back in London

I'm back! After 24 hours of travel, I made it back to Balham. First there was the flight from Monrovia to Freetown in the Elysian prop jet. Which was held together by duct tape. Not joking. I wanted to take a picture, but I thought they wouldn't let me on the plane. Halfway through the flight there was this sound like when you're riding your bike and a plastic bag gets caught in your wheels...for 15 minutes. Good times! Then there was 11 hours in the airport. I got three different marriage proposals there and the passport security guy "Wasn't going to let me leave Sierra Leone" until I gave him my number. Sigh. Then there was a flight to Malaga, refueling, and then the flight to London. BMI really stepped it up - it was a great flight and I somehow actually managed to sleep! As soon as we stepped off the plane in London, the Brits got all excited (and I did a little too) because it was cold, windy, and drizzling. Haha, weird what you appreciate after being away.

Anyway, excellent trip. There was a lot I left out of the blog, so if you want to hear more, I have lots of stories! Thanks for reading along!

finishing up

Total whirlwind last week in Monrovia. First I got documents (yay!). Although it was totally last minute, this turned out to be a real success. The majority of what they have here is deeds and wills because of land rights disputes, but I’m sure that will be useful somehow. I apparently looked at the only documents they have from my time period – the rest were destroyed in the war or exist in the US. Looks like I’ll be spending lots of time in Indiana, Massachusetts, Chicago, and DC in the spring.

Then yesterday I went to confirm my flights and found out they were rescheduled to Monday so I’m not spending next week in Sierra Leone, but back in England. And since I’m leaving sooner than expected, I’m having my leaving party tonight at the Living Room – Monrovia’s best sushi restaurant/lounge. I can’t believe how long I’ve been away. Freetown seems like ages ago; the conference at Hull was only 2 months ago!

Anyway, since I’ll obviously be missing warm weather, the sun, beaches, good music, and cheap beer, I thought I’d list some things I am looking forward to about being back in the UK and US:

Jeans
Refrigerator
Cooking/baking
Fast internet connection
Running
Real coffee and Milk (not powdered creamer)
Thanksgiving
Christmas music
Sweaters
Family and Friends!!

Archives!

I got documents! From my time period! I'm so glad this trip wasn't a waste. Going through my photos from these archives is going to be...time consuming, to say the least. They seemed to be from several different books of deeds, indentures, letters, and other miscellaneous pages. Figuring out what's what is going to be a major ordeal. As is figuring out how to cite them when I don't know what they are....Oh well - a problem for another day. For now, I'm just excited!

analogies

And I still haven't seen any archives. They're getting closer though - yesterday they had some 1870s stuff for me....So, since I have all this free time not researching, here are some thoughts on Sierra Leone and Liberia. Those of you who know me know that I'm a huge fan of analogies, particularly historical analogies. For example, I say things like "Worcestor Mass. reminds me of the 1950s" or "the British Empire is to the Greek Empire as the French Empire is to the Roman Empire" or "George W. Bush is to James Buchanan as Barack Obama is to Abraham Lincoln." Yeah, I'm a dork. While the following analogies may appear controversial because of the problems of imperialism/decolonisation/postcolonial theory, please don't read too much into it. I'm just throwing an idea out there to help people visualize these places (yeah, I know, travel literature blah blah imperialism blah blah Foucault); I know it’s unpopular (and rightly so) to compare modern developing countries to past states of Western society because it implies some kind of linear, progressive development which places the developing country at a lower point. However, I think it's just as important to remember that "developed" and "developing" countries are not some permanent state of higher and lower order: the places we think of as the most developed now went through many of the same things seen here (sometimes very recently) and many of the assumed bastions of Western Civilization were no more "developed" than places we consider developing today. [If the Egyptians could build the pyramids without telephones, why can't we assume great things from countries without landlines? If Shakespeare could write sonnets in a London sinking into the mud during a plague that we can cure now, does that make him backwards?] Similarly, some countries that have boasted the most advanced world civilizations in their time are now classed as "developing." The point being, these analogies are for fun because I'm bored and have no archives, but lumping countries into two categories (whether they're "developing/developed" or "third world/first world") may have the effect of making impressions of the world generic and not specific to the atmosphere, the people, the history, and the current state of a particular country. These analogies are just based on my impressions of the atmosphere of these places and my fondness for historical analogy.

