The sun was just coming up as I filed through the customs in Monrovia airport. The cast had changed since my job in Nepal. Square jawed, weathered expatriate engineers of the extractive industries and UN Mission in Liberia peacekeepers had replaced the square jawed familiarity of mountain tour guides of the Himalayas. The funny looking little man in a suit with an unfeasibly bushy goatee was a - presumably senior - representative of USAID. The goofy looking Slovenian with a goatee was the lone tourist in search of surf.
Everyone else was decipherable only through the statistics I had gathered in the weeks before my first paid assignment for Save the Children. Fourteen years of civil war had left this resource endowed nation in tatters. 4 million people - half of whom live on under a dollar a day watch as the nations wealth is stonen from under them. Returned slaves of the USA once led the coast to superficial prosperity. But subjugating the interior, they carved out the division that led to 250,000 dead, Blood Diamond, Charles Taylor and Naomi Campbell.
Temporarily, there was nobody there to meet me at the airport. Friendly drivers offered me their phones to make a call. Back in Africa - I thought to myself in the relaxed familiar conversation about early mornings, football and taxi driving.
The road from the airport was unusually smooth. Chinese built, I later learned, along with the rehabilitation of a decrepit railway-line to link up a once looted mine in Bong county. Everything looked delapidated . Literally war-torn. The tops of concrete walls seem frayed by the endless spirals of razor wire that protect the ports, barracks, law courts and NGOs.
The recruitment queue outside the army barracks had been there for days. Young hopefuls with not many choices dream of a chance to get off the streets. A gaggle of thirtysomethings stranded in their wheelchairs at the roundabout could probably testify to their unpalatable options. But implausibly, the war in Mali has become an attractive career choice in a country with 80% unemployment.
Arriving at the Save the Children office I was briefed, greeted and welcomed by inspiring Liberians who had lived, suffered and worked through unimaginable security threats. Good humour seemed everywhere as I dutifully ordered-in the Liberian Chicken from the takeaway lunch menu. "Prabably not much different from English Chicken" offered Samuel over his shoulder.
It was comforting that he wasn't far wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment