Leaving Liberia

Somehow it is October already, these last six months has flown by and it’s time for me to leave Liberia. I’m taking with me so many memories and there’s so much I wanted to write but didn’t have either the time or the internet access to do so, so here’s some of the thing’s I’ll remember about Liberia, including some I’ll miss and some I really really won’t …

· Fantastic Liberian English! Liberal use of the words ‘fine’ and ‘too much interesting’, ‘sorry o!, ‘don’t make me vexed, I beg you, don’t embarrass me o? The way that Liberians shout as if they are really really angry – intimidating until you realise it’s just a normal discussion dressed up as a full scale row; different almost archaic use of words: when someone gives birth they ‘bring forth’ a child, whereas goats ‘drop’ their kids; to emphasise a point you ‘buttress’ it; if you spill water, you ‘waste’ it; born again Christians are described as “As though you are new, brand from the plastic”, my English being described as ‘slippery English’

· Liberian sayings (“white teeth, black heart”) and proverbs, most of which seem to be about goats and elephants and I have no idea what they mean but they last a long time and they sound good.

· English-Liberian misunderstandings: Written reports which stated that “The roads were so bad that vehicles couldn’t travel without a wench”; One of my expat colleague’s stories of walking into the Logistics Office and telling the 3 logs guys in there that it smelt of moth balls…the stunned silence, and the query from one of the Liberian logs officers, ‘do moths have balls?’; The roundabout answers to straight forward questions, and the ubiquitous ‘yes’ answer to any ‘either/or’ questions; the story of what happened to our goats and the salt water…ask me about it some time…

· Liberian devotions every morning, highlights including Pharaoh being described in very solemn tones as ‘mischievous’ and ‘rude’ for not letting the Israelites go, and a whole sermon based on the premise (?) that the word ‘Christ’ is derived from the word ‘crisis’ and therefore we should expect a certain amount of turmoil as Christians…riiiight

· The people I’ve met along the way, including Sinoe base’s Chief Mechanic’ Musa, a scrawny old man with a toothless smile, signalling ‘time to cut off the generator’ with a finger drawn sharply across his throat under his beaming grin; the little of African grandma who was one of the beneficiaries in the car accident in Sinoe who didn’t realise the car had fallen off the bridge and started to complain that someone was ‘wasting water on me’; Sinoe police chief’s ‘well, legally there’s no fine to release your vehicle, but whatever you can afford would be nice…’

· Lizards darting across the grass, up the walls, every colour and shape, skittering over the palaver hut roof during meetings and devotions and falling splat onto the ground

· Travels across Liberia, heat rising off the road, water from the recent rain shower, passing trucks with “NO FOOD FOR LAZY MAN” painted across the front, yellow New York taxi-esque commercial cars broken down by the side of the road with luggage strewn across the verge and the stranded passengers trying to hitch a lift onwards, past ‘fifty fifty motel’ (not the strongest of accolades), stopping for sweetcorn cooked on braziers by the side of the road and poked in through the windows by children stretched on tiptoes; the view form the chopper of jungle as far as the eye can see, occasionally broken by the bare patch of an upland rice farm

· Charles Taylor’s rusting logging ship sunk and immobile in the Greenville port, tiny sailing boats with tattered UNHCR sails slipping past in the narrow pass between the ship and the rocky outcrop of land lading into the harbour

· Breakfasts with Francis the Ugandan Watsan Advisor in Sinoe as he tries out different food combinations in an effort to make the same food interesting – stale bread and honey with a sprinkling of dried milk powered anyone? Honey and marmite?

· Arriving back to Monrovia compound after a long bumpy 9 hour journey from a month in the bush and opening the fridge for a cold coke or beer; seeing familiar faces of all the expat staff based in Monrovia or visiting from the field, drinking good coffee brought by the Kenyans, Ugandans and Ethiopians and good wine from the South African, and Cadbury’s chocolate from the latest visitor from the UK…

· Liberian meeting etiquette, where if you hide behind a piece of plain A4 paper when someone calls you on the phone then apparently no-one can hear you and it’s not disruptive in the slightest…. And if you need to leave a meeting, just bend your knees, put your hand up in the air drawing attention to yourself as if you’re asking a question and noisily shuffle out right through the middle of the gathering.