I have to say that from what I’ve read – both historically and fictionally – Freetown is most aptly described in historical analogy to ancient Rome in the years of the Republic. That is, hilly, winding streets, multi-storey wooden tenement houses, street vendors selling fast food, candle-lit pathways, thriving entrepreneurial culture, popular engagement in politics, intrigue amongst government and businessmen, a recent civil war, huge mansions for the political elite up on the hills... If you can picture that then you can probably picture Freetown by adding a whole lot of cars and okado (motorbike taxis), cell phones, and telephone/power cables.

Then I came to Monrovia and all I can think of is the Old West. For example, Randall Street is this wide, straight, potholed road, with built up sidewalks just like in old west towns, and these storefronts that are like glassfronted warehouses selling furniture and building supplies and groceries along long counters. Monrovians live in these homestead-type situations where they cluster houses together, sometimes with one on the main road, but mostly in what looks to us like the middle of the block, with laundry strung out between the buildings. In Sinkor (where I'm staying) a few of the fire ravaged buildings from the war are now home to impromptu carpentry workshops. But right next to them there will be a really new fancy building constructed to house, for example, the Great Wall Chinese Restaurant. Maybe it's the post-civil war feeling here too that makes me think of the post-civil war atmosphere in the US. Maybe it's the Chinese road building contracts (Union-Pacific Railroad?) or maybe it just still has that leftover American frontier feeling.

Sorry if this post offends anyone.

archive trouble

Oh boy. On Friday I went to the archives, as planned. Unfortunately, when I got there, they had nothing for me. They showed me some documents from the 1940s and 1950s. They complained that they needed money to do the search. I told them that I didn't want to give them any unless I knew that this stuff actually existed in the country. After some negotiating, we came to a compromise: I would pay them the fee to search for 4 documents and I would come back on Monday afternoon to see those 4 documents. If they existed I'd pay the rest of the fee, and if they didn't, then....well....not really sure. Here's the thing though: they were looking at typed looseleaf documents, at which point I realized that they don't even know what they're looking for. Of course it's taking them awhile: the typewriter wasn't even invented during the 1820s-1840s! So I had to tell them I only wanted handwritten documents, usually found in bound volumes. Fingers crossed that tomorrow is more successful.....

Thanksgiving

Happy Liberian Thanksgiving!!!

The Kenyans designated today a national holiday to celebrate Obama's victory; the Liberians already had one! I'm using the day to catch up on old episodes of The West Wing (remembering what a liberal president is like) and going to the beach. Tomorrow I'm finally allowed in the archives, so I'm enjoying the last day of this unexpected vacation before I get back to photographing thousands of 19th century documents.

Oh, and I learned how to make pasta in a kettle, so no Cup O Soup Thanksgiving dinner for me!

the election

I spend a good 3 hours a day with CNN on, either in the breakfast room at the hotel or in my room when I'm working there. It's so funny, because in Freetown I had essentially no news on the election (except snipets when BBC World Service felt like teasing me) and now I'm totally inundated with it. And, while I was still following it to some extent there, I wasn't up on the hourly changes. It's totally addictive once you have 24-hour news, though. Which is silly, because things do not change that fast! So I end up watching the same stories, same clips, over and over again. (Now I really understand the Daily Show). The problem with this is that I feel really powerless! I wish I was out there campaigning, I wish I could vote in person, I wish I could make a difference in these crucial last days to help Obama win.

