29 January 2017: Liberia- Toweh Town

In this episode, I leave Saclepea and head back to Bahn, where I’d be briefly stopping again before taking the short ride to Toweh Town for a Nimba party at Ike’s house.

                I was sad to leave Saclepea and the lovely people I’d met there, namely Julie from the cookshop, who was legitimately one of the loveliest and welcoming people I’d ever met. Thomas said that a good chunk of all Liberians are genuinely this friendly and nice. What a world. From Saclepea, I hopped on a motorbike to Bahn, where I found Trey in his kitchen making spaghetti. We ended up watching, what else, seemingly endless episodes of How It’s Made. I don’t know why this has become so popular, but when hard drive selections are limited, sometimes you just feel the need to watch factory machines do things like turn wires into little springs at high speed, or cover snack cakes in fountains of icing over and over…and over. Or sometimes you just like to laugh at the host overact his reactions to the creation of things like bread and plastic bags. Yep, this is PC life, people.

                Anyway, the next day at Trey’s school, classes were cancelled after only one period. They were cancelled for the rest of the week for voter registration training, the same thing Thomas’s school was cancelled for. With no school to occupy us for the day, we decided to go to the cell tower to charge our phones (the generator was still broken), then wander down the road to a neighboring town. Because what else do you do when you’re bored? When we got back a couple hours later, we went to a big shop in town to get enormous (like 50 pound) bags of onions and flour to bring to Ike’s house.

                We took two bumpy and slow motorbikes to Toweh Town with the onions strapped to Trey’s bike and with the flour strapped to mine. I took the opportunity to recline back on the flour sack like a pillow. Ah, luxury. Ike was placed in a very unique house. It was the house of the former VP and then President Moses Bla. The house itself is really big, and what makes it kind of weird is that in the front yard there’s a huge mausoleum housing the former president, and to make it even weirder, there’s a big gold-colored statue of the man himself inside the house. Upon entering the house, it has become a Nimba PCV tradition to kiss the statue for good luck.

The Holy Ike-dol

                Ike had just built this awesome outdoor oven, and he went outside to start warming it up by building a fire inside it. As it heated up, the rest of us started preparing bread dough, and we later tested the oven by baking some awesome garlic bread. It was so delicious. We then popped over to one of the shops to buy some more baking ingredients and found a shelf of different flavored “gin.” There was ginger, lemon, and many other mystery flavors. The kicker is that all the bottles say that they are 40% alcohol, but they could actually range from around 10% to what was likely almost pure ethanol. Now that’s what I like to call Liberian Roulette.

Ike's oven

Cutting bamboo to use as "tongs"

                The next day, the other people started to arrive throughout the day. I was reunited with Milea, who was happy to see that the other PCVs had taken such good care of me during my independent jaunt around Nimba. At this point, we ceaselessly made different bread products throughout the weekend including pizzas, cinnamon rolls, pretzels, you name it. One night, we went out to get some things, and we ended up getting sat down at this new bar in town at a table with the supreme town chief, which is a pretty big deal. As we sat there, there were at least four rows deep of kids staring at us, just watching us sit there. This seems to be a common theme in PC life, but especially here. A small group of foreigners? Wow, let’s just stare at them like they’re zoo animals. In their defense, any time I saw a white/foreign person during my service, I would also stare uncontrollably, wondering the same things everyone else was probably wondering: what the heck are you doing here?

Throwing pizza dough

                Other activities at Ike’s house included making so much food, including carmelized onions (almost the whole enormous bag of them) on the coal pot. Side note: Most people in Liberia don’t have gas or electric stoves. They use a metal coal pot outside. There’s a small square space at the bottom that acts as a stand, then the top flares out like an upside down pyramid shape. You pour some coal into the top and get some embers going, then put your pot of food on top. It takes much longer than on a stove, but it’s way cheaper and gets the job done. Anyway, other than cooking and making fruit wine, we fetched many buckets of water from the nearby pump, played on a slackline, hung out in hammocks, found a secret society (no one really knows what these are- they’re kind of like the traditional religion, or maybe it’s something like initiation school) and were told to scram, had a dance-off in the yard with the neighbor kids, threw water at the other kids who wouldn’t stop crowding around Ike’s windows to see what us zoo animals were doing in there, etc.

Cooking on the coal pot with, you guessed it, all the neighbor kids

One really cool thing was talking with Cori, who is a Global Health OBGYN volunteer working near the capital. I liked hearing about so many of her stories of weird surgeries. Then I asked her what was up with a disproportionate number of Liberians, especially kids, having these huge, distended belly buttons. She said that they are belly button hernias where the lining of the abdominal wall is open, and so fluids and intestines and things collect in the belly button, pushing it outward. Some of these belly buttons are like little baseballs sticking out of people’s stomachs. It does happen in the US, but is easily fixed with minor surgery. It could also be genetic, which may be why this happens to a disproportionate number of people here.

The last day in Toweh Town, after a breakfast of lots of leftover pizza, Milea and I got a motorbike back toward Bahn. On the way, it had a flat tire, so the driver, the little kid on the front of the bike, Milea, and I walked to the nearest town to get it fixed. We sat in this village while it was being repaired, and soon enough there was a crowd of little kids silently staring at us, as per usual. We were directed to another motorbike guy who was able to take us all the way to Bahn, and then to the immigration checkpoint where I FINALLY got a 30-day stamp for my passport. Phew. After that, we reached Kahnplay, then ended at Duoplay. There was more water pump drama in town, which was probably just going to make people resent Milea because she had a key to the pump. Back at her house, we talked about my week of adventuring through Nimba without her, and how easy it is to make friends among other PCVs, even in different countries. We also laughed about how I was almost acting as a quasi therapist for her group, the traveling American to keep other Americans company and to have someone to have a fluent (American) English conversations with.

Covered in flour, as friends should be

Tune in next time when I get invited to attend a PC gardening workshop in Kakata!


AND, thanks to my dedicated Duoplay news wrangler, I have collected more delicious praise for the blog: