USAID Mission Director Patricia Rader being welcomed at the village of Gba.
The first thing that struck walking out onto Liberian territory was the air; tinged with woodsmoke and diesel, hot and heavy with the humidity of the sea, the perfume of the red-orange dirt.
Second was the African welcome. Not meant for me this particular time, but for an evidently famous Angolan amputee pop star who was on the plane with me, just a seat over and a row back. Donned in gold jewelry, sporting aviators and white headphones, he lingered to have his picture taken with every greeting local on the tarmac.
Roberts International Airport was built by the US during World War II. Dirty white, Soviet-era aircraft emblazoned with "UN" dotted the airport. I smiled at the first impression of a service truck sporting the USAID logo. It was parked next to a new bus, also with a USAID logo, used to transport passengers the 100 feet or so to the terminal, which was about the size of a 1950's roadside diner.
We were picked up in an airconned Toyota SUV and sped away in the dusk towards the city. It being Friday night, life was just starting to hop a little. The roadside discos had opened their doors and begun blaring their music. The airport is quite a long way from Monrovia, which was just fine with me, as I wanted as much time as possible to stare out the window, devouring my first moments in Africa.
The driver pointed out the various buildings as we arrived. The Ministry of Health. The oddly cool Presidential Palace (currently vacant, being refurbished), the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) headquarters, The Legislature building, The University of Liberia and the Methodist University. Other than these large government annexes, Monrovia is a city of closely-packed, small concrete buildings. For the moment, the landscape holds evidence of post-conflict: compunds where foreigners work and sleep are surrounded with high walls with barbed wire and bars on all windows.
There are two main hotels that foreign visitors typically stay in; the Cape Hotel and the Mamba Point Hotel, next door. Both have basic rooms, decent pools and restaurants, and one even has a casino; hidden in the back through a nice tropical garden.
Just uphill is the US Embassy; one foreign service vacancy posting called it that "great aging Club Med on the Sea." This is an extremely accurate description as it truly is an assembly of 1960's era buildings that seem more like a decrepit old Country Club with a helipad (Caddy Shack, anyone?) than an embassy. It's covered by a kingdom of weird head-banging orange lizards. The grounds crew caught a deadly Black Mamba snake in one of the buildings a few weeks ago.
(Therefore I looked under my bed in my hotel room every night before I went to bed).
As a capital city in one of the poorest countries in the world and one that is also just recovering from a civil war, in Monrovia there is currently no electric grid, no city water system per say, no land line phones or sewer system. As such, all buildings (including my hotel and the US Embassy) have their own generators and water systems. Many buildings do without.
We got a brief tour from a member of the Mission and he took us to Sunset Beach for dinner and the local brew, Club Lager Beer (which tastes like Heineken) on the beach. There I was thrilled to learn that I just happen to be arriving right as the new Mission Director Patricia Rader was making her first trip upcountry to tour projects and I was invited along. What incredible luck.
Early Tuesday morning, I hopped in the SUV that would take me across Liberia through Bong County to Nimba County. But before we made it up there, we had to get out of Monrovia, which I was assured was not small feat. There is an area called "Red Light." No, it is not a red light district, although it may be called that. It is referred to as "Red Light" because the only traffic signal in the nation used to be perched there above that intersection (it has since been removed) and in normal hours, absolute gridlock descends on the crucial way out of town. Our 6am departure indicated that we'd departed relatively painlessly.
Over my year shuffling paper in Washington I couldn't remember precisely how many dozens of vehicles I had assisted in buying in Africa, but here I was traveling northeasterly in one of the many of those models. Like the Japanese-origin/Dubai-source Toyota Land Cruisers and the Thai-origin/Gibralter-source Ford Everests that were their dusty chariots, international and non-governmental organizations whose compounds dotted Monrovia like embassies in the District of Columbia: Save the Children, UN, the Red Cross, UNDP, Africare, UNHCR, Caritas, UNICEF, MSF....
The vital road from Monrovia to Ganta connects more than 60% of the population of the country and is the main commercial artery of the country. It was last paved back in the eighties, and decades of monsoons, overloaded trucks and civil war have brought the road to a significant state of disrepair. Luckily, it will soon be repaved. It was a very scenic even if boneshaking, four hour trip on a route lined with rubber tree plantations, roadside villages, markets and palm groves.
We joined up with the party in the town of Ganta, and continued on with some of our implementing partners to see to kinds of palm oil productions nearby. Palm oil production is the bread and butter of rural Liberia, and is extremely vital to support households in purchasing food, clothing and basic supplies.
The local implementers first showed us palm oil production using the latest method: people-powered presses that yield grand amounts of palm oil from palm nuts; one barrel in sixty to ninety minutes. Then we ventured into the forest (and were greeted by singing women and children) to see how palm oil has been traditionally produced: in large clay-lined, mud pits where the nuts are pressed with feet like the way grapes are squeezed in old-fashioned wine production. This method yields one barrel per day, and is not very hygienic. For approximately nine hundred dollars, "the Freedom Mill" metal palm oil press can yield nearly eight times as much palm oil as the old way, and it can be used as shared equipment - allowing a whole village to increase their household income.
