I don't have the first clue, I realize. I think I'm tough and I can go anywhere. I lived in Rwanda. I lived in Liberia. But I know nothing.
I was in college when I first read The Liberian Civil War and The Mask of Anarchy. I was devastated to read about this country I had grown up in, this place where I played house under the swingset with real fires and real rice cooking in tin cans that my Liberian friends could pick up off the fire in their hands but I couldn't because my hands were too soft and unused to the heat. I read these books and I didn't cry, because I didn't cry then, back before the hormonal changes of the mid-twenties (it's not puberty that makes you a weeping mess, it's the mid-twenties. trust me.). I wanted to know everything I could about Liberia. Every detail. I neglected my classes to read these books.
Then I went to Rwanda. I read Rwanda books, after a while. I read all day one day about the genocide, waiting for my truck to be fixed, and then I took a walk in the light of the setting sun and watched the smoke of cooking fires rising above Kigali's hills, above the streets I had just read about. The air and the reality revived me. It was ten years later, not 1994.
Today I'm writing about Liberia for a paper. I'm re-reading those college books. But I was just in Liberia a few months ago. In Monrovia, where I was so rarely as a child. I used to be able to read about a massacre in St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Sinkor and it was just a story. A story about Liberia, yes. But a story.
But now I know these places. I was in that church compound this summer. I know people who attend there.
Spriggs-Payne Airport. When I was little, we took off from there to go up to Lofa County. This summer, I drove friends home down the roads behind that airport. I sat in a car there with my friend's son, waiting. The little guy and I bought ice cream from a push-cart. Perhaps the same ice cream that made me violently ill that night.
This paper is getting hard to write.
I was in college when I first read The Liberian Civil War and The Mask of Anarchy. I was devastated to read about this country I had grown up in, this place where I played house under the swingset with real fires and real rice cooking in tin cans that my Liberian friends could pick up off the fire in their hands but I couldn't because my hands were too soft and unused to the heat. I read these books and I didn't cry, because I didn't cry then, back before the hormonal changes of the mid-twenties (it's not puberty that makes you a weeping mess, it's the mid-twenties. trust me.). I wanted to know everything I could about Liberia. Every detail. I neglected my classes to read these books.
Then I went to Rwanda. I read Rwanda books, after a while. I read all day one day about the genocide, waiting for my truck to be fixed, and then I took a walk in the light of the setting sun and watched the smoke of cooking fires rising above Kigali's hills, above the streets I had just read about. The air and the reality revived me. It was ten years later, not 1994.
Today I'm writing about Liberia for a paper. I'm re-reading those college books. But I was just in Liberia a few months ago. In Monrovia, where I was so rarely as a child. I used to be able to read about a massacre in St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Sinkor and it was just a story. A story about Liberia, yes. But a story.
But now I know these places. I was in that church compound this summer. I know people who attend there.
Spriggs-Payne Airport. When I was little, we took off from there to go up to Lofa County. This summer, I drove friends home down the roads behind that airport. I sat in a car there with my friend's son, waiting. The little guy and I bought ice cream from a push-cart. Perhaps the same ice cream that made me violently ill that night.
This paper is getting hard to write.
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