It’s a Tuesday morning and I’m making the nine-hour drive to Monrovia to meet up with my boss and have some R&R time after two months in the field. As I stare out the window and contemplate the lives of the people around me, I am optimistic. With the rains over and the heat increasing by the day, new houses and buildings are being erected everywhere. Construction, I think to myself, is a sign of progress—a sign that Liberians feel safe and hopeful enough to invest themselves again in their country.
Three days later, my town was in flames. Several people were killed in the violence—their bodies still not swept from the streets some 24 hours later—and more are injured. Most of my Liberian friends fled to the bush, to Monrovia, or to Guinea. Only the arrival of UN riot police was able to stop the violence—a sign that does not bode well for the country given that it will have to take over responsibility for the country’s security when the UN pulls out next year.
Nobody seems sure exactly how things started, but the following trajectory seems to be generally accepted: A young woman in a nearby town was killed, and the predominantly Loma community (Lomas are Christian) blamed the murder on the local Mandingo population (Mandingos are Muslim). They set fire to the local mosque in anger. In retaliation, the Mandingos in my town (the county capital) decided to set fire to the churches, market and houses of government officials in Voinjama.
When I first began to hear reports of the violence yesterday morning, I imagined that people were exaggerating. But when I called my friend Siya, I could hear the panic in her voice as she and her children made their way out of town. “The war has come back,” she cried before we got cut off. As for my Muslim friends, their phones were all off. I assume that they fled to nearby Guinea, but I have no way of knowing.
How could this have happened, I find myself wondering? How did the landscape of my town change so quickly? Over the past six months, I have never felt unsafe in Voinjama, largely because I am friendly and as a result well-liked and looked out for by the Liberians I interact with on my daily escapades into town. On many occasions, I have found myself wondering whether it’s possible that I am friends with anyone that took part in the war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003 and left the country almost entirely destroyed. Realistically speaking, I knew this must be the case; and yet, I still found it nearly impossible to imagine anyone I chatted and joked with in town to be capable of real violence. Following yesterday’s events, everything feels all the more surreal. Was I always too gullible and naïve to see the tensions lying below the surface in Voinjama, or is it just too easy for a small number of angry people to wreak havoc on the peaceful majority?
Safely closeted away in Monrovia and relying on the accounts of others to help me put together an understanding of yesterday’s violence, too much remains unknown and unexplained for me to have any answers. Only once I am able to return to Voinjama and see for myself the destruction and hear from my friends firsthand what happened will I be able to begin to understand how this all came about. I am hopeful that even then, I will still be able to hold on to some of the optimism I felt leaving town on Tuesday. But I am rattled and not without doubt.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
To pee or not to pee
For the past several days, I have been working at an IRC field office in the town of Zorzor, about two hours from Voinjama, where I am based. The office is pretty small, and there are no expat staff stationed here, so normally when I come, I have the office guest house to myself. Not so last night, however, as a workshop with the health team brought into town a host of my bosses, including IRC’s country director (the big boss lady, as we say here), my supervisor Raphael, and two project coordinators. Added on to their group was a British photographer on a short contract with IRC. As IRC’s guest house in Zorzor boasts only four rooms, a six-person guest list was slightly problematic. Luckily for me, however, my Peace Corps friends offered to put me up for the night. So before all the head honchos arrived yesterday morning, I packed up my things and prepared to head to my friend Kelly’s as soon as the office closed.
To my great misfortune, however, my supervisor turned out to be far less enthusiastic about my plan to sleep elsewhere than I had anticipated. Though it was an arrangement that would have been to everyone’s benefit, he insisted that I stay in the IRC compound, citing the fact that my friend’s compound was not “secure” (read: no guards or barbed wire fencing) and that for liability reasons, IRC could not allow me to stay elsewhere. Instead, he decided that the four men in the group could divide into pairs, leaving the nicest room for the country director and me with the room without a bathroom. Since the country director and I are both women, I could just share her bathroom, Raphael rationalized. Of course. Great idea, boss. Except for the fact that country director’s bathroom is inside her room, not to mention the fact that she is socially awkward and intimidating and we have only exchanged about ten words ever on non-work-related topics. I mean, I’m not particularly shy, but I am nevertheless not exactly comfortable with the idea of having to wake my boss up in the middle of the night if I need to pee.
Faced with Raphael’s intransigence on this point, however, I had no other option but to take the room and embark upon Mission: Hold Pee All Night. I did all I could over the course of the evening to prepare for this mission, making sure to pee in the bushes on my way back from the bar in town and refusing to imbibe any further liquids afterwards. By the time bedtime rolled around, I felt confident that my bladder was pee-free.
