Standing at the edge of the school grounds I squint out over the long expanse of field before me. My high vantage point provides an excellent view and in the distance I can see a worn sign erected years ago to welcome a brigade of Bangladeshi engineers sent by the UN. In the intervening space baking in the hot sun sits row upon row of improvised wooden stands covered with tin roofs and UN issued tarps. Each stand is filled with wares and an expectant vender, waiting to make the first sale of the day.
Today is market day, a weekly event which brings sellers from all over the region through our town to sell the goods they’ve acquired along the way. Most of the items for sale come from the capital city, Monrovia, but a few vendors sport more exotic fare from nearby countries such as Ghana, Guinea, and Cote D’Ivoire.
From my lookout above it all I can see the familiar items for sale from a distance. Plastic buckets and cookery are piled everywhere. Many stands are entirely dedicated to selling vibrantly colored fabrics which will be purchased and brought to the town tailors to be made into new outfits.
Even from this distance I can see one vendor selling the blue and white patterned indigo cloth which is made exclusively in the mountains of Guinea. I make a mental note to walk by later and see the fabric a little better up close, I’ve always liked indigo cloth and if the price is right I wouldn’t mind having some more clothing made out of it.
I’ve had my fill of just watching now and I pick up my bag and walk down the hill into the market. As I descend into the chaos of hundreds of people jostling to be heard my mind is thinking about the hidden items I may find that day. From a distance the market always looks the same, but it’s only as you wind your way through it that a patient eye can spot some unusual catch. Today I’m trying to find some new vegetables for a stew but I’m not hopeful, I’ve yet to see much beyond the usual fare of onions and chili peppers that one can find any day of the week.
As I weave in and out of the people, wheelbarrows, and children selling homemade doughnuts that dot the narrow walkways I’m constantly barraged on all sides by calls from marketeers hoping to entice me to their stand. “Friend, come in and see.” “Razors, 10 LD each!” “Cold water here!” and of course the ever popular one word invitation: “Whiteman!” I usually respond to these calls with a smile and a wave. I can’t stop at every person who invites me or I’d never be finished. Still I’m careful to take a quick glance at everything I walk past, amidst the cluttered piles of merchandise I know there are treasures to be had.
Then suddenly I see something that catches my eye. Spread out on a worn tarp an old woman has placed her collection of various used jars and containers. Piles of what I would have called trash back in the U.S. but here I know better. I think back to the bags upon bags of cooking spices littering my house and I know that I’ve found a solution. I walk over to the woman and, mindful not to be rude, I greet her before I start examining what she has for sale:
“My sista, how da day?”
“No Ba-o”
“How da bidness?”
“I trying small”
“Thank Go”
“Thank Go”
Now that we’ve said hello we can start to talk business. I crouch down and get a closer look at the containers she’s selling. Among the empty mayonnaise and medicine jars I spy a pile of spice containers, perfect. I ask her how much for each container, she replies that they’re 10LD each (which is about 14 US cents). Although the amount is fine for me I know I’m getting charged a white man’s price. I haggle a little, which is customary, and I end up paying 50LD for the 8 bottles I find. I thank her and tell myself to come back next week to see if she’s gotten any more.
By now I’ve wandered into the food section of the market. I walk past tables of smoked fish and chicken feet buzzing with flies. I pass a few woman selling vegetables but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Dried beans and rice spill out of small sacks. Bulgur wheat is also for sale, along with various other grains I’m not familiar with. I buy a few onions for 5LD each, mentally beginning to piece together my lunch for that day. I pick up a head of garlic at 50LD which I find to be incredibly overpriced but I’m assured that the price is correct due to its rarity (“Da garlic bidness har-o”).
Cassava root and plantains are plentiful this time of year but I’ve had enough starch in my diet for the time being so I pass by them. Just as I reach the end of the food and I’ve resigned myself to another meal of plain beans I spy something red out of the corner of my eye. There, amidst piles of the usual market fare I see a woman selling cherry tomatoes. I smile to myself inwardly and run over to claim my prize. The tomatoes are perfect and I can tell they’re fresh, not moldy and infested with bugs like they can sometimes be. I buy a generous bag full of them for 10LD and I head home to make what I’ve now decided will be some sort of bean chili with rice.
As I walk out of the market I feel exhausted. It’s been almost a full hour of walking in the hot midday sun. I’ve been pushed and grabbed and shouted at. I’ve been constantly surveying the areas around me not only for merchandise to buy but for obstacles to be avoided such as animal droppings and tin roofing jutting out into the walkways. I want nothing more than to go home and relax with a bottle of water in my hammock.
