Reminiscing on Monrovia

I am currently taking a creative writing class from BYU to get ready to apply for Grad school this fall. I intend to get my MA in English, but my BA was in International Relations. Anyway, long story short, I've got to take a few prerequistes to prepare myself. I am really enjoying this class. I can't say that I'm really good at it yet, but I'm working on it. One of the assignments was a setting sketch in 500 words or less and I chose to describe Liberia. My friend Karen is over there again right now picking up two more children. Thinking of her travels brought back a lot of memories. It was really hard while I was there, but now I'd give anything to go back--to visit, not to adopt. So here are a few pictures that I'm not sure if I ever posted and my reminiscing of Monrovia for my English class.

I stared aimlessly up at the corrugated metal roof, noting the bright yellow and red paint some inarticulate painter had slapped on to hide the mundane. I didn’t think about anything in particular—just sat there absorbing it all. The music pounded with a vibration that shook the little shanty café. The African drums beat a steady rhythm into my head. It mesmerized and infiltrated me until the rhythm was somehow internalized and pulsing inside my body. I sat at a plastic table, something akin to what one might find in the garden section at Walmart. I sipped a bottled Coke. I didn’t dare eat any of the other food, even though the wafting aromas of fried plantains called to me—more because I was famished than because I had any sort of affinity for them.

I looked down the pothole riddled road toward the Royal Hotel where a machine dumped hot black tar into the holes. Several sweaty men worked to pound and flatten the gravel into the tar. The work looked excruciating. I had never been as hot in my life as I had been the last week in Monrovia. Combine the thick, sticky heat of this tropical climate with the burning heat coming off the tar, and I can imagine those men were only inches from losing consciousness. However, with an eighty-five percent unemployment rate, those men were lucky to be working at all. As I thought about this, it dawned on me that people can do amazing things if their survival depends on it.

All along the sides of the broken roads men and women talked, walked, waited or watched. I noticed many of the people sporting 5K or half-marathon t-shirts covered in dirt and poke-a-dotted with holes. So this is where all of those free t-shirts end up. One tall man that passed me wore a filthy "Vote for Pedro" t-shirt. I smiled as he passed. I bet he had no idea who Pedro was. I couldn't help but watch the strong, dark women in their perfectly tailored African dresses and brightly colored hair scarves carrying oddly shaped loads atop their heads. They glided with a grace that even a ballerina couldn’t duplicate. One may not know it by watching them, but they had seen horrors most Americans could never comprehend. They had had children with men that gave them no choices, or men that left long before the baby was born. They were left to feed hungry infants when most days they struggled to satiate their own churning stomachs. Loitering outside of the Lebanese-owned shops in some sort of informal meeting were the young boys and men with missing limbs. Their deformities came not from birth defects, or car accidents, but from the hateful, evil deeds of the rebel troops. The rebels took what they wanted from the villagers, including their limbs, leaving unspeakable emotional and physical carnage.

The buildings of Monrovia also bore the deformities of war. I had spent many hours traversing the city the last few days and I had yet to see a building unscathed by the pock-marks of angry bullets. Many were burned out with no windows, doors, or roofs. These were home to many people—too many people. Children ran naked in the garbage that surrounded the makeshift apartment buildings, stopping only to send a stream of urine in one direction or another, preferably toward another child.

Yet, despite the nightmares that once plagued it, the city pulsed with life, fear seemingly suppressed--if only for the time being. The ghosts still lingered near for on every corner and in every face the haunting reminders of a cruel, unfair existence remained. But they were a strong people that continued on and looked forward with hope. My taxi driver, earlier that day, had stopped in front of the old presidential palace, now nothing more than a metal and concrete shell decorated with KEEP OUT signs. He motioned to the roads and intersections ahead, “Not lon-go,” he mumbled in thick Liberian English, “dis be all cova wit dead, rottin body-o. It be hell, dat what it be! Bu' we be tryin' small now. Tings gettin better-o."