· The sound of the rain, so loud that you can’t think about anything else, and the thunder that shakes the bed and brings your heart into your mouth; The fact that the rain makes field staff approximately 1 hour late for work, despite the fact many of them live just minutes from the compound…

· A couple of things I won’t miss – vehicle breakdowns, the mould that grows on everything including your shoes and makes all your clothes smell fusty musty, Beans (with or without rice) for every meal for 2 weeks in Sinoe; The frustrations of setting up the BGAN again and again and not being able to get a satellite connection; Thinking that working 6.5 days a week, 12 hours a day, occasionally by the light of a head torch when the generator’s off, is normal; Driving through lightning storms in what is basically a big metal box with one big ol’ lightning conductor of a radio mast stuck on the front; The Lutheran school on the way into Monrovia with a colourful cartoon concrete statue of a zebra outside which I thought was kind of kitsch and cool until I learned of the horrific massacre that took place there during the war; The rainy season outbreak of big fat bush flies, otherwise known as tsetse, the carriers of sleeping sickness…

But overall I think the best thing has been over the past few days during the external Impact Evaluation we’ve been going through, sitting in small village meeting huts hours drive from anywhere along barely passable roads listening to community members express what the work Tearfund has undertaken means to them and the impact that it has had on their lives and their communities. Hearing about how they have clean drinking water for the first time, how the community has been taught about conflict resolution and how particularly the women are empowered to be involved in community decision-making, how they are protected from the threat of rape by having a pump in the centre of the village rather than walking to the local creek for water, how the incidence of diarrhoea, malaria and other sickness has drastically reduced through improved sanitation and hygiene practices and clearing up the community, how the community is no longer hungry through the traditional hunger period between planting and harvesting because of improved farming methods and crop diversification, seeing the healthy children.

Just awesome, and makes me so proud to have been here with Tearfund, working towards a very small part of that impact.

And now it’s time to leave, time to go back to the UK and start something new. As the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:

A time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

(Ecclesiastes 3 v 1-8)

For me, it is now a time to both uproot and to plant, to mourn and to dance. For Liberia, this is a time to mend and to build; a time for peace.

Smallface and the Gang

Apparently the ‘rogues’ who tried to break in to our compound were recently apprehended: ‘Smallface’ and his gang were caught hiding in a swamp near island near the Congo Town area of Monrovia.

 

Liberia recently made armed robbery, terrorism and hijacking capital offences, punishable by death or life imprisonment, despite concern from Amnesty International. This recent armed robbery bill gained momentum after the rising spate of armed crimes including physical assault, rape and murder particularly in Monrovia and surrounding communities. Apparently the President is committed to revisiting the Act for possible amendment as soon as the situation is brought fully under control and sustainable peace is assured.

 

Wonder what will happen to Smallface? Hopefully a long term in jail rather than the death penalty. And does he really have a small face?

Leaving on the DASH…

After a hectic month in deepest darkest Sinoe County acting as Area Coordinator and managing the base, I was due to travel from Greenville (‘capital’ of Sinoe County) back to the bright lights of Monrovia yesterday and it was a typical laid back Liberian experience. No really. The communication line between Monrovia UN office and Greenville office was down due to bad weather (always a good start when you’re planning to fly rusty old UN choppers) meaning the flight manifest hadn’t arrived so no-one knew for certain what time the flight would be leaving, despite the fact it goes every Friday at the same time as far as I can tell, or whether I was in fact even on the list to fly. Having heard rumours of 2pm, I decided to give myself a good hour’s grace and aim to be at the UN base by 1pm. All morning I heard logistics running around looking for the key to Cruiser-12 (the one, as some of you may have heard if you’ve emailed me over the last week whilst I’ve been managing the base, that was in a really nasty accident last week – in which praise God no-one died – but which is halfway to being fixed minus quite a lot of glass in its windows and half the back caved in), but didn’t realise the relevance of this to my travel plans until about 11.30 when I thought I ought to begin prodding logistics to make sure there was a vehicle on base to take me to the airport. Turns out there was. Just the one – Crusier-12, minus a car key. And the spare key didn’t work, apparently something to do with the large amount of water that got into the vehicle from its bungee off a bridge last week, though quite how this affects the ability of the spare key to start the car when the normal key worked when I drove it on Thursday night…anyhow. So. No vehicle. All morning every time I asked, people had been totally laid back about flight times, but all of a sudden the same staff kept appearing and asking me why I was not at the airport since the flight usually left by now. Thanks guys. A car that we couldn’t start, a large bag since I’m not coming back to Greenville again, and no transport to the airport – not even a motorbike on base because all the field staff, motorbikes and vehicles are out in the field running workshops, hauling participants and doing project work.

 

Cue rapidly trying to hire 2 motorbikes and drivers from outside the compound: I left on the first whilst the security guard was tying my suitcase precariously onto the back of the other; backpack on, clutching my laptop to my chest with one hand and holding on with the other, riding along the dusty ‘back route’ to the airport, through puddles left by last night’s heavy rain, across a football field, through people’s backyards, swerving around a hand pump or 2, all the while scouring the sky and listening out for the tell-tale chopper noise that would tell me I was too late.

