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…