But alas, my efforts were for naught. At 1:30am, I awoke needing to pee. Shit. Despite having spent hundreds of hours on buses in Africa and Central America training myself not to pee, there was no way I was going to make it until the morning. I started evaluating my options. My room shared a back patio with the room next door, which opened onto some grass. I could use this door to slip outside and pee, but the door screeches every time it opens and the walls of the guest house are paper thin. My second option was a bucket. I had heard of women in Mali having a “pee bucket” that they used at night in order to avoid going outside. I could pee in the bucket in the broken bathroom and then wash it with disinfectant the next morning. No one would be the wiser. Yet, peeing in a bucket was almost certain to make a lot of noise, and how awkward would it be if any of my numerous bosses heard me peeing into a bucket inside my room? So I decided to go with option #1, peeing outside.
I climbed out of my mosquito net and tried to quietly open the door. Just as I had feared, however, the door screeched and dragged over the floor. After momentarily panicking at the thought of my coworkers finding me out, or alternatively thinking that the opening door was sign that I was sneaking in some local suitor, I continued to pry the door open until the space was just wide enough for me to squeeze through. Once outside, I tried to pee as slowly and quietly as possible so that anyone who had heard the door open would not subsequently hear me peeing, but as I did so, a new fear dawned on me—snakes. Liberia boasts snakes a-plenty (including one that Liberians call “the seven seconds”—after it bites you, you count to seven and then you die), and the gardeners have killed several since I’ve been here. So now, on top of my fears that at any minute my boss is going to walk outside and see me peeing in the office yard, I am imagining my imminent death by snake bite to my nether regions and the subsequent discovery of my body in the morning, keeled over with panties ‘round the ankles in plain view of the IRC guest house and office. Sweet.
Thankfully for me, after what seemed like an eternity of peeing (since I was trying to be so quiet—no easy task, let me tell you), I emerged from the yard unbitten and relieved. And since I didn’t notice any strange looks in the morning, hopefully my secret, like my ass, is safe.
To my great misfortune, however, my supervisor turned out to be far less enthusiastic about my plan to sleep elsewhere than I had anticipated. Though it was an arrangement that would have been to everyone’s benefit, he insisted that I stay in the IRC compound, citing the fact that my friend’s compound was not “secure” (read: no guards or barbed wire fencing) and that for liability reasons, IRC could not allow me to stay elsewhere. Instead, he decided that the four men in the group could divide into pairs, leaving the nicest room for the country director and me with the room without a bathroom. Since the country director and I are both women, I could just share her bathroom, Raphael rationalized. Of course. Great idea, boss. Except for the fact that country director’s bathroom is inside her room, not to mention the fact that she is socially awkward and intimidating and we have only exchanged about ten words ever on non-work-related topics. I mean, I’m not particularly shy, but I am nevertheless not exactly comfortable with the idea of having to wake my boss up in the middle of the night if I need to pee.
Faced with Raphael’s intransigence on this point, however, I had no other option but to take the room and embark upon Mission: Hold Pee All Night. I did all I could over the course of the evening to prepare for this mission, making sure to pee in the bushes on my way back from the bar in town and refusing to imbibe any further liquids afterwards. By the time bedtime rolled around, I felt confident that my bladder was pee-free.
But alas, my efforts were for naught. At 1:30am, I awoke needing to pee. Shit. Despite having spent hundreds of hours on buses in Africa and Central America training myself not to pee, there was no way I was going to make it until the morning. I started evaluating my options. My room shared a back patio with the room next door, which opened onto some grass. I could use this door to slip outside and pee, but the door screeches every time it opens and the walls of the guest house are paper thin. My second option was a bucket. I had heard of women in Mali having a “pee bucket” that they used at night in order to avoid going outside. I could pee in the bucket in the broken bathroom and then wash it with disinfectant the next morning. No one would be the wiser. Yet, peeing in a bucket was almost certain to make a lot of noise, and how awkward would it be if any of my numerous bosses heard me peeing into a bucket inside my room? So I decided to go with option #1, peeing outside.
I climbed out of my mosquito net and tried to quietly open the door. Just as I had feared, however, the door screeched and dragged over the floor. After momentarily panicking at the thought of my coworkers finding me out, or alternatively thinking that the opening door was sign that I was sneaking in some local suitor, I continued to pry the door open until the space was just wide enough for me to squeeze through. Once outside, I tried to pee as slowly and quietly as possible so that anyone who had heard the door open would not subsequently hear me peeing, but as I did so, a new fear dawned on me—snakes. Liberia boasts snakes a-plenty (including one that Liberians call “the seven seconds”—after it bites you, you count to seven and then you die), and the gardeners have killed several since I’ve been here. So now, on top of my fears that at any minute my boss is going to walk outside and see me peeing in the office yard, I am imagining my imminent death by snake bite to my nether regions and the subsequent discovery of my body in the morning, keeled over with panties ‘round the ankles in plain view of the IRC guest house and office. Sweet.
Thankfully for me, after what seemed like an eternity of peeing (since I was trying to be so quiet—no easy task, let me tell you), I emerged from the yard unbitten and relieved. And since I didn’t notice any strange looks in the morning, hopefully my secret, like my ass, is safe.
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