But then I see people on TV shivering in the cold and rain in voting lines or campaign rallies and I go to the beach and feel a little better....there are some positives to absentee balloting!

archives

So I got denied at the Executive Mansion archives. Harsh. There was a fire at the mansion in 2006, which many viewed as an assassination attempt because the president was in the building at the time. Because of security reasons, then, (and I think they're not in the best condition, having survived a fire...) they don't let the public view them. Still, I think it's a little bit silly since what's the point of having archives if you can't look at them? But it hasn't all been dead ends: I found the National Archives building downtown yesterday and put in a request there, so I should finally have something to look at by Thursday next week. In the meantime, I've been exploring Monrovia (the grid system makes this really easy), watching a lot of CNN, sitting on the beach with my new friends, and actually doing a lot of work. I still have about 7,500 photographs of documents from Freetown to go through, so no shortage of work!

contrasts and comparisons

So, Monrovia. It’s funny because in some ways it reminds me of how I felt going to China right after Jordan: because there were some conveniences that I had really missed, it seems uber-developed. There are really well-stocked supermarkets with more American food than is available in the UK (they run cheaper than London though! JIF peanut butter is ~$4.50 here and Skippy is ~$8 in Hampstead). Internet service and mobile phone coverage are better. The businesses in the downtown/city center are all in actual shop fronts (service stations, supermarkets, pharmacies, restaurants, “department” stores), set back from the street, and there are parking spaces. There are working streetlights at night, though I understand that electricity more generally is harder to come by and people rely on generators. The infrastructure of the city seems to be pretty decent. Sidewalks are pretty much intact. There were still vendors set up on the sidewalks, but more like the Senegalese DVD and designer bag vendors in Europe than the semi-permanent structures in Freetown. However, I didn't really see any houses or anything - there are some high rise apartment blocks that looked similar to ones in King Tom, but I haven't seen the same kind of dense urban housing here - so I'm not sure of the state of living conditions in the city. Poverty levels are definitely really bad here, and the dual economy thing is weird (you know it's in Liberian $ when the price of peanut butter is $285! but do you know for sure that the pizza you had at lunch was US$11, or L$11? Since a cab ride is L$25, I kind of just work it out from there. The exchange rate is US$1=L$62). I would say that Monrovia reminds me more of Camden than of Freetown. I really like it here.

In Freetown, on the other hand, there were basically no working lights in much of the city – at night, all of the street vendors would light candles. And most shops operated out of one room wood/tin shacks that doubled as housing for the owner (you don’t go in them: they serve you “over the counter” at the door). While the downtown of Freetown was more urban, with high rises and the like, and a significant lower-middle class, they seemed to have a much bigger slum in the East End. They had a really big problem with refugees to Freetown from the interior during the war and none of them have gone back, which means that there are way too many people for the tiny amount of space between the ocean and the mountains.

And something that’s really interesting about both places: I think when people (myself included) picture poverty-stricken African countries, I don’t think anyone pictures there being an urban middle class. However, in both of these countries there is a professional class in the capital - professors, government civil servants, aid agency local workers, medium-size business owners, bank tellers. This is a really nice thing because it sort of gives you hope that it’s not all bad news and either extreme poverty or ridiculous opulence. I mean, the middle class here in West Africa has nowhere near the levels of consumer spending of the middle class of America or England, but (oh boy, here comes my dissertation topic) you can see the same middle class values translated throughout the world, particularly in the focus on education, morality, financial security, order, etc. Maybe this is just my internal optimist looking at the bright side, but I think it's important to see beyond the really obvious poverty because, while it's important to address, I think that just leaves people feeling hopeless about Africa.

why mosquitoes suck:

Because my room didn't come with a mosquito net, so I had to put up my own, but there was nothing to hang it on, so through a combination of band aids and suction cups (from my washing line) I managed to finagle something. Which then proceeded to fall down on me in the middle of the night and which I subsequently wrapped myself in. Fun. And totally ineffective at repelling the nasty buggers. I managed to escape Freetown without a single mosquito bite. Didn't even manage my first 24 hours here!

Also, I lost/misplaced the key to the lock I so cleverly put on my luggage....

On the plus side, I went to a restaurant called Golden Beach last night with some very cool people and had Club Beer and samosas. Yum! It's this gorgeous restaurant with tables on the sand and palm trees overhead and the ocean and sunset right there in front of you (imagine getting a really good spot at ocean city and then having palm shade and food served to you right there). Unfortunately to get down to the restaurant from Tubman Blvd I had to walk between a pet monkey on an unexpectedly long leash and a pet monkey (no leash) playing with a dog. ewww.