 

I made it to the UN base with 5 minutes to spare; the UN plane, otherwise known as the Dash, taxiing down the runway as we rode up to the gate rather than one of the rusty old choppers – hoorah! My bag on the rented motorbike behind made it with 1 minute to spare. Rushing into the building, without, it transpired, the correct paper work, and a bag that was about 20kg above the appropriate weight limit I managed to charm the MOVCON guy into letting me board. That is until of course the flight plan changed. I then sat in the UN concrete hut in Greenville for 2 hours waiting for the UN flight to ‘dash’ to Harper further down the coast and back to Greenville, before flying, hopefully with me and my bag on board, to Spriggs-Paynesville UN Airport in Monrovia. The flight had been supposed to go straight to Harper and then to Greenville on its way back to Monrovia, but the weather was too bad to land in Harper and they’d had to come back and land in Greenville instead. After 2 hours and the plane still hadn’t left Greenville, the plan changed again – they would take me, the only passenger getting on at Greenville, go back to Harper with the other passengers who’d wanted to go directly there from Monrovia, then fly direct to Monrovia from Harper. By this stage, the sky was getting darker and darker and the rain was pouring down, the flight captain walked passed me on the way to the plane murmuring to his crew mate that he didn’t like the look of this weather, and I began to think that Greenville was a nice place to stay after all and who needed a warm shower and a decent bed n Monrovia?

 

So. We flew the 40 minutes to Harper, at low altitude through thick cloud and horrible turbulence, where we had 2 aborted attempts at landing – wheels down, losing a lot of height rather more quickly than I was expecting, popping out of the cloud and realising we were far too close to the ground, back up into the cloud and round to try again, before the captain came on the intercom and said we were giving up and going back to Monrovia, where all on board except me had started their journey close to 8 hours beforehand.

 

How different from flying the UN helicopters – the suave chirpy multi-lingual flight staff came around the cabin taking down all our details since they hadn’t received the manifest with the names of who was flying, and during a particularly queasy-making bit of turbulence where he was forced to buckle in next to me until it calmed down I remarked that at least it was shorter than the chopper flight, to which he muttered under his breath, “and you’re more likely to get to your destination in this one”. Now it’s confirmed by a UN bloke I’m glad I have no more chopper flights to go. As we passed over Greenville and flew towards Monrovia the weather improved and the sun came out, with a rainbow encircling the plane and white UN choppers visible against the green far far below. It was an odd experience to be suddenly above fluffy white clouds travelling this route between Greenville and Monrovia, which I’ve done before on a chopper, rattling and shaking low over the green jungle, or by road, bumping along bright orange dirt roads for 12 hours: calmer (once the turbulence ended), more serene and distanced from the real Liberia.

 

As I stepped off the plane, back in Monrovia for the first time in a month, I was the only one pleased to be there: the other passengers were back again for the first time in, well, 9 hours of flying around on the Dash, and for some it was the second time this week they’ve tried to get to Harper. The Dash only flies on Fridays so they’ve got the longer chopper ride to look forward to again for the next attempt…

 

Back in Monrovia, I find out the hot water is no longer – the tank was full of rust and apparently growing some sort of bug so they’ve removed it. So no cold bucket baths but cold showers instead… But I can testify that at least the bed is comfy 🙂

A good reason to set off early when travelling to Monrovia…

Someone stood up after devotions the other day with an announcement – a warning not to travel through Red Light district of Monrovia after dark (the area is named after the one – out of order cos there’s no electricity in the city – traffic light in the whole of Liberia, not after the dubious morals of its citizens…), because of the high probability that you will be a victim to organ-harvesting gangs collecting body parts for ritual sacrifices. Great. Certainly an incentive to abide by the programme policies about arriving in Monrovia from the field after dark…

The Cause of the 14-year Liberia Conflict

Just reading through a very detailed report prepared by one of our Nimba staff about the impact of Tearfund projects over the last 3 years, and came to the following in the Background to Intervention section:

“The population [of Nimba County] were forcefully migrated to either refugee or displace people’s camps; lives and properties were destroyed; agricultural production inputs and facilities were either destroyed or lost. Animals were incriminated. It was apparent that population of Gbee/ Doru district of over 15,000 person were displaced and lost every thing they had. Presently there is no shelter intervention in both Kparblee and Gbee/ and Doru neither food security intervention. They are destitute. Through discussion held with Government and Local Officers, Tearfund was mandated to intervene Tappita Statutory District especially in Gbee/ Doru, Gboe and Doe administrative districts”

Hee heee heee, ‘the animals were incriminated’ – I now have a mental image of a band of pigs, supported by a dog or two, and a battalion of chickens with an evil glint in their eye, on the rampage through Nimba County…

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…