Lesotho Infinity And Beyond: 26 January 2017: Liberia- Saclepea

Excited to pound some GB!

In Bahn, Trey and I hopped on a motorbike to the town of Saclepea. At the checkpoint just outside of town, the cop stopped our driver, asking why he was taking two passengers instead of just one. The driver tried to argue with the cop, saying that it was very common practice to take two, three, even four passengers on a motorbike. The cop said that the driver should come into the office. Mind you, this was a little open-air tent tent with a few plastic chairs set up. “Come into the office” obviously meant, “pay me a bribe,” and as soon as the driver handed over 100LD, the cop was happy to let him go. That was the biggest load of BS I’d seen in a long time. “Fined” for having the normal amount of two passengers? Give me a break.

In Saclepea, I would be staying with a PCV named Thomas. Trey and I found him on the road and we all went to a cook shop called “Place to Be.” We had rice with a dried fish soup. We then walked around town and found some awesome cinnamon rolls at the baker, which we ate back at the cook shop with a big plastic bottle of palm wine. Not too shabby. The owner of the cook shop, an awesome woman also named Julie, invited us to come in the next morning to help prepare the food. I immediately said yes, and the next morning before school, we were back.

A foggy morning, as usual

Around the back of the cook shop, it seemed like Julie’s whole family, from little grandkids to her 103-year-old mother, were out there. They were almost done making the food for the day (at 7am!), but still had yet to prepare the GB. GB is a play dough-like food made from pounding boiled cassava. After Julie’s crew boiled the cassava and put it though a meat grinder to get out the knots, they put it in a big wooden mortar. Thomas and I were able to try our hand at “pumping” the GB. It’s hard work trying to make cassava edible. It’s also said to contain traces of cyanide, especially in the leaves. Something that is, in addition to being very labor-intensive to prepare, potentially poisonous in large quantities, seems strange to choose to be your country’s main food staple. After a few minutes of vigorously slamming a large stick into the bowl of cassava grounds, it soon turned into a smooth, and now edible, substance called GB. Fun fact: no one really knows what GB stands for, if anything.

Grinding the cassava

Julie seasoning the soup

Julie helps me pound the GB

A view inside the mortar

Thomas takes a whack at it

We sat down for a big breakfast of the GB we pounded and soup. To eat GB, the dough is formed into a disc, and people pull off chunks and roll them into balls with their fingers. The GB ball is dipped in the soup, at which point you might grab and hide a piece of meat behind your ball. Then, with the help of the “slippery thing” in the soup, an herb or plant that makes it slimy, you swallow your ball whole. It’s a very important thing to be able to swallow the ball in one fluid motion. No one really knows for sure why it’s swallowed, but they say it gets down to your stomach faster. When I told people I ate GB, they would ask, “Do you swallow?” When I said that, yes, I swallow [GB], they would be so happy, saying that I was a true Liberian now. It’s also more impressive to swallow bigger GB balls. Normally, they’re about the size of marbles, but people can easily swallow golf ball-sized balls, and there are the famed few who can swallow even bigger ones. Hopefully, though, you won’t have your life flash before your eyes and literally choke on it in your quest to show people how big you can swallow, as Trey once did.

My humbly-sized GB

Thomas helped me devour all this food

Into the soup!

After some photos with Julie and waddling out of there with our bellies stuffed, Thomas and I went across the road to his school. Thomas taught computer at the school, and we went into the computer lab where he worked on a power point about how to teach his fellow teachers how to type and use a computer. Meanwhile, I watched my new favorite thing, How It’s Made, on the neighboring computer. We learned that the next day, school would be cancelled for a voter registration training that would be held at the school. There was an election coming up, so people decided to use the school to train people how to conduct the voting. And again I witnessed the ease at which school is cancelled in different parts of Africa.

Julie and I had a little phtoshoot going on

After he was done working on the power point, we went to the enormous Tuesday market. There was absolutely everything there: spaghetti-filled turnover things, DVDs, regular meat, bush meat, all the lappa, clothes, alcohol, produce, shoes, plastic buckets, and on and on and on.