The three car entourage continued on to the town of Sanniquellie. Nimba County is bordered by Cote d'Ivoire on the East and Guinea on the West. In Sanniquellie, one of the largest towns in the area we had a fabulous lunch of chicken, rice and beans with local officials and chieftains at Jackie's. Continuing on, we drove further into the forest to the village of Gba.
The following sentence is probably the most overused in the modern international development blogosphere, but I'm going to go ahead and use it anyway; "As our vehicles entered the clearing, we were greeted by joyous, dancing and singing villagers." It is quite an experience being greeted by African villagers in the jungle: without a doubt the very best welcome I've ever received anywhere the world in all my life.
We sat in the Gba community long-house with two tribes: the Gba and the Zor. These two tribes had been warring with each other just a few years ago over their territorial boundaries in a forest. Here, now the tribes were friends and the Gba and Zor kids danced and sang together. A USAID-supported project, Land Rights and Community Forestry Program had assisted the two tribes over the past couple of years in making peace by demarcating the forest they shared and planning its sustainable use.
In the villages of Gbapa and Zolowee, we toured a crop nursery below the village where agriculture experts were assisting the locals with putting the "cash" back into locally-grown cash crops. The Gba people are nurturing high quality black pepper and the recently envogue spice "grains of paradise" in a nursery of eco-friendly non-timber forest products.**
Yet another labor-saving food production process was modeled: a cassava root shredder and presser. The cassava root looks kind of like a long yam, it's a staple of the continent and provides much needed starch to Africans. It must be shredded into tiny pieces and then strained and dried. This is quite labor intensive (especially using the old method of shredding the root with what looked like a massive cheese grater). The device called a cassava processing mill, powered by a weedwhacker-sized engine makes quick work of the cassava and another device presses the liquid out of it with a giant screw-like flange.
The field visit also brought home in heart wrenching detail the insurmountable challenges of the doctors, nurses, facilities and partners that the Global Health programs I’ve been touching in Washington over the past year have supported. At the Sacleapea Health Facility supported by the implementing partner, we listened to a doctor explain how refugees from the civil war next door in Cote d’Ivoire were exasperating the over-burdening of an already tenuous rural health facility. Over forty-five percent of the daily patients at this facility are malaria cases. When I heard that, I considered how over the last year I had assisted with the expenditures for long lasting insecticide-treated bed nets for several projects, having little notion of the scope of malevolence I had a hand in combating. Furthermore, most of the children seeking care were suffering from malnutrition, some of it extremely severe, as I saw first-hand in the pediatric ward. Walking through a children’s hospital ward in this part of rural Africa was unspeakably gut-wrenching, but it is something that I will oblige myself to do again, often.
I returned to Monrovia and my tasks there with an altered sense of levity than when I left. Even though I'd heard many times how important field visits were, the experience of actually meeting the individual stakeholders and seeing the technology of development in rural Africa caused me to reimagine the role I play... among other things.
Liberia was different than I expected. For it having had a very, very bad couple of decades, the people here are remarkably resilient, friendly and upbeat. I also saw buildings with flowers out front. I saw children playing soccer. I saw houses being fixed up and tended to. Maybe it was a mere accident that a clean up crew was out near the Embassy during my visit, picking up trash and whitewashing the sidewalk and roadside rocks with tropical white, but it certainly makes one feel that, to borrow a Reaganism, it's morning again in Liberia.
Then is often the case, in Liberia it's the women who pick up the pieces and put them back together again. And then life goes on.
On the way up to my visit to Nimba County, in the middle of Bong County we happened on a radio broadcast of an interview with the Harvard-trained President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The first female President of an African nation answered questions from respectful callers and her clear voice exuded a sunny optimism. Yes, there were many problems, she admitted. For example, they really needed to increase their exports to build up foreign reserve and there were still lingering issues from the civil strife of the past twenty years. But President Johnson-Sirleaf responded to caller's concerns with a positivity that reverberated in many of my encounters with the local people.
In an interview with National Public Radio in 2009 she said, "Today, people are out on the streets, even in the night ... no longer fearful. You can see intimidation is gone," Johnson Sirleaf said. "Children are back in their uniforms going to school. You can look in people's faces, and no longer you see despair, disappointment and dismay."*
Besides the fact that disaster and hopelessness net more viewers per soundbite, progress and development takes great time and more patience than most jet-setting journalists have the attention span for.
"I cannot afford to be impatient. I must keep my head above water and keep pushing," President Johnson-Sirleaf said.*
Liberia and Liberians will persevere. That's what I leave here with.
Tony Bourdain, that great tourist, can add Liberia to the list of places he was very wrong about.
*National Public Radio. "Liberia President Knew Hardship Before Power" Radio interview conducted 8 April 2009. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102866461
**Special thanks to C.Y. Kwanue and the Daily Observer of Liberia, "USAID Director Tours Nimba Projects" article of 25 April 2011.
