yay for Liberia

So I found blogs about Liberia. Very very exciting. I used to read obsessively about Liberia when I was in college but then I graduated and went to work and after a while to work just happened to be in Rwanda and the two years there were some of the best and worst and most interesting and most difficult years of my life (so far) and my obsession transferred and last summer all I wanted was to get back to Rwanda. I am a go-backer. Some people leave and move on. I go back. I need to go back. I went back to Rwanda and now I want to go back to Liberia and be a big kid there instead of depending on other people to arrange everything for me.

This is the thing about Liberia. I remember it as a backdrop for being a kid: the beaches were for playing in the waves, the roads were for riding bikes, the markets were for buying marbles. And we lived in Buchanan which, let me just say, has to be one of the most boring second-biggest cities in the country in the entire world. Not that Kibuye, Rwanda was any better (although smaller, I think). And touristy. Ish. For Rwanda, anyway.

But when I read Kevin's blog, I realize that Liberia could actually be, well, fun. I realize that this is possibly akin to heresy in the hardy Protestant missionary community in which I experienced Liberia, but I'm excited. In my head, Liberia is something completely different from Rwanda or Uganda or Kenya or Tanzania. I think of East Africa as an entirely different, far more developed version of Africa. And it might be more developed - think sour gummy worms at Shop Rite and good dish soap at Uchumi, think movies at the Sarit Centre and chana batura at Garden City Mall, think movies twice in two days in Nairobi and BMWs in rows in Arusha, think perfect roads in Rwanda and upcoming wireless access everywhere in the country. But I'm getting the impression that Monrovia (where I've actually spent very few days of my life and in recent memory none except one horribly hot night at CHAL in 2000) might just have enough NGO and UN people (war does that) to have decent restaurants and a few things to do at night. The key is finding them. Not that decent restaurants and things to do at night make a country. Kibuye had pretty much nothing except the guesthouse and our NGO gatherings on Thursday nights and there were many nights when I lay on my couch reading by candlelight and thought, "What is there to DO here?" But I still loved it.

Just that Liberia might not really be all that different. Except hotter. The good restaurants in livinginliberia.com are all air-conditioned, unlike Rwanda where every single restuarant is open to the air and you have to bring warm sweatshirts or freeze (people say that it's not that cold, but trust me, it's cold. I often wore a long-sleeved shirt and a fleece and was painfully cold while around me the very strange people wore t-shirts).

Okay, story: the Kibuye Guesthouse was the only thing of note in Kibuye and now it's closed because the owner didn't have enough money to make the upgrades necessary to fit into the grand plan for tourism development in Kibuye. It's tragic, really. The little cabanas are going to be replaced by some horrible tall hotel with a pool. When the lake is swimmingly right there. But anyway. The Kibuye Guesthouse was classic in that it rarely had the stuff on the menu. Regular ordering food scenario:

Friend = "I'll have an omelette simple."

Server = "We have no eggs today."

F = "Okay, I'll have two beef brochettes."

S = "No beef today."

F = "Well, then, I'll have a salad."

S = "No salad today."

F = "Fine, a fillet of tilapia a l'ail."

Server goes off to kitchen. Forty-five minutes later the table next to us, which arrived after us, gets four plates of fish. Ten minutes after that, the server returns.

S = "No fish today."

F = "What do you have today?"

S = "We have goat brochettes."

F = "I'll have that. Anything. Anything edible. Bring the goat live and I'll eat it, I'm so hungry."

Meanwhile, I ordered grated carrots, chopped green peppers and chips (S = "No peppers today"), which arrived with undercooked chips (I sent back every plate of chips three to five times a week for a year before they started coming the right way) and carrots garnished with the green pepper they supposedly didn't have.