Ch-ch-ch-ch Changes

I’m back in Liberia after R&R and a Tearfund training course in Kenya, and since the last time I passed through the arrivals hall in Monrovia, the immigration cards have been updated from a piece of scrappy white paper to blue card, and you now have to pay $1 for the baggage trolleys…I’ll take that as a promising sign of development!

The other major change since I left Liberia is that whilst on R&R Josh asked me to marry him, and I said yes, which is very exciting!

We had a fantastic time in Kenya, and it was exactly what I needed after the sadness and stress of the previous few weeks. It did not start in a very Restful or Relaxing manner (at noon before my 5pm flight, Evangeline the HR Officer left in a leisurely manner to pick up my ticket from the Kenya Airways office half an hour’s drive away in town, the newly-arrived HAP auditors were trying to pin me down to interview me about Beneficiary Accountability, and I was trying to finish packing and call England to get the Tearfund IT Helpdesk to sort out my broken email account…), but I made the flight and arrived in Mombasa, met up with Josh (learning valuable lessons about the timeliness of Kenya Airways flights and their baggage systems in the process) and headed south to idyllic Coral Cove cottages on Tiwi Beach. And took a great big breath of fresh Indian Ocean air and began to relax…

It was perfect – white sands, deserted resort, wildlife all around, including monkeys in the trees outside (and two particularly cheeky monkeys in our apartment when we left the door open: when caught, one was sat on top of the fridge – he fixed us with a baleful stare, bunch of bananas clasped in his armpit, and then sprang back into motion, grabbing handfuls of uncooked pasta and shovelling them into his mouth as fast as possible before scramming, leaving behind sticky banana footprints and bits of chewed pasta), bats in the roof, and geckos and chongololos inside.

Local traders came round each day to sell us prawns or lobster, mangoes and vegetables. Life is particularly hard for them at the moment, in the aftermath of the election violence in December/January this year leading to mass desertion of Kenya’s resorts and safari destinations by tourists. We couldn’t believe how quiet it was – great for us, a disaster for the local people reliant on tourism.

After a few days on the beach, not to mention a marriage proposal (yay!), we went on an amazing safari in Tsavo National Park (home to the man-eating tsavo lions made famous by the film The Ghost & The Darkness), where we saw approximately 3 ½ out of the Big Five (does a leopard tail count?) – there are photos up on flickr (check out the link on the right), though Josh has more on his facebook page…lots more….in fact you might want to take some annual leave to look through them all… The whole safari was out of this world – wide African skies, stunning sunsets, so many animals crazily close – and we stayed in the most amazing lodge one night, where we drank ice cold beer and the best G&T I’ve ever had round a blazing camp fire, guarded by proud askari warriors, with hippos and zebra strolling the perimeter of the light the flames cast, and then later on in the middle of the night, hippos grunting around right outside our tented hut.

Then it was back to the beach for more quality time doing absolutely nothing, and last but not least, onto Mombasa for a few days wandering around the crumbling streets of the old town and the Arab/Portuguese influenced Fort Jesus.

So now I’m back in Liberia, heading back up country first thing tomorrow morning, looking forward to seeing the team and celebrating news-just-in of a successful HAP audit with them. It’s good to realise just how accustomed I am getting to Liberian English when I can clearly understand Emmanuel the groundsman, whose English was totally indecipherable to me 2 months ago when I arrived and I would have to reconstruct entire sentences from the one or two words I had deciphered…

Thanks for all your messages of congratulations about our engagement! Though you can’t be quite as excited as I am…

Quick Update

Hey y’all, just a quick update to say that since the internet connection in Tappita, Nimba County, where I’m now living is satellite-based, I can’t update the blog as regularly. Also, this last week has been pretty hard, with the sudden death of one of the Tearfund Nimba team last Saturday, our logistician, so as you can understand I’ve not felt much like writing.

I’m back in Monrovia for 2 days before heading to Kenya on Monday for a training course and R&R which I’m definitely ready for, and I’ve just put up a few photos of the last 2 weeks upcountry here so you have some idea what I’m up to:  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16675032@N00/

Please pray for the Nimba team as they come to terms with this sad death of a close colleague and try to put the team back together, particularly as we’re due to be externally audited on Wednesday 4th June, which is not great timing. Thank you.

 

A Silent Tsunami

 

A couple of weeks ago I went along to the monthly Agricultural Committee Coordination (ACC) meeting at the Liberian Ministry of Agriculture, where discussion centred on the current global food crisis. In the past 6 months the price of rice has doubled; since Liberia imports nearly 60% of its food stuffs, the impact on the cost of key staples is significant, and Liberia is preparing for a food crisis, particularly amongst the urban poor.

 

This, and getting ready to go upcountry on Tuesday with food supplies from Monrovia since the markets in Nimba sell nothing but the most basic of staples like rice grain, not to mention the news I just heard on the BBC that food relief being provided to cyclone refugees by the Burmese government consists of a cup of rice per family per day made me realise how complacent we are in the West about access to and availability of food.