But at the same time I’m already looking forward to next week’s market. I wonder what it will bring with it and in what ways it will change my small corner of the world. As I walk up the dusty road leading to my house I decide that before I get in the hammock for a much needed nap I’ll clean the bottles I’ve bought today and fill them with their spices. Another successful day.
February 7, 2010
January 17, 2010
Things I've thunk
Three airplanes, five airports, two Peace Corps buses, two training facilities, a Peace Corps car, and a bush taxi. That’s what it took to get me to my new site, but here I am. Nestled between two French NGOs and facing a UNICEF made latrine my house sits enclosed by half a bamboo fence. I say half because the rest of it is either missing or in the process of falling down. Made entirely of cement it is a far cry from my housing back in Guinea. There are four bedrooms, three common areas, a bathroom, and a porch. The windows all have screens and everything is shaded by a ring of palm and coconut trees. When my principal showed us around the place it took all I had to keep my mouth from hanging open in shock as I mentally compared it to the mud and thatch hut I so recently called home.
If my new house was a surprise then the town follows suit. Sitting on the main road connecting Monrovia to the Eastern part of Liberia it’s one of the largest towns in Nimba County. The markings of development are visible as you approach by car as not one but three cell phone towers make themselves visible over the horizon. As you role into town you begin to see the signs for every international agency that contributed in rebuilding the community after the war. USAID, UNICEF, the EU, Action Against Hunger, Doctors Without Borders...
After you leave the car and begin to walk through the center of town you see three huge walled compounds surrounded by guard shacks and barbed wire. Now you’re in UN territory. UNMIL (The United Nations Mission in Liberia), UNHCR (The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), and WFP (The World Food Program) all have regional centers in the town. I can’t tell you how weird it is to stroll past them at night looking at the rows of spotlights that illuminate the electrified compounds and think back to my old village in Guinea where the closest thing was a string of Christmas lights my friend put up in his small shop.
Of course with the UN compounds come UN employees and all three regional offices are headed by expats (non-Liberians). A Bangladeshi man who everyone calls Major heads UNMIL which is in charge of maintaining the roads to ensure supply lines can reach UN troops up country. Jason, an American, heads UNHCR which mainly seems to concern itself with the large Ivoirian refugee camp just outside the town. Finally Laura, another American, heads the WFP which is currently distributing food to schools for a school lunch program intended as an incentive to draw more students to class.
I got to spend some time with the three of them when I first got to town. Fed, my housemate, and I got invited to a staff party at the WFP being held our first night here. After gearing myself up for getting back into the slowness and isolation of village life it was quite a wake up call. Specifically, you’re not in Guinea anymore.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention another big change. As you can see, I’m not alone out in the bush anymore. I have a housemate and another site mate. Fed, my housemate, is one of the other volunteers who transferred from PC Guinea with me. He’s a chemistry teacher and we’re both going to be teaching at the same school. Roz, a former volunteer from PC Costa Rica, is staying in the WFP compound and will be working with them in some way that involves parent teacher associations. I’m not really sure.
So yeah, I guess the over arching theme of this whole thing is that things are different. In some ways that’s going to be a good thing, you are certainly benefitting from the cellular internet I have now. In other ways though, it’s going to make the rest of my service more challenging. Peace Corps is not the UN. We don’t shut ourselves up behind barbed wire compounds, we lay on our hammocks behind tumbling bamboos fences. I need to be in the community talking with people to do my job. So I need to make sure I don’t get caught up in the universe of international aid that has landed here in Liberia.
Like one of the PC Liberia staff members said during our quick orientation; other organizations bring money, but Peace Corps brings people. So, I need to remember to be a person.
If my new house was a surprise then the town follows suit. Sitting on the main road connecting Monrovia to the Eastern part of Liberia it’s one of the largest towns in Nimba County. The markings of development are visible as you approach by car as not one but three cell phone towers make themselves visible over the horizon. As you role into town you begin to see the signs for every international agency that contributed in rebuilding the community after the war. USAID, UNICEF, the EU, Action Against Hunger, Doctors Without Borders...
After you leave the car and begin to walk through the center of town you see three huge walled compounds surrounded by guard shacks and barbed wire. Now you’re in UN territory. UNMIL (The United Nations Mission in Liberia), UNHCR (The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), and WFP (The World Food Program) all have regional centers in the town. I can’t tell you how weird it is to stroll past them at night looking at the rows of spotlights that illuminate the electrified compounds and think back to my old village in Guinea where the closest thing was a string of Christmas lights my friend put up in his small shop.
