A Liberian Wedding

A few weeks ago, I made a friend named Siah. The encounter went as follows:
Random woman on the road: Hello!
Me: Hello. How are you?
Random woman: Not bad oh. You my friend, right?
Me: Yes, we’re friends.
Woman: What’s your name?
Me: Aminata. What’s yours?
Woman: I’m Siya. (Brief pause.) You know, I’m getting married.
Me: Oh wow. Congratulations.
Woman: You’ll come to my wedding, right?
Me: Sure.

The entire conversation lasted less than five minutes, but nevertheless, Siya showed up at the IRC compound a few days later with wedding invitations, and I assured her that I would be there. The whole experience is pretty indicative of Liberian culture. Though we Americans feel that friendships require time to develop, here in Liberia, it is perfectly normal for someone to greet you on the street, ask for your phone number, and then call you repeatedly just to say hi. All of which is very convenient when you’re a lonely foreigner like myself, wandering around in the hopes that someone will take you in and befriend you.

In preparation for Siah’s wedding, my new housemate Isabelle and I decided to have African outfits made. We bought cloth and chose out designs for my friend Aissata’s husband to sew for us. The morning of the wedding, we donned our new clothes and set out for Mount Camel Baptist Church, unsure exactly what to expect. We arrived to find the church decorated with streamers and balloons, with the added bonus of an altar wrapped in toilet tissue. While waiting for the ceremony to start, Isabelle and I chatted with various guests and also vied for the perfect photo of a toddler with “I [heart] Jesus” barrettes. Then all of a sudden, a large group of women began to congregate outside the church, singing and dancing in celebration of the wedding. For each song, one woman would start out singing, and then after about a minute, the rest of the women would join in. As they sang, everyone danced, and the whole thing lasted at least half an hour, making this certainly the most pre-wedding ceremony fun that I have had.

The wedding itself followed the structure of a typical American wedding, but with a few uniquely Liberian aspects. For one, each of the bridesmaids did a sort of slow dance-walk down the aisle. When the bridesmaid would reach the halfway point, one of the groomsmen would join her (everyone would start cheering at this point), and they would then continue to dance-walk together the rest of the way. A second unique aspect was that more than half of the ceremony was singing. And not the solemn singing of hymns that I have always associated with attending church. These were a sort of ‘boogie hymns’ that had the whole congregation getting down in their pews. Also entertaining was when the groom’s cell phone started to ring in his suit pocket while he and Siah stood at the altar. He then passed the phone to a friend, who then proceeded to hold the cell phone up to the bride and groom’s mouths as they said their vows, presumably so that whoever had called could hear. The ceremony ended with the bride and groom’s kiss, which took place to the wild cheers of the guests. Unfortunately, the first kiss apparently left something to be desired, so the ushers quickly made slight adjustments to the bride’s veil and train, and then the couple kissed a second time, apparently to the satisfaction of the guests and photographers because no third try was deemed necessary.

The wedding was followed by a reception at a nearby banquet hall. The reception was only able to begin, however, once the bride and groom had driven around town in a car decorated with balloons and toilet tissue (nothing out of the ordinary by American standards), followed by the rest of the bridal party zooming around on a pack of motorbikes (slightly less common). The reception itself was far more lavish than either Isabelle or me had expected. Despite there being well over one hundred guests at the wedding, each of us received dinner. Comprised of fried chicken, potato salad, fried rice, and wedding cake, this dinner was pretty amazing if you ask me. We also listened to a series of speeches thanking various guests for their contribution to the wedding. This was all well and good until the groom excitedly told the crowd: “And we also have two white women celebrating with us today!” (As if we didn’t already stick out.) He then invited me and Isabelle up on the stage to tell the story of how Siah and I had met and become friends, which was all very awkward because the only other person deemed important enough to be called on stage was the groom’s mother. All in all, however, the event was a lot of fun and I am looking forward to any future weddings I get to attend while I’m here.

Me with Aissata and her family

Market Mob

This past week, I received a new roommate at the IRC guest house named Isabelle and also made friends with a few other recently arrived expats in Voinjama. Since they all arrived after me, I decided to invite them to meet Aissata, the Peulh woman I befriended, and walk around town. Since Aissata’s husband is a tailor, we decided to go shopping for lapas (aka pagnes or sarongs). After wandering around the market for an hour or so, Aissata and I noticed a small crowd around our friend Yoko, a Japanese girl who just started working for the UN here in Voinjama. We walked up to find a man demanding to see Yoko’s identification documents, which she had forgotten in her house. Though the man had an ID card saying he worked for Liberian immigration, he was in plain clothes and extremely belligerent. Thinking he was just a crazy guy, Aissata and I told Yoko just to ignore him and keep walking. Yet the man kept blocking our way, getting angrier and angrier with each moment. Before we knew it, there was a crowd of twenty and then perhaps fifty people around us (most of them women sellers from the market), yelling at the man to leave us alone and trying to help us get away from him. As I slowly pulled Aissata along, he tried to hold her back, eventually shoving her out of the way (she was carrying her four month old daughter on her back at the time). This made me lose my temper, and I started yelling at him to leave my friend alone. In response, he started lashing out incoherently and calling all the women around us “a bunch of African bitches.” All the while, the crowd kept getting larger, with half the people yelling at the man and the other half trying to calm him down so that we could resolve the situation.

In the end, the crowd was able to help us get to Yoko’s car, blocking the man from following us. At this same moment, the UN and Liberian police showed up. They ended up having to give the man who was harassing us safe haven in the police car in order to prevent the mob from beating him. Luckily, we were able to drive away, and the crowd dispersed with the arrival of the police.

Looking back on the afternoon’s events, on the one hand, it was unsettling to see how quickly the mob formed and the situation escalated. On the other hand, however, what struck me most about the incident was how the men and women in the market immediately came to Yoko’s defense and tried their best to help her escape the man’s harassment. Throughout my travels, I have found this willingness to protect and help out strangers characteristic of West African culture, and it is one of the things I appreciate most about living here.

Mission Make Friends: Accomplished

The first week or two in Voinjama were pretty lonely. I was living by myself in the IRC guesthouse, which is in the same compound as our office. Since most days it would start raining in the late afternoon or early evening, this meant that I would not be able to go into town or walk around anywhere when work ended at 5pm. Instead, all I could do was just walk the ten feet to my room, at which point I would be forced to occupy myself for the next several hours, the sound of the rain magnified by the tin roof in the background, until I could justify going to bed (I decided 8:30pm was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances). Needless to say, when the weekend arrived, I decided to embark upon a mission to salvage my sanity: Mission Make Friends.

My M.O. for this mission was to walk around town greeting people and hoping that someone would invite me to hang out. Though this would never work as a way to meet friends in most parts of America, it works quite well in West Africa since the culture here is very welcoming to outsiders, not to mention that people enjoy the novelty of having a white person for a friend. So naturally it was not too long before I started meeting people and getting invited to sit down and chat.

Eventually, I stumbled upon a Peulh woman with two small children, and based on the fact that 1) she was Peulh, 2) she had a baby, and 3) she seemed slightly broussey (aka she acted like she was from a village rather than a town), I decided pretty much instantaneously that I would make her my friend. (For those of you who don’t know, the Peulhs are the ethnic group I lived with in Mali, although Peulhs from Guinea are pretty different culturally from those in Mali.) Luckily for me, I was successful in my endeavor, so now I hang out with my new friend Aissata Diallo each weekend. Granted, since we speak different Peulh dialects, we only understand about half of what each other are saying most of the time, but the friendship seems to be working out nonetheless.