 

What initially seemed a dry news story when I was back in the UK suddenly comes to life when you see the tangible effects of the global food price rises on the local population. The situation seems to have crept up on a lot of people – the first real signs of an approaching crisis were apparently documented in an Economist cover story in December 2007 entitled “The End of Cheap Food” which highlighted that the food price index is higher than at any time since it was created in 1845: global rice prices have risen 75% over the last year, and developing nations are the hardest hit, especially when combined with weather shocks, or political crises, as Liberia. For some background, check out here, here or here.

 

It’s really hit home to me how interlinked different parts of the globe are: the increased cost of a bag of rice or handful of small small beans here driven by a rise in energy prices, continued population growth, the economic boom in India and China, changed consumer preferences towards higher meat consumptions in these economies, reduced crop yields due to climate changes, and increased biofuel production which has increased competition between crops for food and crops for fuel. And once the price of staples rise, the situation worsens when people on an individual or country scale panic buy and hoard, speculators buy up supply, and food producing nations impose export controls to preserve food for their own people, reducing the amounts available for export to those countries like Liberia which rely on food imports.

 

The Liberian government is preparing short term measures to mitigate the crisis, including removing a $2 tax on rice and other staples (which helps the population in the short run, but reduces the governmental budget by $3 million), and calling on the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) for emergency food aid, likely to be distributed through NGOs such as Tearfund. Longer term, there needs to be a focus on increased Liberian rice production by both small holdings and commercial farms, reducing the dependency on external imports. Work that Tearfund is already doing on Food Security, encouraging low-land swamp development and farming through training and tool distribution, rather than slash-and-burn upland agriculture is a step in the right direction, yielding much more rice from the same area of land, and more sustainably year on year. Tearfund is also supporting communities to build drying floors and grain stores which help to reduce the hunger gap between seasons of planting and harvesting.

 

The FAO and WFP have initiated a joint price monitoring exercise, collecting bi-weekly data from 22 markets throughout the country to record prices of key staple foods such as butter rice, raw cassava, small small beans, plantain and palm oil. Based on the data, the government, UN agencies, Tearfund and other aid organisations will plan a response. Meanwhile, prices continue to rise and it it appears Liberians are apparently swapping rice for spaghetti. Let’s hope that they are content with the new cosmopolitan diet, since after all, it was the 1979 riots in Monrovia based on the increasing price of rice which led to Samuel Doe’s coup of the 1980s…

Contact Details

Sadly my mobile phone went ‘missing’ last weekend (boo), so I now have a new number – check out the Contact Details page! xxx

Golf Mike, let’s Tango on the Charlie Papa

 

Friday 2^nd 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!

Devotions

The whole team meets at 8am every morning in the palava hut for Team Devotions – singing, a short talk by one of the team or a visiting pastor, and prayers for team members and for the day ahead. The same happens with the teams in the field sites, and it’s a great way to start the morning, spending time in the cool of the day before the heat builds, a reminder of what it’s all about and who we’re doing this for.

I was asked to lead the devotions this morning, and since Tearfund UK are spending today in prayer and fasting, focusing on chapters 1 and 2 of the book of Philippians, I spent a while in my free time this week reading through these verses and preparing a 15 min talk for this morning.

I thought I’d got some good points together, and hoped that it was helpful to the team. However, the only feedback I’ve got so far is that I am greeted with a big Liberian handshake and a cry of ‘preacher-woman!’, and the finance manager who missed Devotions this morning said he asked another staff member who was there what it was all about, and she said she didn’t know because she couldn’t understand my English…

This is all very good for my humility, which after all is what Philippians 2 is all about, so I think I will chalk it up a success – for me anyhow

“Cow Poo Poo Conflict”

 

Today was the last of an excellent five day Workshop run by Tearfund for its management staff from the three field sites, as well as some local partners, covering a range of ‘Good Practice’ topics from Performance Management, Beneficiary Accountability and Gender issues through to Conflict and Conflict Sensitivity.

 

It was great meeting national staff from all over the programme, especially those I’ll be working directly with once I get up country to Nimba. It was also a great introduction to interpreting the Liberian accent (adopt an American accent, talk at speed, missing out all your consonants and running all your words together, and add ‘o?’ at the end of every sentence and you begin to approach the experience) and Liberian turns of phrase: when discussing different types of conflict (no conflict, surface level conflict which is easy to resolve since it has no deep roots, latent conflict bubbling under the surface ready to erupt when disturbed, and full blown open conflict), one participant brilliantly summed up the current latent conflict in Liberia by likening it to “Cow Poo Poo Conflict, hey, crusty and unremarkable on the surface, but soft and terrible when cracked, o?”. I like.

