In Postwar Liberia, Paradise Amid the Poverty: Feelings Mixed as Aid Workers Live Well

Finally someone is writing about the dichotomy of the NGO world...

Sushi chefs work at the Barracuda Bar, one of Liberia's newest hot spots for foreign aid workers. "They drive the best of car, go to the best of entertainment center," says one Liberian. (By Craig Timberg -- The Washington Post)

By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, May 30, 2008; Page A01

MONROVIA, Liberia -- The second sushi bar to open in ragged postwar Liberia did not settle for having its chefs wear simple T-shirts, or for serving $25 worth of sliced fish on plain white plates.

Instead, the Barracuda Bar -- the new favorite hangout of ambassadors, U.N. officials and legions of aid workers whose shiny white SUVs jam the parking lot most nights -- opted to dress its staff in Japanese-style robes and red bandannas. Bigger orders of salmon and yellowtail arrived not on flatware but on little wooden sushi boats. Lobsters languished sullenly in a tank near the door, waving their antennae as customers walked by.

As this impoverished country climbs its way back from 13 years of civil war with the tiniest of steps, a boom is underway in the industries that cater to the rarified tastes of thousands of mostly European and U.S. expatriates who have come to help since peace arrived in 2003. The increasingly visible splendors available to this relatively wealthy group have left some Liberians wondering whether the foreigners are here to serve the nation or themselves.

"They drive the best of car, go to the best of entertainment center," said Allen Weedor, 42, the Liberian manager of a modest bar in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of town. "You can't really see what they've done."

The offices for aid groups and U.N. agencies that line major thoroughfares evoke as much discontent as gratitude in Monrovia, the capital. Their signature white trucks offer vivid contrasts when most vehicles on the road are worn-out old coupes with broken windshields, torn upholstery and thoroughly battered bodies that bespeak the troubled times Liberia has endured.

A U.N.-maintained list from 2005, the most recent available, catalogued more than 600 nongovernmental organizations, donor groups and agencies of the world body working in Liberia. Their missions included tending to nearly every facet of national life: food, health, education, forestry, farming, religion and rebuilding the electrical grid, water systems and roads.

Yet whatever the accomplishments of these groups, Liberians say the benefits of this massive international investment are far more obvious in the parts of town inhabited by the foreigners themselves. The number of swimming pools is burgeoning. Casinos are opening. Beach-side bars are springing up and sprucing up.

At the Abi-Jaoudi supermarket, ground coffee can be bought from Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks and Seattle's Best. There are eight types of Chi-Chi's salsa and 90 types of cereal, including six varieties of Special K. Pop-Tart lovers have 16 options; if they can't decide between strawberry and blueberry, they can get a "Splitz" Pop-Tart, with both.

A bag of these expensive imports can easily exceed the monthly salary of a Liberian lucky enough to have a job. A dinner for two at either of the sushi bars is much more -- especially if the meal is augmented with a few $8 caipirinhas or mojitos, as is possible at the Living Room, Monrovia's original, and somewhat less fancy, sushi spot.

There is another side to aid work in Liberia. Eliane Van De Velde, 35, a Belgian public information officer for the U.N. mission here, now on maternity leave, said many Westerners leave behind their families to work in a place that often is dangerous and disorienting.

"There are a lot of people who are there because they love the work," Van De Velde said.

Yet over several years in Liberia, Van De Velde said, she witnessed the most urgent needs ease as the aid flow grew sharply. As the money poured in, so did the amenities geared toward Western tastes.

Nudes (I thought that would get your attention)

I held my room door open as someone waited in the hall while I fetched the money from my closet.

"Were there young guys in this room before you?" he asked.

What a strange question. It must have come from somewhere.

"No, I don't think so." I scanned the room in the direction he was looking.

Then my eyes landed on my open closet door with pictures stuck everywhere to it, including a nude. I laughed and explained that I had studied nude drawing and painting for 7 years as well as fashion design and liked the human form. The pictures were all mine.

Disclaimer #2

I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a lot of questions about life and the way we live it in this small world together. I am an observer and feel an urge to speak up when I see discrepancies. I feel we can learn from those that have insight (those who have been there longer than we). We can learn from being quiet, listening and watching. From being a humble guest in someone else’s home. I seek truth and love and these things need not be compromised for anything. I see no conflict of interest in choosing this. My weak point is often my negativity that can arise from being on a different page from everyone around me. I need to present things objectively and critically. It does make me nervous when complex issues are simplified, whitewashed or generally not fully exposed. I trust something more when I see all the sides, good and bad, clear and hazy. I want to understand how something works and sort it out for myself before buying into it. I will never make a great follower. To see my previous disclaimer CLICK HERE.

Quote: C.S. Lewis

"Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of pre-conceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?"

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Two Different View Points From Three Different Worlds

I like stories of first impressions or reactions. Here are two different viewpoints from 3 different worlds:

2 Ghanaian friends of mine who live on the Mercy Ship are shocked in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain). They can't believe it when they see westerners begging on the streets. The impression that we westerners leave is that we are all made of endless money.

