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.