 

When discussing gender issues in project planning, it was a wake up call to realise that even some of the national project staff (though a minority) were of the opinion that women are weak-minded and should not necessarily be involved in decision-making processes. It’s bound to reinforce the danger that women’s views are left out when planning interventions with the community. Tearfund itself of course strongly advocates mainstreaming these gender issues in the design and implementation of all their programmes, working hard to promote inclusiveness and ensure equal participation, but it’s a reminder that the local context, belief and tradition make this challenging. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works in practice when I get into the field in a few weeks time.

 

A jam-packed six day working week in the heat and humidity has wiped me out, and today was a nicely low key Sunday, with church and a wander along the (beautiful unless you look too closely at the tide-line rubbish) beach. The rainy season is on its way, the skies are overcast and there have been a few short showers, but the wellies are still in the cupboard for now. Thought I did meet a guy called Wellington in the workshop this week if that counts…?

Mobile phone

I now have a Liberian mobile – number on contact page if you fancy giving me a call!

Little Black Dresses and Wellington Boots

 

After 2 weeks of thorough briefing at Tearfund HQ just outside London on the intricacies of the Liberia Programme, on how to approach checkpoints and how to use a VHF radio, I arrived in Monrovia late on Wednesday.

 

On recommendation from the Deputy Programme Director whom I met as she was passing through Tearfund HQ for a conference, in my luggage were both wellie boots (flowery Laura Ashley at Homebase, no less) and a Little Black Dress, items I never thought I’d be taking to a post-conflict African nation. And despite the chaos of Monrovia Airport – a cacophony of noise, officials waving papers around and stamping anything that moved, the most overloaded luggage conveyer belt you’ve ever seen with enormous plastic-bound bags and boxes rolling off onto toes and being chucked back on, the sweaty heat and crush of bodies - both my bags arrived in one piece (2 pieces?) so I won’t have to wear wellies to a formal event, or the LBD to wade through swamps in the rainy season… 

 

It’s great being in West Africa again, although I think it’s going to take me some time to get used to the humidity and the heat – the generator goes off at midnight and comes on again at 6am, so the ceiling fans don’t work between those times and it’s like lying on a damp mattress in a sauna – nice.

 

The Tearfund compound is a little way out of central Monrovia, within a larger secure compound in which a number of aid agencies and Liberian NGOs are based, including AEL (Tearfund’s main partner in Liberia), Samaritan’s Purse, some missionary organisations, and a small hospital, school, church and clinic. The best bit is that the compound is bordered on one side by…the beach! I somehow seem to fall on my feet with my overseas travel – The Gambia, The Maldives and now Liberia all with their beautiful coastlines. However, because of the security situation we’re separated from it by the Tearfund compound fence, and it’s only safe to wander along when there are others around. The UN come here to swim, so yesterday there were a whole load of pasty German-looking guys in speedos. Will try to upload photos (of the beach, not the speedos) to the flickr site.

 

Security is fairly light, since there are loads of UNMIL (UN) soldiers around – I think the second largest deployment of UN troops in the world. This makes Monrovia relatively safe and gives Liberia the chance to develop and train its own police force, but the peace is fairly precarious, especially if and when UNMIL leaves.

 

Drove into Monrovia last night, past the port where Mercy Ships’ Africa Mercy is docked – lots of the ship staff chilling out on the quay in deckchairs watching the sunset – and along Monrovia’s strangely American-looking wide roads with their boulevard signs. It’s a funny place – many of the buildings we passed look prosperous-gone-to-seed, and the only real sign of the recent conflict are the numerous UN barracks, ubiquitous ‘no guns’ signs and the large advert boards along the roads put up by USAID or the government with messages about working together, ‘No Mob Violence’, and how to get help if you have been raped.

 

**

 

I’ve got a million documents to read on security procedures, as well as how all the parts of the Liberia programme are funded, so I’ll leave it there, except to tell you the all important Cockroach Count: only 2 so far, disturbed in the kitchen in the middle of the night, ick ick but am trying to behave like a grown up. There are very few mosquitoes since it’s not yet the rainy season plus we’re on the coast. Think it might be worse when I head up to the jungly Nimba County where I’ll be permanently based in a couple of weeks time.

 

No call yet to wear either the Little Black Dress or the wellies…will keep you posted…

“The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here”

 

Liberia is Africa’s oldest republic, but is of course better known for the bitter conflicts that raged through Liberia and its neighbours throughout the 1990s. In preparing to go to Liberia in under 4 week’s time, I came across the Liberian Coat of Arms, the symbolism of which seems poignant for this damaged and broken country, and with the current focus on rebuilding and reconciliation.

The Coat of Arms consists of a shield containing a picture of 19th century ship arriving in Liberia, symbolising the ships which brought freed slaves back from the United States to Liberia in 1822, and led to the founding the Republic of Liberia in 1847 with the support of the American government.

Above the shield the national motto of Liberia appears on a scroll:

The love of liberty brought us here.

The wheel barrow and shovel represent the dignity of labour and hard work through which the nation will prosper. The rising sun in the background represents the birth of a nation, and the palm tree, the nation’s most versatile source of food, represents prosperity.

The white dove with a scroll represents the breath of peace.