A Canadian O.R. nurse comes to Liberia and adopts a 12 year old orphan she has formed a strong attachment to. She takes her back to Canada and watches in amazement as the young girl eats half of everything and throws the rest away. She turns on the shower and then does another job before getting in. I wonder what sort of wasteful impression (or reality) we westerners leave the world.

Two North American women hire a private taxi regularly in Monrovia. They refuse to pay private taxi fairs and continually insist on giving the driver public taxi prices (US$5 vs. US$.35) because they feel all Liberians are out to rip them off. I am not sure they are aware that gasoline prices are higher here than in their own country. They have him chauffeur them around for half a day stopping for lunch at a restaurant where they invite him to sit with them. They feel generous when they give him the parts of their sandwiches they can't finish & wonder why he speaks of needing more money to send his son to school when they feel he is obviously well paid for a Liberian.

Halo 3 in a War Torn Country

Sometimes I wonder what Liberians would think of our playing the video game, Halo 3, on board the ship.The situation becomes more complex when you consider the teenagers on board. I imagine they are the people who have the toughest time being squashed for years on a ship with 400 others. No where to escape or be on your own. No chance to get a job and earn money to do your own thing. And sheltered from the reality of what goes on outside along with the rest of the crew.

The situation becomes more complex when you consider that there are both hard core travellers that come on board and young 18 year olds who have never travelled before. The blanket rules seem to cover the more uninitiated but cause a somewhat stifling environment for the others. I suppose you have to cover your own butt as an organisation.

A Long Way Gone

A LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

New York City, 1998

My high school friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.

“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”

“Because there is a war.”

“Did you witness some of the fighting?”

“Everyone in the country did.”

“You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”

“Yes, all the time.”

“Cool.”

I smile a little.

“You should tell us about it sometime.”

“Yes, sometime.”

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life. The rebel army, known as the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.), attacked my town in the southern part of the country. I ran away, along paths and roads that were littered with dead bodies, some mutilated in ways so horrible that looking at them left a permanent scar on my memory. I ran for days, weeks and months, and I couldn’t believe that the simple and precious world I had known, where nights were celebrated with storytelling and dancing and mornings greeted with the singing of birds and cock crows, was now a place where only guns spoke and sometimes it seemed even the sun hesitated to shine. After I discovered that my parents and two brothers had been killed, I felt even more lost and worthless in a world that had become pregnant with fear and suspicion as neighbor turned against neighbor and child against parent. Surviving each passing minute was nothing short of a miracle. After almost a year of running, I, along with some friends I met along the way, arrived at an army base in the southeastern region. We thought we were now safe; little did we know what lay ahead.

This is how wars are fought now: by children, traumatized, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become the soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story: At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at his rehabilitation center, he learned how to forgive himself, to regain his humanity, and, finally, to heal.

Ex Child-Soldiers From Liberia Act Out War Trauma in Movie

Click here to see article on Google News (author not listed)

CANNES, France (AFP) — Former child-soldiers from Liberia act out the horror of one of Africa's most murderous recent conflicts in a new film on children forced to go to war, showing this week at the Cannes film festival."Johnny Mad Dog" by French film-maker Jean-Stephane Sauvaire is based on a novel by Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala, also from a part of Africa where children are given guns.
The film was selected by festival organisers to screen at its parallel Un Certain Regard section grouping movies that are more original or less mainstream than those competing for its top film prize.
"Violence in childhood is a subject that fascinates me," Sauvaire told AFP in an interview. "There is always violence during childhood but it can degenerate and become atrocity."
The 39-year-old film-maker, who in 2003 shot a documentary in Colombia involving teen violence in "Carlitos Medellin", this time chose fiction to shoot the parallel stories of 15-year-old rebel chief Johnny Mad Dog and 13-year-old Laokole, forced to flee the brutality of war.
While the country is not specified in the film, Sauvaire in fact travelled to Liberia where he first chose 15 children, all veterans of war, from 500 to 600 he met.
He then moved into a house in the Liberian capital Monrovia for a year with the children to gain their trust, explain the film, and help the then illiterate group to learn to act.
"I wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, so I needed to make it with children who had fought in battle, and in a country that had known war," he said.
"I didn't want to cheat with a subject that is too painful and violent to be caricatured," he added.
The children, he added, said films such as Hollywood's "Blood Diamond" had failed to encapsulate their war."In the first sequence, an attack in a village, I began to set up the scene but straight away they said 'No let us get set up, we know what to do'".
Sauvaire said he was wary of traumatising the children by re-opening old sores but that theatre was one of the methods used by specialist aid groups to help evacuate bad memories.
"The children changed during the year we spent together," he said. "It appeased them, they were more stable."
"It really became their film. I called them from Cannes and they said 'How's it going with our film?'"
Sauvaire has set up a foundation to continue to help the children -- www.jmdfoundation.org.
Last year, a movie by Nigerian director Newton Aduaka on blood diamonds and child soldiers, "Ezra", won the Golden Stallion at Africa's biggest filmfest in Burkina Faso.

Mercy 10

Mercy 10 refers to a well known phrase that circulates the ship referring to the 10 pounds one puts on while "in service". I have also heard Mercy 20 referred to. The cooks do almost too good a job in providing us with 3 buffets a day...unheard of in Liberia. Instead of fasting we are feasting.

