Your trusty author has garnered official praise from the world famous and possibly fictitious Duoplay Times:
Milea had graciously met me at the border
and we immediately exchanged my remaining Francs for Liberian Dollars. LDs x100
are more or less on par with the USD, meaning that one LD is equivalent to one
penny. Their largest bill is 100LD, and they don’t have coins, so I then had a
small brick of bills. Milea said that this was normal, and yes, it always makes
you feel super rich even when you’re just carrying around like $10. Since she
was so close to the border, Milea had gotten cleared by her PC staff to go to
this border town on their weekly market day. The market in the town on the
other side of her village was during a school day when she would be teaching. She led
me into Liberia to where I washed my hands at a bucket hand washing station
and got my temperature taken. Why? Ebola. Even though it’s been eradicated, I’m
sure you remember the absolute crisis that parts of West Africa experienced a
few years ago, so they still take these precautions. I also had to register my
yellow fever card with some guy who tried to make me pay 50LD for this “service.”
I asked him why, as he wasn’t doing anything for me but writing down my name
and the fact that I had a yellow fever vaccine. Milea confirmed that this was
BS, and that he was just trying to get some money out of me. With no protest
from him, we just walked out, and stepped up next door into another office where I
got a 15 day stamp in my passport. The guy couldn’t give me a month stamp because I guess only
certain borders can do that. Even though I had a whole month-long visa from the
embassy, he wouldn’t give it to me. Whatever. I’d just have to go through
another immigration checkpoint later and get it extended.
After
going through another seemingly pointless office where the guy, again, just
wrote down my info, Milea and I found a motorbike (the only form of transportation around
here) and we zipped off to Duoplay, her village. The guy turned right off the
road into the “center of town,” a small open space where the market ladies sold their various food items. We continued straight to her house, where I dropped my stuff and she
showed me around. Her house was freshly painted, my arrival being an excuse to
get it done, and it looked great and so colorful. Her house was huge, 5 rooms
including an indoor bathroom (with a toilet requiring a bucket flush since
there was no running water). The PCV who lived in her house before her had been
evacuated, with the rest of the PC program, during Ebola, and Milea’s group was
the first group back after Ebola had been eradicated. This guy had all the
furniture taken out by neighbors, teachers, etc., so Milea moved in to an
absolutely empty house. She had since had a bunch of furniture made, like a big
table, some shelves, and a futon made by a local carpenter. She was very
excited to tell me that she had 24 hour current, or electricity that runs
around the clock, which is pretty rare among PCVs in Liberia. She was still
waiting for another few pieces of furniture for her kitchen, so her electric
stove was sitting on the floor next to the outlet. I thought that I had a
limited selection of food in my village, but she had way less, having to go to
one of two bigger towns on either side to get anything much in the way of food.
Her market ladies sold things like little bags of peanut butter, tiny onions, little
piles of pepe (the ubiquitous hot pepper), and small bags of rice, but anything
more substantial required a trip to a larger town. People here seem to use more
locally-produced foods like rice that grows in the nearby paddies, fish from
the swampy ponds, cassava (cassava for days), and sometimes various fruits like
tiny bananas, papayas, or pineapples.
The famous market ladies
Milea relaxing with other market ladies selling fish from the coolers
That
afternoon, we walked around the village. Everyone was so excited to meet me and
figure out who I was and why I was there. I soon learned how to do the
handshake-snap. Why are African handshakes so much cooler than the boring old
American handshake? Basically, you do the typical down-up-down handshake like
in Southern Africa, but they add a snap where you brace thumbs, hook fingers,
pull back, and let your fingers snap against your palm. I had yet to master it,
but I was still having fun doing it. I also quickly learned the greeting
phrases in Gio, the local language. People do also speak English, but it’s
Liberian English and sounds vastly different. But more on that in a later post. Everyone was super welcoming to
me. My face even started to hurt from smiling at everyone greeting me as I enjoyed their genuine words of welcome.
We
then got some peanut butter snaps (little plastic bags the size of maybe large
gold balls whose corner you bite off and squeeze the peanut butter out of) and walked
to her school. She has no signal inside her house, and the field by her school was the best place for her to get a data signal on her phone. We kept wandering
around and finished the small tour by ending back at her house. In her house,
we talked and talked. When you’ve been cooped up in a village for a long time
without the ability to have a fluent (American) English conversation with
someone, it’s great to just have the ability to talk fluidly. We compared our
respective PC experiences, complaining about universal problems of males professing their love for us, and about us literally having dreams about chocolate and
Clif bars. I told her about my travels thus far, and watched stars form in her
eyes especially when I talked about South Africa and Cape Town.
The data field (soccer field) by the school, with some houses across the road
Our
next task would be to haul water from the pump. It was on a circular concrete
base with a round wall surrounding it. The pump was insanely easy to move up
and down, unlike other pumps I’ve encountered in Lesotho. Milea said that the
pump was her favorite spot in the village. It was almost religious, with people
removing their shoes before they entered the small circular enclosure, and
somehow a peaceful energy reverberating through it as the sun started to set. Everyone
used a piece of lappa to cushion the bucket on their head (which was weird to
me because people in Lesotho normally put the bucket straight on their head).
Lappa is a big piece of patterned cloth that is used for everything from carrying
a baby to wearing as clothes to using as a sheet to using as general fabric for
doing things like making curtains. Each of us took a bucket the short walk to
her house, spilling only a little along the way even though her buckets didn’t
have lids. The night ended with us sitting on her front porch area surrounded
by lots of neighbor kids, messing around with them as we enjoyed the cooler
evening air.
"Burry your pupu," declares a sign outside of town
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