Liberia Election-a-rama

“Did he rape your sister?”

“No!”

“Did he give you guns?”

“No!”

So begins the campaign slogan for former footballer George Weah, the front-runner in the race to lead to Liberia, a small, densely-forested West African nation in the first and fragile stages of rebuilding the damage of a 14-year long civil war.

I arrived here on Friday morning, fresh off two days in Accra and with a sense of foreboding, like I wasn’t really sure how this was going to go and it was my first big test as a freelancer. By the end of the day I needed to file a 700 word piece to the Star, the South China Morning Post and the Sydney Morning Herald.

After weeks of emails back and forth with a cousin of a friend of Mom’s, I had a ride arranged from the airport and a place to stay. I also had the door opened to a wealth of information and contacts, as Felix proved to be incredibly media-savvy and very, very helpful and generous.

On the ride from the airport – the sun pouring down on the humidity, the roadsides crowded with kids and women on their way to and from who-knows-where, the countryside looking lush and empty – Sam from Save the Children gave me a small rundown on all that’s happened since I was here a year ago.

Essentially, nothing.

Two years after the peace agreement led to a transitional government hand-picked by the United Nations, nothing has been accomplished, except maybe the further evidence that even with the best of intentions and the close eye of the international community, Liberian leaders are still committed to stealing from the country’s coffers.

The roads are still a mess, especially in Monrovia, where craters in the road created by rocket-propelled grenades have further deteriorated during the rainy season and crumbled under the constant parade of UN vehicles and NGO Land Rovers.

The education system is barely limping along. There is no health system to speak of, save the emergency clinics set up in some of the city’s slums.

The capital, Monrovia, is absolutely teeming with people. I’ve never been to such a crowded city, where the young, unemployed men just spend their days sitting around, waiting for something – anything – to happen. Downtown they crowd the markets, line the sidewalks, jostle and shout and generally cause a melee. Uptown they play soccer, hawk small goods.

The women go about their daily lives, washing, cooking, doing petty trading. They’re not as visible.

Some 900,000 Liberians and ex-patriates live cheek-by-jowl in Monrovia, a city designed ot support 300,000. There is no water system, so water is trucked in and easily contaminated. A cholera outbreak swept through the more densely populated areas of the city this spring, where 70,000 people live in an area of three city blocks.

All of this life happens to the loud roar of hundreds of gas-powered generators: there is still no electricity anywhere in the entire country.

On election day, I was up in Ganta, near the Guinea border, up early and at 8.15 a.m., the motorbike pulled up the lane and Freeman and I headed out for a day of visiting the polls and some of the Equip sites. The line-ups to vote were long and had been forming since 5 a.m. It was surprising how many young people, particularly women, were standing in line. They seemed to know there would be a long wait ahead of them and, thankfully, the weather was cooperating. It was cool enough that I wore a long-sleeved shirt over my sweater for the entire morning and most of the afternoon.

After hitting a half-dozen polls – and getting the same quote over and over and over again – I decided to pack it in. In the morning I had a brief interview with Jimmy, one of the volunteers who worked with ex-combatants, and had gotten some info from Freeman about what happened during the war and he gave me a bit of a tour of some of the shot-up and burned out houses and told me about how when the rebels came, they captured some people, beat them up, then nailed them to a wall and left them to die.

Imagine.

After being stuck up north for longer than I expected, I took a shared cab back to Monrovia. Essentially, people with cars rent out six spaces in what would normally seat four in the west. About halfway through the ride – I had no sense of where we were – the road absolutely disappeared and transformed instead into a mud pit. I remembered, vaguely, that we had slowed down here on the way up in our big SUV, but now that we were in a small car, it was a different matter. There were a couple trucks stuck in the mud and a short line of cars and SUVs waiting to go through. This time around there were two big trucks stuck in the mud, one leaning rather precariously, and boys hauling its goods from one truck to another. There were a group of boys uproariously pushing stuck cars through the mud. Every time they successfully managed to dislodge another car, a boisterous cry would go up and a few dollars would be exchanged. I expected each of the barefoot boys to be coated in thick red mud, but they were actually only muddy up to their knees. The peacekeepers arrived to take some digital photos, but otherwise they were useless.