Monrovia

So, busy past couple of days! I spent the last week in Freetown working in my office at FBC (my first office was at a college I don't attend....), running errands (mostly at the bank), and doing lots of "last night" stuff: Paddy's/Atlantic/Sports Bar, lunch for the family (tuna pasta salad), and dinner with Edgar's parents at Eden. Overall, a really great last week!

Today I woke up at 5:30 to get the ferry to Lungi for my flight to Monrovia. The ferry was nowhere near as crazy as the Banjul-Barra ferry in the Gambia. Met a nice woman working for a UK-based NGO, so had someone to chat with on the ride and the flight here. We took a 19 passenger prop jet: old school. It only takes an hour to get here, and then it took another hour for the 19 of us to go through immigration and luggage collection.

Monrovia seems pretty cool. Very different from Freetown, which is hilly and has winding English roads. Liberian license plates look just like American ones, and with wider streets, crazy humidity, and the fact that it's totally flat - built on a marsh - it's kind of like being back in New Jersey! I'm staying in Sinkor, which is south on the Monrovia penninsula. Haven't been around to check things out yet, but I'll let you know when I do.

Tacugama Chimpanzee Reserve

Wow, what a cool place! Way up in the hills beyond Regent there’s this small, secluded chimp reserve where they rehabilitate and reintegrate into the wild 90-odd chimps rescued from “live trade” (as pets). It’s kind of like primate Jurassic Park – and one time, the chimps even escaped when the electric fence was down and killed one person. Seriously. Jurassic Park. With monkeys. I am not a fan of monkeys (freaky, people-wannabes) but even I was excited and impressed by the place. And they seem to have really dedicated staff and good facilities. During the war, one of the chimps and at least one of the staff died, but things seem to have improved since then. The place doesn’t have any government funding, but it is supported by numerous wildlife trusts, etc. If you ever find yourself in Freetown, definitely plan for a trip up there: the ride up through the mountain jungle alone is worth it (take a 4x4!). They even have a lodge where you can stay overnight.

Makeni

Went to Makeni yesterday. The trip there was pretty cool (although we did have to stop for a ½ hour mechanic trip…) through rice fields and palm-studded savannah. Everything is so green and lush in the rainy season. We went over Okroh Hill, where the British fought against the RUF in 2002. Makeni itself was the headquarters of “the rebels” (as they’re called in Freetown) and when we got there, Paul (Lama’s friend) showed me around the former HQ and RUF hospital. Very interesting. The town was pretty small, and clearly really poor, but the houses were nice and they have good food there. We went to the Apex, a new classy hotel and club opening there soon – I think Lama told them I was a guidebook writer or something because they let us just wander around and inspect unoccupied rooms and hang out at the not-completed poolside bar. I also made a bunch of little kid friends – they didn’t believe that the ‘Opito’ was real, so I had to convince them I’m not scary and then we played games like “high five” or “shaking hands” or “little kids pointing to a body part and giving the English name and then rolling on the floor laughing when I repeat it.” Good times. And I took lots of “snaps” today. My Krio is getting better too (understanding – not speaking!). And I saw the president’s motorcade coming in to the city as we left. Makeni is President Ernest Bai Koroma’s hometown. The road to Makeni is also an extremely nice, new two-lane highway, funded by the EU. Thank you EU!

On the way home we were chased the whole three hours by an amazing thunderstorm right at our backs. Finally, when we hit ridiculous Freetown traffic through the East End, it caught up with us. I did get to see the East End, though, which was exciting and something I wouldn’t do on my own during the day. The East End is a rougher part of town and was more damaged by the war, since that’s where the rebels came into the city. You can still see bullet holes in the three-storey, iron-work balconied apartment buildings (this part of town really looks like the Freetown in Blood Diamond, even though that movie wasn’t filmed here at all…) Freetown at night is such a different place. There are almost no working streetlights, and everyone seems to have a second (or very long first) job as a stall vendor at night. This usually entails selling chop (street food) or phone top-ups from a shack or a table outside illuminated with a kerosene lamp. The streets are just jammed with people, and although I find it intimidating because it’s harder to tell where you are at night, it also kind of feels like you’re in the middle of a really crowded block party.

