Gbarnga Life

So I’ve been in Gbarnga at the Cuttington University Campus training with the other volunteers for the past two days. Cuttington is the Harvard of Liberia and I’ve actually been quite impressed with the quality of their facilities (electricity and a real library (it even smells like a library!)). Training is really intense, we start at 8 each day and tend to go until 9 or 10 (today was easier, we ended at 7). The upside is that most of it has felt useful, and it’ll all be over soon. Tomorrow is our last full day of training, and most of it will be spent in some small village near here looking at and discussing cultural differences. Saturday we have a couple of sessions, but mainly that’s the day we all leave for our sites. Jesse and I are only a few hours away from here (we’re already about 4 hours outside of Monrovia).

We met our coutnerpart last night, he’s the French teacher from our High School, who studied in Liberia and also traveled as a student to Côte D’Ivoire and Togo (both French speaking countries). We worked with him in the morning sessions, but he fell ill and missed out on everything after lunch. He seems like a nice guy, and he had a lot of good information about our school (there are 1,000 students, and about 20 teachers, students at the “High School” range from 7th to 12th grade, and he suggested that we help him teach French since he is currently the only French teacher…though I don’t know what we’ll actually end up doing when we get there). Through him and mostly through the Peace Corps security guy we’ve also discovered that we have a large house (“living room big enough you could play tennis in it”) and that our sitemate Roz will have a very nice house as part of the UN compound with a full kitchen and electricity. Also, the town is apparently fairly large.

As for the food (and those who know me will know how important this is to me), I have yet to eat a Liberian meal I haven’t loved. The rice and sauce here is delicious (though that is partly skewed by the fact that I’ve been mostly eating fancier-than-normal food served by the training compound kitchens), and there are SO MANY plantains. For breakfast I’ve been eating boiled plantain topped off with fishy, oniony, tomatoey oil, and it’s fantastic – no really, I love it. Lunch and dinner are both usually accompanied by fried plantains and the sauces (or soups, as they’re actually called here) have been quite varied and contained interesting things like cabbage, beans, and dare I say spices?). The only soup (sauce) I’ve been less than enthused about was the palm butter soup because it’s exactly the same as bonté which I got and very regularly all the time in Guinea (except the Liberian version was spicier and made with chicken, so it wasn’t a total loss).

Anyway, so the plan is to head up to Saclopea on Saturday in a bush taxi with our counterpart and figure it out from there. I’ll hopefully set up my internet key then (I don’t have enough phone recharge cards to pay the initial bill now, and I can’t get them in the Cuttington University compound), when I do I will put these posts online unless I get internet sooner than that. Either way, talk to you soon.

Oh, by the way, as part of training we’ve watched a few documentaries on Liberia, and I highly recommend “Iron Ladies of Liberia” it’s very good. “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” is also very good.