Of course with the UN compounds come UN employees and all three regional offices are headed by expats (non-Liberians). A Bangladeshi man who everyone calls Major heads UNMIL which is in charge of maintaining the roads to ensure supply lines can reach UN troops up country. Jason, an American, heads UNHCR which mainly seems to concern itself with the large Ivoirian refugee camp just outside the town. Finally Laura, another American, heads the WFP which is currently distributing food to schools for a school lunch program intended as an incentive to draw more students to class.
I got to spend some time with the three of them when I first got to town. Fed, my housemate, and I got invited to a staff party at the WFP being held our first night here. After gearing myself up for getting back into the slowness and isolation of village life it was quite a wake up call. Specifically, you’re not in Guinea anymore.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention another big change. As you can see, I’m not alone out in the bush anymore. I have a housemate and another site mate. Fed, my housemate, is one of the other volunteers who transferred from PC Guinea with me. He’s a chemistry teacher and we’re both going to be teaching at the same school. Roz, a former volunteer from PC Costa Rica, is staying in the WFP compound and will be working with them in some way that involves parent teacher associations. I’m not really sure.
So yeah, I guess the over arching theme of this whole thing is that things are different. In some ways that’s going to be a good thing, you are certainly benefitting from the cellular internet I have now. In other ways though, it’s going to make the rest of my service more challenging. Peace Corps is not the UN. We don’t shut ourselves up behind barbed wire compounds, we lay on our hammocks behind tumbling bamboos fences. I need to be in the community talking with people to do my job. So I need to make sure I don’t get caught up in the universe of international aid that has landed here in Liberia.
Like one of the PC Liberia staff members said during our quick orientation; other organizations bring money, but Peace Corps brings people. So, I need to remember to be a person.
January 4, 2010
Liberia ho!
Well, here I come back to you all like a dog with his tail between his legs after my shameful absence from updating. A thousand apologies, things got moving pretty fast during the evacuation and once it was over I sort of lost the motivation to blog. But I'm making my triumphant return with keyboard in hand and I'm looking to right my wrongs by filling in the gaps and pushing onward to brave new territory.
So the evacuation turned into quite a hectic experience (surprising right?). For most of our stay in Mali there was no information to be had and we volunteers chose to spend our time spreading any scrap of rumor that came our way. Things got pretty out of control for a while, I think the best two were that Michael Jackson was dead and that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Ridiculous.
Life continued like that for what seemed an eternity (but was probably closer to a week or two) when information started coming in all of the sudden. One day we woke up to find that the Peace Corps Guinea program was closed indefinitely, we were homeless. Soon thereafter Peace Corps Washington started flying in a small battalion of representatives to process the 100 volunteers milling around the compound. This is where things really started to heat up.
Within the span of the next week we had a slew of administrative loose ends to tie up and we had to decide our next step from an array of options including transferring to a new country, closing out our service, or reenrolling. Keep in mind that we didn't actually know what countries were available to transfer to and for the most part we didn't really have much say as to where it would be. I must say the whole experience was rather flustering and that week saw the preferred volunteer activity shift from rumor spreading to intermittent screaming and frantic resume writing.
In the end though my options came together pretty well and I decided that I wasn't really ready to leave Peace Corps yet. So I decided to transfer and now I'm headed to Liberia to teach math again and hopefully participate in the training of new volunteers.
Before I could transfer Peace Corps needed to set up my new site so I was sent back to the U.S. for a couple months to give them time to get it all in order. I'm certainly not complaining, I can think of worse fates than having a two month vacation during the holiday season to see friends and family.
I took full advantage of the break and traveled around the country to visit people who were inconsiderate enough to move away from my hometown. I spent some time in D.C. (which is just crawling with former Peace Corps Volunteers) and also made my way out to San Francisco. It was really great seeing so many people I hadn't seen in so long and it was a good time for me to sort of reevaluate my long term plans and get excited to continue with my service.
But all good things must come to an end and after two months of being a professional couch surfer I am shipping out again on January 9th to my new home sweet home. I'm really excited to see what's in store for me in Liberia. I think it'll be a much different post than Guinea was for a lot of reasons. First off it's an English speaking country so I can say goodbye to French for the time being. I've also heard that there's a huge international aid presence in Liberia which is certainly the opposite of my experience in Guinea. There are even still UN Peacekeepers there to keep the post-civil war peace on track.
