still writing offline - silly internets!

29 June 2006

1027hrs

I’m really not sure I can stay awake for this day. Tooooooo tired. It’s worth it, though. I laughed harder last night than I have laughed in years. There were people here from another international organization that’s working with mine and one of them was telling stories about Peru. That doesn’t sound funny, but trust me, it was. There were hand motions. There were leanings over. We laughed until we couldn’t breathe. And then I pulled out my computer and showed a video I took last week of a contortionist who had his legs twisted up behind his arms and was walking around on his arms and, well, his torso I suppose it was, and then leaned back and started rubbing his own bottom in circular motions. This was in public. Children were present. The crowd went wild. The Peruvian guy watched it over and over and laughed until he cried actual tears.

Life in Monrovia is developing a rhythm. The power goes out at 1 am. It comes back at 5 am. Off at 8 am. On at 6 pm. On Wednesdays there are Lebanese meat pies at Mamba Point. We work on Saturday mornings. (I’m not over that yet, by the way.) Sunday afternoons, if all goes well, we head to the beach. And there is evening and there is morning.

On Tuesday night, I sat on a rock at the edge of the ocean and watched the waves crash against my rock and the ones next to it and around it and thought about how it is possible for life to come back in a circle like this: that in 2006 I would be sitting on a rock at the beach in Liberia after so many years away.

30 June 2006

0829 hrs

I’m amused by the fact that I don’t have to think about which clothes to wear each morning. Of course I have to think about what is going on at the office, but I never have to wonder whether it’s better to save the long-sleeved shirt for tomorrow when it might be colder. Because it won’t be colder. Tomorrow will be just about like today is and yesterday was. The only tiny difference is the rain. If it hasn’t rained in the last few hours, you know it because you are too hot by the time you get up to the gate at 8 o’clock in the morning.

I’m sitting out in front of our compound’s office just wishing that the wireless internet will suddenly come on, even though, since no one is in the office and the wireless router is gone, the chances are approximately zero. We’ve heard varying stories of where the wireless router went. First someone had taken it to his friend’s house for a day or two and it would be back soon. Then it had been taken into town to get fixed. Then they just stopped bothering with excuses and started shrugging. We suspect that it’s somewhere with everything else that has disappeared, lying somewhere in a little cache of “lost” items with C’s cell phone, the plate, the knife, the jar of jam, and the crackers that were left on the back porch and poof! Gone. The sad thing is that we no longer have them, so we can’t put them all into one place and make a diorama of them.

Ah, well. We still have the New Democrat with its Countdown to Power (27 days). That is souvenir enough. There might actually be some power in 27 days. Not out here far away where we live, but we saw workmen cutting down trees and putting up light poles (donated by Ghana even though Liberia is covered in trees) down Tubman Boulevard in Sinkor and over to the hospital.

0847 hrs. Still no one to open the office and give me internet. Still no ride. We were supposed to ready to be picked up at 8 am. More even than East Africa, Liberia seems to be a place where you wait and wait and wait only to be suddenly told to do something RIGHT NOW that you could have been done with already if only you hadn’t had to wait so long. Maybe this is partly because we are interns and everyone else is more important than us, so we wait for a ride for an hour but then can’t keep the ride waiting for even five minutes because someone more important is in the car.

And... gotta go. Car just got here.