The following afternoon was emotionally draining: I went out with the International Rescue Committee to interview "war affected children" and heard lots of sad stories. It’s hard to stay buoyant when you’re just surrounded – and I mean surrounded – by the sheer enormity of the rebuilding efforts. It’s almost too much to think about.

The neighbourhood where we did the interviews was called “Public Health Pump,” a rather laughable name with obvious origins. Apparently a lot of the neighbourhoods have weird names like that, such as Chocolate City (named for the thick mud that turns up in the rainy season). PHP has the old army barracks, scene of some very, very heavy fighting in the early 1990s. The area was basically destroyed. What buildings weren’t entirely riddled with bullets had floors missing. There were staircases that led nowhere, just walls without anything around them. In a few of the burned out buildings, laundry flapped. Families were squatting there, out in the open.

The training program we went to see was “tie & dye,” and it was definitely a no-frills operation, like nothing I’ve seen in Africa. Most of the NGO projects on this continent are in air-conditioned buildings, with guards and froofy pillows and a coffee pot in the corner. They’re basically a testament to the kind of environment western funders might like to visit. The kind of environment that western donors might need in order to do training.

This was, um, nothing.

It was a concrete floor with a zig-zag arrangement of woven grass mats. That’s all. No lights, no power, no anything. A couple benches were scrounged up so we’d have somewhere to sit and talk. A few kids laid on the floor. Out back, where trainees laid out their new creations to dry, there was just a stump of a tree, a blackened building and a ruined structure that had one of those stairways to nowhere. Next door was just rubble, pile after pile of destroyed bricks. Out front was a graveyard of rusty, broken-down cars that dozens of mechanics were trying in vain to coax back to life. It was the sketchiest neighbourhood I’ve been in, yet I felt rather safe there. Strange. I’m not sure I’d want to walk through there at night, but during the day the place felt well-watched.

We hopped back in the van and went further down the road to a maternity clinic, where social workers are helping rape victims get treatment. They’re focusing on preventing rape and dealing with the psychological scars of the war. It seemed like a fantastically difficult job. I can only imagine the AIDS rate in this country. Everything is an unknown: the AIDS rate, the literacy rate, the jobless rate, the number of people…

It really is starting from scratch.

That's what makes this such a profoundly distressing place. That may seem like an obvious statement, but it’s taken me 10 days to really experience it and now that I’m here, now that I’ve been here for several days, now that I’ve gotten over my initial paranoia (somewhat) and allowed myself to breathe in the place, I find it depressing. It’s overwhelming in its destruction. It’s unrelenting in its futility, I guess. These are all very deep thoughts, no?

I watched the boys go through their soccer drills this afternoon. Some of them were not wearing shoes. They were all dressed in bright colours, running up and down the pitch in their jerseys and shorts, following a coach who cannot be paid for a sport that will never be anything more than a hobby for each of them. I wasn’t even sure if they had a ball to play with.

I watch the little girls across the street, the kids in little drab, grey rags. Their clothes fall off them – they’ve no zippers or buttons or clasps, maybe lost through repeated washings, maybe simply broken or missing or maybe lost during the previous wearer’s reign. How is it that they find the strength to get up in the morning, these wee kids that have known nothing but war and will never know anything more than what they know now, a kind of grinding poverty that steeped in violence and ignorance. They have no electricity. Some have no roofs. The boundaries of their homes are marked with tarps and laundry lines.

They will likely never learn to read. Numbers will remain an abstract concept that’s needed only for the exchange of money. They will probably at some point be taken up by some young boy who is equally as ignorant and raise a batch of even more profoundly ignorant children – having had no discipline in school, no idea of history, no sense of language.

As someone pointed out, there is a huge gap in the brains in Liberia. An entire generation is missing. There will be no one to take over jobs that require some level of education, because everyone has had his or her education stopped, started, interrupted. The only ones who survived unscathed are overseas, and what is the likelihood that they would return to a country full of ignorant rape babies?

How do parents go on, knowing that this is all they will have and all their children will inherit, that unless something very fortuitous happens to their family they will never be more than illegitimate, uncomfortable squatters. When they look around this city, what do they see? Some of their parents know Monrovia as an enviable capital, the place where most of West Africa came to do their shopping back in the days when the US favoured them with exports. Now, when they look around, do they notice the bullet holes? Do they think it strange that many buildings have no roofs?

Do they even foresee a day when the UN can safely leave them?