Weekend in Liberia

Saturday – Sunday 13th May

It's the weekend and so operations are a bit slow. Saturday I was invited at a wedding. Two members of the staff were getting married. One British girl with an Ethiopian man. In the morning Céline, Sofie and I went to chill out on the beach and get a tan. Well at least for Céline and Sofie. I just get either red or stay completely white. As I want some colour, I just stay in the sun. Result: I am red and have some spots on my face. Hopefully it will go away before I get back.

Talking about getting back… This is going to be difficult. I really like it here. The staff is great, expats and nationals, they made me feel more than welcome. I am not counting the days when Wednesday comes and I will have to catch the plane to Brussels. I am happy to see my friends and family back but also really like my job here. I hope I'll get the chance to go back on the field soon.

The wedding was set on Golden Beach in the centre of Monrovia. The sea there is completely different from the one that we usually go to (Cece beach). It's impossible to swim there as it's rough and dangerous. It was a really nice buffet and it was a good opportunity to speak to the staff in a different setting than just plain work.

I also had the chance to speak more extensively with the national staff. I wanted to know how they live, how they spend their days outside the NGO, how they saw the future, if things had changed since the war. They wanted to what Belgium was, like how I live and why white women are so scared of spiders .

Blackie, one of the national staff, invited me for the next morning to his church as I wanted to know how an African mass is celebrated.

The next morning I took the car downtown to an area where probably it's rare for "white" people to go. Blackie was waiting for me, all dressed up and proud that I would do the honour to visit his church. He had even warned the pastor that I was coming. African mass is very different from what we know. First you get the pastor to preach and then they basically sing and dance for nearly two hours. What's not different is that they have to give money to the pastor. For a population that's living on less than 1 dollar a day, they surely give a lot to the church. Blackie explains to me later that it's only because they actually don't have a church. It's kind of a small house with bullet holes (probably a leftover from the war in 2003) and a metal roof. No more than 15 people can sit in it but the community is growing so they need to move, hence the money… Hum

Houses are as scarce in Liberia as is clean water. They're a few from the glory days before the war and rarely inhabited by Liberians. Most "houses" are either ship containers that European companies just dumped, in "full" wood or "small" wood. Don't really know how the explain it correctly but some houses are entirely in wood, others just have four wood sticks and a metal roof.

Apart from being extremely hot, Liberia is one of the most humid countries in Africa, if not the most. It rains here regularly and when we complain in Belgium about a heavy rain shower, just come here and see hell break in the sky. It's amazing. But not for the people living in the wooden houses. After a rainy night you can see that it has rained inside their houses. You also have to imagine that they haven't got a running water system (nor toilet system) and no electricity (some have generators). The morning after the rain the smell inside the city is quite indescribable.

Cars are also a big issue. People have no money to buy a car and mostly take the cab. You have to imagine that yellow cabs are not taking one person but several people. They just hop in along the way, mostly four people cramped in the back, three in the front.

Africa can be considered as Europe's dustbin. Well at least Liberia, I haven't been to all the other countries and wouldn't call myself and African connoisseur. They get the t-shirts we can't sell anymore, the toys we wouldn't give to our children etc. The worst are the cars. If you ever wondered were your 13 year-old car is, well now you have the answer: it's in Africa polluting the atmosphere. I saw a car with a smap (Belgium insurance company now called something else) sticker on the back and one with a Kortrijk (a city in Belgium) sticker. A vast majority of the cars (used as cabs, Liberians rarely have a car) also have stickers at the back showing what country they're from (B for Belgium, CH for Switzerland, NL for the Netherlands are the most popular).

As a result, Monrovia is extremely polluted and it's sometimes hard to breathe when stuck in traffic. All this time we are lobbying for the environment and at the same time we dump our old, polluting cars on the poorest.

For those who are interested in reading more about Liberia and the NGO's, an actual writer has actually written a very good piece in the Observer. "Letter from Liberia", Zadie Smith, 29 April 2007. Go and check it, it's brilliant.