So I'm heading in to my new post not knowing what to expect. I don't feel like village life will be incredibly different than it was in Guinea, but then again I don't really have anything to base that on. I guess I'm just gonna have to wait and see.
Anyways I'm back now and I'm hoping to update this thing a lot more than I have of late. So for any of you who are still reading, keep watching the skies and I'll let you know how it all turns out.
So the evacuation turned into quite a hectic experience (surprising right?). For most of our stay in Mali there was no information to be had and we volunteers chose to spend our time spreading any scrap of rumor that came our way. Things got pretty out of control for a while, I think the best two were that Michael Jackson was dead and that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Ridiculous.
Life continued like that for what seemed an eternity (but was probably closer to a week or two) when information started coming in all of the sudden. One day we woke up to find that the Peace Corps Guinea program was closed indefinitely, we were homeless. Soon thereafter Peace Corps Washington started flying in a small battalion of representatives to process the 100 volunteers milling around the compound. This is where things really started to heat up.
Within the span of the next week we had a slew of administrative loose ends to tie up and we had to decide our next step from an array of options including transferring to a new country, closing out our service, or reenrolling. Keep in mind that we didn't actually know what countries were available to transfer to and for the most part we didn't really have much say as to where it would be. I must say the whole experience was rather flustering and that week saw the preferred volunteer activity shift from rumor spreading to intermittent screaming and frantic resume writing.
In the end though my options came together pretty well and I decided that I wasn't really ready to leave Peace Corps yet. So I decided to transfer and now I'm headed to Liberia to teach math again and hopefully participate in the training of new volunteers.
Before I could transfer Peace Corps needed to set up my new site so I was sent back to the U.S. for a couple months to give them time to get it all in order. I'm certainly not complaining, I can think of worse fates than having a two month vacation during the holiday season to see friends and family.
I took full advantage of the break and traveled around the country to visit people who were inconsiderate enough to move away from my hometown. I spent some time in D.C. (which is just crawling with former Peace Corps Volunteers) and also made my way out to San Francisco. It was really great seeing so many people I hadn't seen in so long and it was a good time for me to sort of reevaluate my long term plans and get excited to continue with my service.
But all good things must come to an end and after two months of being a professional couch surfer I am shipping out again on January 9th to my new home sweet home. I'm really excited to see what's in store for me in Liberia. I think it'll be a much different post than Guinea was for a lot of reasons. First off it's an English speaking country so I can say goodbye to French for the time being. I've also heard that there's a huge international aid presence in Liberia which is certainly the opposite of my experience in Guinea. There are even still UN Peacekeepers there to keep the post-civil war peace on track.
So I'm heading in to my new post not knowing what to expect. I don't feel like village life will be incredibly different than it was in Guinea, but then again I don't really have anything to base that on. I guess I'm just gonna have to wait and see.
Anyways I'm back now and I'm hoping to update this thing a lot more than I have of late. So for any of you who are still reading, keep watching the skies and I'll let you know how it all turns out.
October 16, 2009
Evacuation
Here's a short post just to let everyone know what's going on. I guess the situation in Guinea was a little more serious than I gave it credit for. About a week after the events of that news article I posted Peace Corps evacuated all the volunteers in the country to a training compound in Bamako, the capitol of Mali. So we've all been here since Oct 7th in a weird consolidated state of limbo. For the moment Peace Corps Washington is deliberating as to whether or not they are going to suspend the program in Guinea. While they're making a decision there's really nothing for us volunteers to do but sit and wait.
A lot is going into the decision but it seems that a lot is going to depend on whether or not the U.S. State Dept allows non-essential embassy personnel to renter the country (for the moment they've all been evacuated as well). I'm trying to remain hopeful that we'll be returning in the face of all this uncertainty but a lot of people I've talked to are of the mind set that we're not gonna be able to go back. We'll see I guess.
Anyways that's all I can say for the moment. Once I get more info about the situation I'll write up a post letting everyone know what's gonna happen. Until then we'll all just have to be patient.
A lot is going into the decision but it seems that a lot is going to depend on whether or not the U.S. State Dept allows non-essential embassy personnel to renter the country (for the moment they've all been evacuated as well). I'm trying to remain hopeful that we'll be returning in the face of all this uncertainty but a lot of people I've talked to are of the mind set that we're not gonna be able to go back. We'll see I guess.
Anyways that's all I can say for the moment. Once I get more info about the situation I'll write up a post letting everyone know what's gonna happen. Until then we'll all just have to be patient.
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