Tomorrow: Tacugama Chimpanzee Reserve!

winding down

My research up at the archives is winding down now, with only about 5 books left to photograph. Now it's all about reading through the ten thousand pages I have stored on my computer. Fun!

Tomorrow I'm headed for Makeni, capital of the Northern Province. It's about 3 hours to the northeast of Freetown and supposedly the roads are pretty good. I'm only spending the day there (still hoping to get to River No. 2 beach on Saturday) but I'm still excited to be seeing other parts of the country. Apparently the drive there is through the savannah region of the country, primarily devoted to rice-growing. Looking forward to reporting back on this excursion on Saturday.

Meanwhile, plans for Monrovia are ticking along. Having a little trouble convincing the hotel there that I should be allowed a single room (I think they see me as a walking bank) but I'm hopeful that this will all work out. And I'm cooking dinner for my host family on the Saturday before I leave, which should be fun. Any suggestions for which kind of American/European food to cook? They seem totally skeptical and keep asking if I could just make jollof rice or groundnut soup. Just goes to show: to each his own....

a tourist day

So I finished up a big chunk of research at the archives yesterday, which left me today free to run errands downtown (and surreptitiously take some pictures!). I mailed my ballot - hope it gets there in time; changed some money; bought my plane tickets to Monrovia; had lunch in Crown Bakery and read Newsweek; and then went to the Sierra Leone Museum.

In a city that has very little tourism, where most non-Sierra Leoneans are with NGOs or the like, taking pictures of historic sites attracts an uncomfortable amount of attention. People seem confused when I'm walking around downtown too - I think they expect all white people to drive around in the white official NGO 4x4s. Even in the taxis I rarely see other white people. And apparently no one else does either, because everywhere I go it's "psssss - hey white girl!" It seems strange that there's any surprise at all - when going to Diaspora or Crown Bakery I run into tons of Europeans and Americans - but I suppose that's not what they see. So, in a way, I'm really glad to be staying with a local family, eating their food, learning Krio (very slowly). I think my impression of Monrovia will be really different because I'll be staying in a hotel there.

typical Freetown day

So this is my typical day in Freetown:
Get up around 7:30 (because it’s really hot in my room then as the sun comes in). Do ½ hour of yoga. Take a cold bucket shower (actually feels really good). Get dressed and pack my bag for the day. I leave for the college at about 9:15, 9:30. Getting to college consists of walking up the road to King Tom Bridge (I’m living in King Tom district, which is just west of central Freetown) where I get in a taxi headed for Circular Road. There are usually 3 other people in the taxi, or we pick people up on the way. You don’t tell the taxi where you want to go; you find a taxi that’s going where you’re headed. Then I get off at Model (pronounced Moe-del, even though it’s actually at the model school) where I catch a taxi up the hill to Fourah Bay College. The taxis up the hill usually cram 5 people in – 4 in the back, one up front – and then speed up this clearly very dangerous road up the mountain. Keep me in your prayers…

The archives open around 10, when Abu lets me in and I get to work photographing all the relevant material we found in the storage room on the first day. I listen to BBC World Service while I work and then at lunch time, Abu brings me a soda. I work until about 2 or 2:30.
At which point I’m free to run errands in town (have to take another taxi down the mountain) or go to Diaspora (a really nice cafe/wireless/library place) and get some coffee and use the toilet, since I’ve been drinking water and soda all day and there’s no working toilet at the building I’m in at the college. If I’m doing errands in town, I walk down the Circular Road from Model into town past Victoria Park (c. 1897) and along Siaka Stevens Street and catch a taxi back into King Tom or to Diaspora from the Cotton Tree. I really want to take pictures of downtown. It’s there that the closeness of the possibility of redevelopment stands out because the war damage isn't sooo bad there – parks, schools, nice roads, stop signs, street lights, air conditioned office buildings – just with a few too many people with no jobs…

After Diaspora, I come home around 5:30 and sit on the verandah with a coke or fanta and watch the sun set behind the mountains directly in front of me while the kids from Edwards and Prince of Wales secondary schools walk home. Then it’s dinner and then I escape to work in my room. Work means my article, reading theory, or copying pictures to my computer/recharging camera batteries/etc for the next day. And then I go to bed by 10. Not terribly exciting, but slightly more exciting than the British Library! I get to go to the beach, too, which is a major bonus!

tomorrow!

