More Liberia

Things were going pretty poorly. When I got up in the morning, after a horrible night’s sleep and with my stomach in knots, I went for a walk with the night watchman, who was great company. He talked about staying in Monrovia during the war and how frightening it was and how many people crowded down by the convent, which is near the water and the American embassy, seeking refugee from the fighting. The convent was looted often and the school was often shut down as teachers replaced textbooks and fixed pillaged classrooms.

He showed me how to get to the UNHCR building, then I went in to get some breakfast. Prue and Alex came downstairs about three minutes before UNHCR was scheduled to pick them up. We exchanged a few words – I made sure to say that I hadn’t slept well because the walls were so thin (hint, hint) – and then I decided to hoof it to UNHCR. I had a little chat with the PR person, then went off to set up some interviews. I ran into Prue & Alex on the way, since the PR woman was an hour late to pick them up, mostly because she was having a hard time finding a driver for the day.

I hopped in a cab and headed out to Sinkor to see the International Rescue Committee, which was in a three-year planning meeting and completely unable to help me. They sent me around to a couple other places, where I had pretty poor luck. Eventually, tired, hot and frustrated, I ended up at the JIU, the joint implementation unit, where an older man was working on a computer, writing letters inviting his girlfriend’s family to a family meeting. He had me spell check it and look for grammar errors; turns out he was planning to ask for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage. Even though he had been married before and had three kids, he needed to go through the dowry process, meaning he would provide his fiancee’s father with one cow. If he couldn’t produce one cow, he would instead pay $50 USD. “Then she’s mine!” he said.

I waited for about an hour for the PR guy, sitting downstairs with the Nigerian peacekeepers and picking their brains about the situation in the country’s oil region, where a band of “lazy low lifes,” as they called them, were causing trouble.

The PR guy was an absolute dream. He’s a former journalist, who spent the last days of the war holed up in a basement. He felt he couldn’t leave the country, especially as things got desperate, because he was one of the few journalists left in the country. The rebels took his passport and his laptop so he couldn’t file stories. He relied on foreign journalists to help him, logging onto their computers and using their cell phones and sat phones to file.

He gave me a great interview, with great quotes, although he was a little too positive about the disarmament process to be completely great. He agreed to pick me up the next day and take me out to a disarmament camp and one of the training camps for former soldiers, both about a two-hour drive outside the city. I was ecstatic! Getting to see some of the countryside sounded amazing.

The next morning I was up early and we headed out, as promised, to the disarmament camp near Kakata. The drive out was stunning. Liberia is just so, so green. The road was paved, but pitted by rocket-propelled grenades. Houses were scarce and those that remained were picked over or bullet-riddled. There were a couple IDP camps along the way, tucked into the rolling hills and partially hidden by bush.

At Kakata we met up with a Methodist pastor who left his church service to show us around the school, which has since been taken over by UNMIL to train former soldiers in things like masonry, carpentry and electronics. Essentially, the idea is that the country will be rebuilt by the very people who destroyed it. The soldiers love the idea, since they get a free education, $30 a month for transportation and transferable skills if they give up their guns. They also get $150 dollars off the top and another $150 when they are settled.

The pastor told me he had watched as rebels shot his mother, his sister and several little children as they ransacked his house. They turned the gun on him and demanded money. He pleaded that he had nothing, nothing left, nothing to hide, nothing of value. For some reason they spared him, maybe because he was wearing a clerical collar. Instead, they picked apart his house, snatching even the roof, before moving on. He showed me the house of a former teacher, which was picked clean two years ago. All that remains are partial concrete walls. The inside has been completely overtaken by weeds, flowers and jungle plants like elephants ears.

Ironically, the pastor is now training the very boys who killed his family, stole his home and ransacked his school. There are no computers, no anything, at the school anymore, making training very difficult. The boys and girls – about one-tenth of the DDRR soldiers are women – are rebuilding the school as materials become available. Already, they refurbished a residence that was plundered during the war, painting it white, placing on a new room, adding electrical wires and a new staircase.

I was introduced to a former soldier, who was kidnapped at 20 as he walked home. He was thrown in a car, driven to a training camp and forced to fight for Charles Taylor’s band of personal thugs, known as the Government of Liberia forces. He fought in Kakata. When he spoke of the war, he began stuttering so badly it was difficult to decipher what he was even saying. He hasn’t seen his family in four years and he has no plans to find them until he’s dealt with the demons of his time at war.

We drove back and stopped at an IDP camp along the way, seeing even more children with distended bellies and the white spots of malnutrition. It was just heart-breaking, because they were just the brightest, most enthusiastic children, who looked just ecstatic to see us, even though they probably see white people all the time. They weren’t begrudging at all with smiles and I felt horrible at leaving them there with nothing but the promise of a story.

When we got back, we stopped at the university – the only university in the country -- for a meeting between the chiefs of Lofa county, the biggest country and the LURD stronghold. Everyone was very concerned at how long it has taken the UN to move into Lofa and how many problems they were encountering, things like pathetic roads that were so washed out that ex-combatants were walking for four or five days with their guns on their heads. There was a real windbag at the meeting who talked on and on and on and on about the divide between Liberians and Americo-Liberians. Turns out he was the attorney-general in the Doe government. He was educated in the US and spent most of his life there, though. Now he’s a minister in the transitional government. I was far more impressed with the leader of the meeting, who was a science professor and former president of the university.

We went to an ex-pat place for lunch and had a great conversation about the presidential elections. Molley thinks a soccer star named George Weah is going to win and I think he’s right. He’s got name recognition and charisma and he’s not affiliated with any political party of yore.

From there we went to see the head of the NCDDRR program, who was a boring interview but a fascinating person. He was also educated in the US, as a clinical psychologist. He spent 20 years in an emergency room working with trauma patients. He also counseled Vietnam vets and said that his training was handy when working with ex-combatants.

I went home and watched soccer with the boys at the convent and went to bed super early. It was a good thing, since school started on Monday and at 7:30 a.m., it sounded like every child in Liberia had gathered in the courtyard. Alex and I sped out to the airport and caught a very suspicious plane to Cote D’Ivoire. The plane was a tiny little 737 and when they turned on the air conditioning, the plane filled with mist.

We arrived in Cote D’Ivoire and had a fantastic lunch. The Ivory Coast feels very French and seemed very modern. We waited in the airport for about three hours then boarded another flight and spent an hour in the air before reaching Accra. All in all an exhausting but incredibly worthwhile trip.