided in the same position with feet extended sideways into the footwell, 11 hours and yet passing only a few hundred kilometres through a mere 3 out of Liberia’s 15 counties. In all my travelling that was the worst and muddiest journey I have ever done.

 

That was of course before the gruelling return journey to Tappita a couple of days later, undertaken in a very different spirit since we were returning to Nimba without our late brother Anthony, and along a much longer route almost via Monrovia on (slightly…) better roads, in order to avoid the rain-worsened route travelled a few days before. But that is another (17 hour and 7 County) story which I will leave to the map and the imagination.

Cops and Robbers

A few weeks ago in the middle of the night we were visited by armed robbers. Or ‘Rogues’ as the Liberian guards called them, which makes them sound vaguely loveable, which they certainly were not, armed with machetes and guns. They tried to break into one of the buildings to one side of Tearfund’s Monrovia compound which houses our finance manager, but despite hacking the window surround away, couldn’t get through the steel bars on the windows. One of our guards then did a sterling job to convince them that the team house was in fact full of big burly Liberian guys, no expats, and was guarded by a lot of scary guards. The ‘rogues’ then went to try other organisations’ compounds on the larger ELWA compound where Tearfund is based, and succeeded in stealing valuables and wounding a female expatriate from another organisation who was trying to hold the door shut from the inside whilst they hacked at it with cutlasses. Whilst escaping from yet another organisation’s compound in the same robbery spree, they fired at another expatriate running out of his house, luckily missing him in the dark.

There has been an increase in violent armed robbery in Monrovia, beyond the usual rainy season rise. After the war, Liberia was disarmed: however, an emergency response unit of the police force have recently been re-armed, and it seems to be these same guns which are finding their way into general circulation. The bullet fired in the attack on the ELWA compound was apparently from one of these guns.

Attractive steel doors are in the process of being fitted to all external doors in the main Tearfund staff house, and the guards now have torches, which is…reassuring…!

Not so engaging…

The response to telling people I’m engaged is very different out here to that of friends and family back home. Every time I tell a Liberian or one of my other African colleagues, they are pleased for me but immediately start giving me advice on how to hang on to Josh until we get married and I’ve legally entrapped him – not to eat too much, work hard not to get fat or thin, not to talk to him by phone from out here too much or too little, in fact probably best not to work overseas at all in case he meets someone else and dumps me before the wedding… all highly encouraging…!

Since I’m sure of the strength of our relationship and that it is built on mutual respect and commitment, this is all quite diverting (especially the misunderstanding with one of my Liberian colleagues when I said I hoped to get married next summer and he sprang to reassure me that he was almost certain that if I didn’t change too much and was very careful, then Josh would probably still be around next summer…), but it worries me that this is the first reaction of my African brothers. How many women in Liberia, but also across the continent, instead of feeling security from a concrete declaration of intent to marry are still unsure of where they stand, knowing that engagement isn’t enough and that they need somehow to trap their partner into further commitment? Sad…

The Bright Lights of Tappita City

Tappita City is a small collection of ramshackle houses, old shipping containers doubling as shops and several ‘petrol stations’ – wooden benches with a row of old 2L mayonnaise jars filled with golden gasoline – strung along a stretch of red dust road, with wooden market stalls springing up every week on a Wednesday each selling a handful of Liberian fruit and veg – a few onions, bitter ball, palm nuts, cassava, pineapples.

Driving from Monrovia to Tappita you drive past the hospital destroyed in the war (the nearest is now in Ganta, about 3 hours away), the school and a swamp rice farm that Tearfund are helping to develop, then up and through the main collection of buildings – a shop selling cigarettes, rice and a few tins of mixed veg and fish, a motorcycle repair shop – and a few dozen people hanging around at all times of day, and down the other side, along the road to the Tearfund compound, and further on, to the UN Military checkpoint and base where BANGBAT, the Bengali battalion is based in their small city of white cube offices.

We work Monday to Saturday here; the majority of the 40 staff we employ here are based in the communities all week apart from the area coordinator, logistics and the sector managers, so Saturday is a time to catch up with them, monitor progress, get together as a team, prepare logistics plans for the following week, sort out finance and HR issues and to clean and repair the motorbikes and vehicles since they take a lot of wear and tear off-road every week.

I’m getting used to the simple things since there really isn’t much to do in Tappita City. Up in time for a cold shower before team devotions in the palava hut behind the house at 8am, then across the dusty compound to the dusty musty office with the unhurried fan sweeping arcs across the room, or out into the field to monitor how work in communities is progressing. The compound generator is off late afternoon to give it time to rest, so then maybe outside to set up the BGAN satellite connection to send and receive some emails or back to work on donor reports or sector updates until the computer battery fails or it’s too dark to see and bugs begin to buzz around your ears and crawl distractedly along the edges of the computer screen. Ambaye (the Ethiopian Area Coordinator) and myself eat together every meal, then watch some tv or a dvd or read or chat or go back and do some more work once the generator is back on in the evening.

Food is prepared for us by our cook Mariah who does her best with a limited selection, so the menu rotates mainly around rice, chicken, cassava, and more chicken. Occasionally it branches out to other forms of carbohydrate: baked spaghetti with cassava on the side, anyone? The fruit situation is better, with papaya and mango trees in the compound. The mango season is now over, and pineapples abound. Though I like mangos, this is better for my nerves since mangos are tasty but lethal: the numerous large dints in the tin roof of the Tearfund compound’s meeting hut bear witness to the onslaught of heavy ripe mangos over the past few months at irregular intervals, each one landing with a gunshot crack, drawing squarks from the team assembled for morning devotions (somehow it always seemed to be after someone had mentioned some area of instability or conflict in the nearby communities) or from me in the middle of the night as I wake up convinced the sky has fallen in. This might have something to do also with the colour of my room, which is dark blue. UN-blue. Apparently the only shade of paint readily available in Tappita…

I can’t believe I have been in Liberia nearly 3 months. It’s good to be here with the lovely Nimba team, and though quiet it’s not boring – I’m learning about well and hand pump construction (water tables, culverts, de-watering machines…), the hard work that goes into swamp construction (clearing the trees and stumps, making the canals and walls by hand, puddling the mud – like treading grapes – to get it the right consistency for planting, the bright green of the new rice seedlings…), all sorts! So if I’m ever lost in the wilderness, I’ll be able to sort myself out with an 18ft well and a rice swamp, no probs…