Dear Sir or Madam,

If you had the chance to make a difference, would you?

In Liberia, West Africa, many expatriates awake as early as 6am to the loud thumping of Akon songs outside their windows. Throughout the day, radio stations cycle through the same Akon songs. On the street, children sing the same Akon songs. In the evening, the bars and clubs play the same Akon songs. In order to survive, expatriates will claim that they like Akon; they will feel that they love Akon; they will lash out when outsiders tell them that Akon is not very talented; they will develop Pavlovian responses to Akon stimuli, most notably awkward dancing and singing-along when Akon is played. In short, in order to survive, expatriates succumb to Musical Stockholm Syndrome.

Four to five kids hawk pirated DVDs outside the grocery store. However, these aren’t your normal DVDs, these are behemoth 19-movies-on-one-DVD….DVDs. I’m not a scientist, so I’m not sure how they convinced 19 movies to squeeze onto one DVD. What I do know is that when I found out that it was possible to have 19 full-length, good quality movies on one DVD, I felt that my life until that point had been a sham. Newton’s classic conjecture, his oft cited Fifth Law of Playability (For every one DVD there is equally found one movie therein), stood mute in the face of a brave new science.

Well, I have officially been in Liberia for over a year. I have tried to describe small aspects of life here that you may find interesting, but it’s often hard to get across the true depth of the experience here. Some people have asked me how I come up with the posts for this blog, how long they take, do I plan them out, etc. Well, the answer is that before each post I compile a list of interesting, seemingly unrelated statistics and weave that story – the story of numbers – into a narrative. For avid readers, this explains the up-to-know mysterious primacy I grant numerology throughout the posts.

Liberia is hot, shaded with palm trees, and has breathtaking beaches. If ever there was a place meant to be ground zero for ice cream consumption, Liberia would be it. Liberians should be hapless, obese diabetics, waddling hourly to the corner ice cream stand, wheezing and gesturing at a picture to indicate how many scoops they want to tower on their next cone. Alas, this is not the case. A handful of restaurants catering to foreigners or the Liberian middle-class serve frozen soft serve or a gloppy substance resembling play dough. On the streets one company dominates the Liberian ice cream market, Quench Your Thirst International. Vendors roam the streets with wooden wheelbarrows selling ice cream that is cheap, but not very creamful. Foreigners have maybe one or two experiences with Quench Your Thirst International, then shrug and write off Liberian ice cream.

I decided to choose my own for a bit and headed to Europe, a journey with maps, for a month. I took hot showers, partook in no stadium riots, saw no Tercels, it was fantastic – the hot shower part at least. I traveled by rail with my backpack. At an art museum in Berlin I bought a poster to decorate my house back in Liberia, which, until now, has been decorated in what I call the Silent Post-Expressionist Style (Don’t look at what I’m hanging, look at what I’m NOT hanging. It’s a deep movement; also cheap). They put the poster in a laughably large prism-shaped box. And then I traveled by rail with my backpack and a giant Tolberone bar. I saw old friends, lots of euro-mullets, and even made some new friends. But, this post is not about any of that. Not at all. This post is about the Most Miserable Girl in the World.

After surviving the Akonalypse you tend to think that you have a certain prowess, a deft ability to navigate poorly managed mass events. 

 

Hey Sean, we’re buying tickets for the Liberia-Gambia game. Want us to pick you up one?

 

Sure. How much?

 

We’re going to buy the $20 VIP seats.

 

Oooooooo. Weeeeellll. You see, I was thinking about getting the cheap $3 dollar seats.

 

Really?  We’ve heard that those seats are pretty dangerous….

 

Yeah, well, you know….  The Akonalypse was pretty dangerous, but I have a certain prowess, a deft ability to navigate poorly managed mass events. You wouldn’t understand…

 

Ok. Well, we’ll pick one up for you just in case you change your mind.

 

My house has a ten foot wall around it. Topped with snarled coils of barbed wire. Four guards patrol the grounds with clubs. How tough would it be to sneak into chez Sean? One day, I drove up to my house in a big, white Carter Center SUV. I smiled at the guards. Hello! They smiled back and told me that Sean wasn’t there and that I couldn’t enter. They refused me entry to my own house on the basis that there was no one (i.e. ME) home to welcome me. They had beautiful logic. This is how tough it is to sneak into my house. I thought.

There comes a time in a man’s life when he decides to buy a juice extractor.  My time came last week.  At around 10 a.m.  I was sitting in my office, working diligently, but something wasn’t quite right.  I looked out of my window, trees swayed in the breeze, branches bulged with citrusy delectables.  I looked back at my computer screen, began to type a few words, and then paused again.  It was time.  I pushed my chair back with resolve.  In the hallway, I saw Tim.  Tim is a graduate anthropology student at George Washington University working for the Carter Center and the United States Institute for Peace this summer.  Tim, I’m going to buy a juice extractor, want to come?

Moments later we were walking with purpose and steely gazes towards what I fondly refer to as the Carter Car.  Zinnah, our driver, was listening to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings on the radio.  This was no time for national catharsis.  This was a time for impulsive consumerism.

Hey Zinnah.  We have a mission!  Juice extractor!  To the Carter Car!

One of the things that I’ve been struck by in Liberia is the overt nationalism of the UN Peacekeepers. I used to think that once a soldier put on a blue UN Peacekeeper helmet the transformation would be akin to that of Bob, the hapless deli employee who at night dons makeup, becomes the uninhibited Chiquita, and serenades drunk business men at the bar – in other words, complete and utter. No longer would the soldiers be tools of the nation state, but rather faceless cogs of the UN, ready to go anywhere and stay just long enough to be fired upon before being withdrawn. Sadly, I was wrong. Turns out that giving a person a blue helmet just amplifies their nationalism.

Dear Uncle Ken,

I was in the forest, far from the hustle and bustle of Monrovia with its tin shacks, gnarled barb wire, free-flowing street sewage, and rampant armed robbery. The oppressive heat, even now, at mid-morning, suggested that the sun had saddled up next to Venus overnight. Sweat poured down my face. I pressed through the knee-deep brush, taking care not to betray my position with a careless step on a land mine. The dense forest densified with each step.

They were somewhere behind me, nearer now.