29 April 2010

Dear Friends,

My friends Raj, Justin, and Ana left a few days ago for the US via Monrovia and then Europe (if the Icelandic volcano ash covering all of Europe cleared up). I was sad but am looking forward to hanging out with people in Zwedru over the next month. The people here, both the ex-pats and the Liberians, have been so nice to us so quickly. I'm lucky to have met so many nice people in my life. A few weekends ago, Raj said to me, Wouldn't it be great, if in a few years time, when people ask how we achieved our goals, we could say, "We just hung out a lot"? He made me laugh, but he reminded me that I do like to hang out.

Last week, a group of us went to visit the farm that Philip's support group for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs) has started. It was a ten minute drive out of town, on the dirt road to Monrovia. We got out of the car and met some of his family, then walked five minutes through the forest until we reached a clear cut area. The farm is very new; there are some parts that are still being cleared. They are slashing and burning in order to make farm land. I've heard that that's not a sustainable way to farm because so many of the nutrients are burnt away, but Philip said the land is actually quite rich. In general, the farming here is done entirely by hand, the clearing, the planting, the weeding, the fertilizing, the harvesting, and it's pretty much subsistence, as evidenced by how quickly food runs out in the market and how hard it is to get anyone to sell you their fruit. (A British NGO worker I met from Grand Kru, a place so remote that it makes Zwedru look like a bustling metropolis, told me that the concept of market—even barter—is so fragile there that it's hard to get food sometimes. People just don't want to give you what they have. This disinterest in trade boggled my Wal-martized mind, of course.)

A few days later, Philip asked me about farming in the US, and I described what little I've learned of industrial farming from driving by big farms: huge machines that dig and plant and water and harvest; farmland in California, where desert and saline soil is transformed into arable land through irrigation and piping water hundreds of miles from the mountains; the powerful agriculture lobby and how our government subsidizes agriculture and reduces the economic risk involved in farming. He liked the idea of a company, which is what he said his dream was for the PLWHA farm. He was curious about livestock, so I told him what (again, little) I know about factory farms and how we give our animals hormone injections and prophylactic antibiotics and produce huge amounts of food, surplus even. As we spoke, Zwedru's only tractor happened to drive by us. Philip said it was owned by that one rubber farmer that my neighbor told me about a few weeks ago, and only used to haul large loads around town, not actually for farming because, as far as he knew, no one had the tilling attachments that you drag behind it. Sounded a lot like the hospital equipment situation. I have a couple of friends who know more about farming than I. I wonder if they have any suggestions for online (or other) resources for Philip and his friends. They are hungry for knowledge about farming.

In some ways, I imagine Zwedru is like many other places in the world: there is a lack of resources and knowledge and education and functioning systems to give people opportunities to grow and develop. However, there is also a lack of resources here that is uniquely due to the recent history of conflict. In talking to people around town-—the drivers and security guards and hospital staff and Tiyatien staff and members-—it seems like everyone lost someone in the war. I've talked to several adults in their twenties and thirties, including some of the Tiyatien staff, who lost both of their parents in the war, when they were teenagers or younger even. (Locals darkly joke about the NGO Save the Children: they call it “Save the Children, Kill the Parents.”) In addition to the overwhelming emotional devastation, it's staggering to think about the loss of knowledge and tradition that comes with that loss of a generation. There are definitely no old institutions, like schools or universities here to pass knowledge and opportunity and stability. It's hard not to compare it to Erfurt, Germany, the small town that I spent a day in a month ago, on my way here. My friend's family showed me the town's sights, which included one of the oldest universities in Germany; it had been functioning for 600 years or so! There are not even many old people here, and by old, I mean older than 50. While you do find the odd outlier here and there (Kerry's oldest Liberian patient was 98), it's pretty unusual to see white hair on people's heads. Life expectancy here is 45.7 years, vs. 82.6 years in Japan vs. 78.2 years in the US. A lot of that 45.7 is due to war casualties, but a lot is due to poor healthcare and infrastructure. I entered some data in my first week here on the names and ages of the HIV patients who have died since August 2009, and they, too, contribute to the low numbers: they were in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, with a few children under 5.

Ana said a few days ago that prior to 1994, no one lived in Zwedru. People fled in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, and some even farther afield to Nigeria, Congo, South Africa. Some, like Raj's family, went to Sierra Leone or the US. The largest concentrations of Liberians in the US are in Washington DC, Maryland, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, many actually in Worcester, where I've been living for the past four years. In some part, the people who are repatriating are reinventing their society.

When we were in Monrovia, Raj and I ran into a friend from public health school who just started a job to strengthen the health sector. He has worked in Afghanistan, and he said that he had a soft spot in his heart for post-conflict areas because of the potential for change. After a few weeks here, I can see what he means. There are a lot of Liberians like Raj, who fled as children or young adults, who have come home to help rebuild. In the airport on the way over, we met and hung out with a guy named Kimmie Weeks, who has started a group called Youth Action International, which works to disarm children and improve opportunities for them. He is in his late twenties and got his education in private schools in the US. He splits his time between the US, Uganda, here, and Sierra Leone, all places with ex-child combatants. And in Monrovia, we met a minister at the Ministry of Health who told us that he returned from a comfortable life in Minnesota because Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson asked him to return and contribute when she was running for president. He said, she won, how could I not return? There is a lot of love in these repatriates for their work.

Okay, signing off from my perch in Zwedru. Next time, I'll tell you about the PLWHA support group and the Zwedru Women United for Change meetings that I went to last weekend. The latest on the fruit front, for those interested in the amount of fiber my GI tract is getting, is that Kerry gave me a whole pineapple and papaya yesterday. I felt like a rich woman. They were sun-ripened (unlike the tropical fruit we get at home) and so so good.

Good night,
Roona :)