Things Fall Apart (or, My Exciting Monrovia Trip)

It’s been a while since my last blog post, but up until recently not a whole lot of new stuff had happened. This past week has been full of new things, most of them somehow involved with my trip to Monrovia to attend the small projects assistance (SPA) grants committee meeting.

First off, I cook my meals every day, and use a gas stove connected to a small gas tank. This tank is cheap enough to refill when it runs out (~$35), but the only place to refill it is in Monrovia. Jesse and I had not been looking forward to the day it ran out because it would mean eating street food and sardine sandwiches until we could make a trip down to Monrovia – not to mention dealing with our bulky and heavy-when-full gas tank on bush taxis. As luck would have it, 2 days before our trip to Monrovia the tank finally ran out of gas. This happened to fall exactly on our “halfway through our service” day, meaning we probably won’t have to deal with getting it refilled again before we leave Liberia. It also happened minutes after I got off the phone with our doctor who was letting me know that he was taking a trip upcountry and would be able to give us a Peace Corps ride back to our house (when we would be lugging a heavy gas tank – much easier than changing taxis 3 times and walking ½ mile across Saclepea to get home).

Then, the day before we left, all of our phones started acting up, not making calls, and sometimes showing no signal even though we live ½ mile from the tower. It turns out that in Monrovia at the main Cellcom office (Cellcom is like T-mobile or Verizon, it’s one of the carriers), lightning struck the main tower in such a way that completely destroyed their system. This meant that for the past 6 days, no phones in the country have worked, nor has our internet GPRS modem which runs off Cellcom cellular reception. Of course everybody in Peace Corps uses Cellcom as their main number, so this meant for the entire time I spent in Monrovia, visiting it for the first time, I couldn’t ever call anybody to figure out where they were, or in case I got lost, where I was. Had this happened any time in the previous 4 months I’ve been here it would have been much less disruptive than the 2 days I spend in Monrovia for the first time.

Well, the day came, and we started off for Monrovia on Sunday morning. We left our house at 6:45 AM and waited in the taxi parking of Saclepea for a car to leave for Monrovia, this meant waiting for 3 more passengers who wanted to go to fill the remaining seats up. Around 8:45 we were on the road, very excited to get going. We made it about 300 yards when Jon started yelling “Whoa! Smoke! Smoke!” as there was smoke billowing out from under his seat. We stop the car, the driver investigates why there is smoke pouring out of the floorboards of his car, decides he needs to move some fuses around in his fuse box, then we all pile back in and resume our trip. This time we make it about 5 minutes out of town then there is smoke again, and this time there’s a lot more of it. The driver stops the car, we all get out again, and this time when the driver opens the fusebox, he burns his hand on it, and we see that all the fuses have melted together into a mass of metal and plastic. It turns out the entire car had shorted out, and the smoke had been pouring out of the large bundle of wires that ran underneath Jon’s seat – which incidentally had melted through part of the cushioning. The driver mumbles something about how we can still make it, but quickly the other passengers and we convince him that his car isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and he tries to call for a new car to get us on my phone – of course it doesn’t work since my phone isn’t working. The driver gets on a passing motorcycle and heads back to town to get us a car. We waited for about an hour during which it started to rain, and then one of the ladies in the car with us got frustrated and hopped on another motorcycle heading into town, and was back within 10 minutes with the driver as well as a new taxi to take us to Monrovia. We were on our way. We were in Ganta 5 hours after we left the house, though normally it takes about 45 minutes. For some reason we switched cars at this point, then again right before entering Monrovia.

After making it into Monrovia around 5pm, we chartered a car to our hotel that Peace Corps was paying for. We weren’t sure how to get there, but I managed to get a call out to the hotel to ask for directions (how my phone managed to make this call in the middle of the Cellcom mess is beyond me). We arrived and were amazed at how nice the rooms were (A/C, TV, hot running water, shared living room and kitchen, it was great). The front desk guy was getting off his shift, so he offered to walk us to the part of town where we could find some food. It was late Sunday afternoon, so almost everything was closed, but managed to find a butcher that was open (after LOTS of haggling we got a big piece of really fresh meat), found a guy selling bread on the street, and found a small store that sold beer, mayonnaise and canned baked beans. We cooked this up in our apartment’s kitchen and it was such a delicious meal after the day we’d had.

This whole time I’d been trying to get a hold of Jarrad because he had planned on coming up to Monrovia to crash with me and catch up a bit, but I just assumed that he decided not to chance it after the phones stopped working. However, right as I was getting to sleep, someone knocked on my door, and there he was along with his friend Rebecca who had given him a ride. He’d been waiting at a different location of the same apartment/hotel closer to the office. We chatted for a long while then slept. First thing in the morning he was going to head back to his town (he had been in Monrovia for 3 days at this point), and he asked if he could shower before he left, I said sure. He hadn’t been in the bathroom 2 minutes before he came back out and told me he had broken the shower and hot water was pouring onto the floor and into my room. I was already running late for catching a car to the Peace Corps office, so I ran down and told the manager about it so he could shut off the water, then put my stuff in Jesse’s room and gave the manager the key to mine as I ran out the front gate to catch a car across town to the office.

The SPA meeting was remarkably short, but while I was in the Peace Corps office, I managed to fill out all the forms required of me to train the new groups arriving this summer to Liberia and Sierra Leone (yep, I’ll be working as a trainer for Peace Corps Sierra Leone sometime this summer!), and I also got all my paperwork for getting my French visa authorization finished and handed off to the Head of Mission for the French Embassy here in Monrovia (since there is no reliable mail system here I asked the French embassy to put my paperwork in their diplomatic pouch). While I was in the office I also got to see Ousmane Diallo and Youssouf the driver from Peace Corps Guinea. Ousmane is consulting for a month to help get the pre-service training together for Peace Corps Liberia, and so he was in the office getting some work done. He’s doing great, he isn’t using his cane anymore, though he still limps. I got to talk to Youssouf for a while about how the office staff in Conakry is doing, and it sounds like things are still running at full-capacity there – they are preparing for Peace Corps Response volunteers to arrive in August.

As far as food goes, I had a delicious chicken shwarma sandwich for lunch with a side of eggplant dip, and then I got soft cheese, red wine and fresh fruit at the Monrovia grocery store for dinner. It was awesome to eat something besides rice and beans for a change.

One last note, I am going to take my first vacation trip in a couple of weeks to visit a volunteer in Robertsport for Liberian Unification Day (May 14th), then will hopefully hang out with Jarrad in his town (also near the beach) afterwards. So, here’s a link to a recent NYT article about Robertsport.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/travel/24explorer.html