I'm leaving tomorrow! Finally feeling somewhat prepared. It helped that at the conference this weekend, most of the people had been to Freetown and plenty had helpful suggestions. I'll be staying at a B&B at least for the first week (see how it goes). Post more on Tuesday or Wednesday, once I've got my bearings!

creeping up on me

Just realized I'm leaving in less than two weeks. ahhh! I feel totally unprepared. When we went to the Gambia, we left a week after we arranged the trip and somehow that was okay. Having had so much time to plan and organize this trip has made it way more stressful because I feel like there's so much I could be doing that I haven't thought of. There isn't. Can't book anything online. Can't get in touch with any more people. It's just: pack, take out the uncomfortably large sum of money that I'll have to carry as my only resource for two months (not looking forward to that) and get on the plane. And hope that the hovercraft to Freetown is running - I am not taking the helicopter! In other words, it's time to leave things up to chance. Which of course I hate to do.

visa success!

Everyone should go to Liberia:

I showed up at the visa office at 1:00 (had to get photocopies and pick up my malarone prescription first...and then I got lost). The emabassy officials from upstairs were clearly visiting their consulate buddies on lunch break and the atmosphere was really...well...boisterous. They all came out to talk to me (because I had my Obama t-shirt on), were telling me jokes and about how. as dual citizens, they were definitely voting for him, etc. They told me to come back at 3:00, when it would be ready. That is some good turnaround.

At 3:00 I showed up and there were a couple of other guys there. One was a very shady Dutch(?) man about 65 years old. He talked like it was 1900 and we were off to a jolly romp in the colonies, what what. He seemed to be involved in some kind of business dealings (diamonds??) and was waiting until today to get his visa for his trip on...Friday. And I thought I did things last minute!! Well, my visa took longer than everyone else's to get ready (I was there for half an hour), and because they felt bad about it, they gave me a multiple entry visa instead! And then, half an hour later, when I was in the nurse's office getting rabies and cholera part II, they called to tell me I had left my yellow fever certificate. Which I would have figured out, but probably not in time.

Moral of the story: Liberians are way cool. I just hope my impression doesn't change once I get there...

update

oh, he got back to me nearly two weeks ago. on the day my phone died on Snowdon. and the voicemail just showed up on my phone! ridiculous. but at least we're making progress.

bureaucracy

I don't understand why the Sierra Leone embassy requires a letter of introduction for my visa when they know perfectly well it's impossible to get in touch with people in their country. Please write back to me, archive man. Maybe it's an elaborate conspiracy to get me down to the wire and force me to pay the additional charge for a same-day visa instead of the normal 7 working days. hmmm. clever.

In other news, I could be getting my visa for Liberia, which doesn't require a letter from someone in the country. But I keep putting it off. Because I'm writing my upgrade (so I tell myself). Tuesday. I will do it Tuesday. In between some last minute trips to the archives. And before my upgrade deadline of Thursday night.

I promise this blog will be more interesting at the end of the month. For now, it's an awesome tool for procrastination.

full of diseases

I'm not sure if this is a reaction to reading too many 'Hot Zone' type books when I was little (it is, it definitely is), but I'm getting every single vaccine I can get my hands on for this trip: Hepatitis A, Typhoid, Hepatitis B, Meningitis (4 strains), Tetanus, Diptheria, Polio, Cholera, Rabies, Yellow Fever, and of course, everyone's favorite anti-malarial, Malarone. This may sound like overkill, but if you spent all your time reading about 'The White Man's Grave' (nasty nickname for Sierra Leone and Liberia in the days before quinine), you might be a little cautious too...