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.
January 17, 2010
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.
September 29, 2009
A nice place to visit
I just got back from a trip to Mali. It was a good time, I went with a few friends and we took a river boat up the Niger River to Timbuktu. Timbuktu was a really interesting place and it was a really cool experience to be wandering around a city that is so ever-present in pop culture as some mysterious and exotic locale. The people who live there call it the door to the desert and you really do feel that way when you’re there. It’s dry and unbelievably hot during the day. There is sand blanketing the streets and there’s almost nothing green in the entire city. The architecture is really amazing and is sort of how I imagine cities in Morocco or Egypt might look. It could have been straight out of “A thousand and one Arabian nights”.
After exploring the city we took camels out to the Sahara to play in the sand and see the sunset, which was a really great experience. I had never seen a camel in real life before and I can now report back that they are one of the weirdest animals there is. Their teeth jut out of their gums like long white fingers and their feet look like huge mushy bags that squash out every time they take a step. Also, if anyone out there was wondering what sound a camel makes I would say it’s kind of loud warbly groan, pretty much exactly like a bantha from Star Wars.
After Timbuktu we came back down and did some hiking in a part of Mali called Dogon country, so named for the Dogon people that live there. The region has a really interesting history and you can still see the remains of the houses carved into the cliffs of the people who lived there before the Dogon. The landscape was really beautiful and it reminded me a lot of places I’d been in Arizona and New Mexico.
When it was all said and done I had a great time in Mali. The country is beautiful and incredibly varied. It was amazing to wake up one morning in the desert and goto sleep that night in a place lush with greenery and lined with amazing cliffs. And of course there’s always the allure of more developed countries and the inevitable western comforts they provide. I swear I think I’d be happy anywhere in the world these days as long as I could find a hamburger and French fries. Anyways I took a lot of pictures (not of the hamburgers) and I’ve posted a lot of them online. Goto the photo link on the right side of the page to check them out.
Unfortunately my return to Guinea was met with bad news. A round of protests against the government just took place in multiple cities around the country including the capital, Conakry. It’s still too early to say what actually happened but multiple international news outlets are reporting quite a bit of a violent activity and deaths. The last I checked BBC had put the death toll around 130 for the protest that took place yesterday in Conakary. Here’s a BBC article on the recent protest that summarizes what pretty much all the major news outlets are reporting.
Guinea rally death toll nears 130
At least 128 people were killed when Guinean troops opened fire on opposition protesters on Monday, rights groups and opposition figures claim.
Earlier police said 87 people had died, but local activists say hospital sources confirmed a much higher toll.
Human rights groups say they have had reports of soldiers bayoneting people and women being stripped and raped in the streets during Monday's protest.
Junta head Captain Moussa Dadis Camara denied knowledge of sexual assaults.
About 50,000 people were protesting over rumours that Capt Camara intends to run for president in an election schedule for next January.
But soldiers moved in to quell the rally using tear gas and baton charges and firing live ammunition into the crowds.
An eyewitness told Human Rights Watch: "I saw the Red Berets [an elite military unit] catch some of the women who were trying to flee, rip off their clothes, and stick their hands in their private parts.
"Others beat the women, including on their genitals. It was pathetic - the women were crying out."
Another eyewitness told the group: "I saw several women stripped and then put inside the military trucks and taken away. I don't know what happened to them."
There has been worldwide condemnation of the violence.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Guinean authorities to exercise maximum restraint, while the West African regional body Ecowas is reported to be pursuing sanctions against the military regime.
Anyways, I’m posting all this info to let people know what’s going on but I also want to stress that I’m not in any danger and Peace Corps has volunteer safety in mind with everyone decision they make. All the violence has been confined to Conakry and my site and the area around it is perfectly safe. So don’t worry, nothing’s gonna happen to yours truly. In fact Peace Corps has advised us that the best thing we can all do is go back to our sites and wait this out, which is where I’m heading right now. So I advise anyone who’s interested to keep up to date with what’s going on at the BBC website and keep in mind that no matter what I am safe and sound. So don’t worry. And check out my picks from Mali!
After exploring the city we took camels out to the Sahara to play in the sand and see the sunset, which was a really great experience. I had never seen a camel in real life before and I can now report back that they are one of the weirdest animals there is. Their teeth jut out of their gums like long white fingers and their feet look like huge mushy bags that squash out every time they take a step. Also, if anyone out there was wondering what sound a camel makes I would say it’s kind of loud warbly groan, pretty much exactly like a bantha from Star Wars.
After Timbuktu we came back down and did some hiking in a part of Mali called Dogon country, so named for the Dogon people that live there. The region has a really interesting history and you can still see the remains of the houses carved into the cliffs of the people who lived there before the Dogon. The landscape was really beautiful and it reminded me a lot of places I’d been in Arizona and New Mexico.
When it was all said and done I had a great time in Mali. The country is beautiful and incredibly varied. It was amazing to wake up one morning in the desert and goto sleep that night in a place lush with greenery and lined with amazing cliffs. And of course there’s always the allure of more developed countries and the inevitable western comforts they provide. I swear I think I’d be happy anywhere in the world these days as long as I could find a hamburger and French fries. Anyways I took a lot of pictures (not of the hamburgers) and I’ve posted a lot of them online. Goto the photo link on the right side of the page to check them out.
Unfortunately my return to Guinea was met with bad news. A round of protests against the government just took place in multiple cities around the country including the capital, Conakry. It’s still too early to say what actually happened but multiple international news outlets are reporting quite a bit of a violent activity and deaths. The last I checked BBC had put the death toll around 130 for the protest that took place yesterday in Conakary. Here’s a BBC article on the recent protest that summarizes what pretty much all the major news outlets are reporting.
Guinea rally death toll nears 130
At least 128 people were killed when Guinean troops opened fire on opposition protesters on Monday, rights groups and opposition figures claim.
Earlier police said 87 people had died, but local activists say hospital sources confirmed a much higher toll.
Human rights groups say they have had reports of soldiers bayoneting people and women being stripped and raped in the streets during Monday's protest.
Junta head Captain Moussa Dadis Camara denied knowledge of sexual assaults.
About 50,000 people were protesting over rumours that Capt Camara intends to run for president in an election schedule for next January.
But soldiers moved in to quell the rally using tear gas and baton charges and firing live ammunition into the crowds.
An eyewitness told Human Rights Watch: "I saw the Red Berets [an elite military unit] catch some of the women who were trying to flee, rip off their clothes, and stick their hands in their private parts.
"Others beat the women, including on their genitals. It was pathetic - the women were crying out."
Another eyewitness told the group: "I saw several women stripped and then put inside the military trucks and taken away. I don't know what happened to them."
There has been worldwide condemnation of the violence.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Guinean authorities to exercise maximum restraint, while the West African regional body Ecowas is reported to be pursuing sanctions against the military regime.
Anyways, I’m posting all this info to let people know what’s going on but I also want to stress that I’m not in any danger and Peace Corps has volunteer safety in mind with everyone decision they make. All the violence has been confined to Conakry and my site and the area around it is perfectly safe. So don’t worry, nothing’s gonna happen to yours truly. In fact Peace Corps has advised us that the best thing we can all do is go back to our sites and wait this out, which is where I’m heading right now. So I advise anyone who’s interested to keep up to date with what’s going on at the BBC website and keep in mind that no matter what I am safe and sound. So don’t worry. And check out my picks from Mali!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