Banksy

More social commentary from Banksy...

Banksy and the NGO Dilemma

I just came across these images by Banksy, the world's most famous and anonymous graffiti artist, who has in recent years broken into the world of high art. Celebrities and art collectors alike buy his work which fetches up to US$576,000.
Banksy's piece (above) represents the precise state of the Non Governmental Organizations (NGO's), how they operate, are funded, and the marketing scheme that leads them by the nose. Everything becomes a photo opportunity. Everything is a dramatic story if told just so. It must be aimed to tweak the heartstrings of the unconsciously guilt-ridden wealthy west. It must be told in a simple and somewhat trite manner. Please don’t include any complex irony that may complicate the objective or indicate true humanity. If all goes well the money should pour in. Is this compromising too much?

I instantly conjure up images of World Vision television ads. The background music has caused me to dislike “tear jerker” movies in their attempt to manipulate my emotions. Mine are manipulated easily (I score high as a Feeler in Myers Briggs). Nor will I ever look at the faces portrayed and believe that their overriding feelings are not embarrassment and intrusion.
I watched in embarrassment at the Mercy Ships screening day in Liberia. Crowds of people lined up before the sun came up, many with very visual physical deformities that, in a superstitious culture such as Liberia, is commonly believed to be a sign of a curse or an evil presence. Many hide away for their own safety. Mercy Ships with its boundless supply of excited and sometimes naive volunteers had a handful of amateur photographers who had procured themselves professional cameras and were exuberantly clicking away in the faces of people whose dignity should have been protected rather than exploited.

After the 2004 tsunami a Canadian news team did a follow up story on the international emergency aid and NGO’s that were sent to that part of the world for emergency relief efforts. They found that almost exclusively the aid was concentrated in prominent media covered areas. The organizations were heavily reliant on international exposure for funding and therefore exposure became the priority over the helping of the desperate. This particular news team went town-by-town to “unpopular” areas and found nothing had changed or been done there despite the millions contributed worldwide.

There was one exception. A Toronto Muslim society had sent a medical team that was operating with doctors and medics in the middle of nowhere. No one knew they were there except the people who benefited. The team was filled with doctors who could not practice in Canada due to the strict regulations on any medical persons trained outside of the country. I was mightily impressed. I assumed the society had raised the necessary money to send the team. In an era where Muslims are often vilified, it is so nice to see anyone humbly operating exclusively out of their own desires to help the needy.

Liberia: Kimmie Weeks Addresses U.S. Congress

The Inquirer (Monrovia), 19 May 2008, Posted to the web 19 May 2008. - Author unknown.
The World's renowned Liberian child rights activist, Kimmie Weeks, has warned the United States Congress that the escalation of prices of basic commodities and other staple food would undoubtedly cause a widespread political unrest in Africa which could derail years of progress towards development and stability. Kimmie Weeks raised the concern as he testified before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, May 13.

While speaking at the Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Kimmie Weeks detailed the difficulties already facing poverty stricken war-torn countries. He painted a picture for lawmakers of the entire nations in Africa without running water, electricity and more importantly where a growing number of people could not even afford to feed themselves. He lamented that "wars, corruption, and environmental degradation cause poverty to the extreme that mothers watch their babies die and can absolutely do nothing about it."

He detailed, how hard it was for the world's poor right now and painted a vivid image of the struggle a majority of the world's people face to live from one day to the next. Speaking extensively about problems facing his native Liberia, Kimmie Weeks noted that more than half of the Liberian population was living far below the international poverty line. "It's already difficult for these people to come up with the $26 to buy a bag of rice to feed their families. What do you think will happen when those people go to the store tomorrow and find that the price of their staple food has more than doubled to $50 or $60.?"Weeks asked.

Weeks predicted that if food prices continue to soar and if food shortages start to become more widespread, turmoil and civil wars would break out in capitals across Africa. Kimmie Weeks noted that outbreaks of turmoil would prove disastrous in efforts to reduce the number of children participating in armed conflicts. He observed: "Children are recruited in every African conflict. If wars breakout, we're guaranteed to see a traumatic increase in child soldiers, human trafficking, and rampant sexual exploitation."

Weeks admonished American lawmakers to begin to take preemptive strikes against global crises due to food shortages. He called for increase in US aid not only in terms of providing food aid, but to provide seeds, technology and know-how to help African farmers to become self sufficient. He said: "If there is ever a need for a preemptive strike, it should be a preemptive humanitarian strike. It should be one that acts now to prevent millions of people from dying in the streets of African capitals from hunger and disease."

Kimmie Weeks used the hearing to discuss issues around the use of children in armed conflicts, the difficulties surrounding rehabilitation of child soldiers, as well as the trafficking of women and children in conflict areas. His panel included Benjamin Skinner author of "A Crime so Monstrous".

Mercy Colour

From the galley salads section...

Look-Alikes: Spongy Sweets

Licorice All Sorts Candy & a package of sponges.

Liberia Bans Food Exports to Tackle Food Crisis

(RTTNews) - In the latest attempt by Africa's poorest countries to fight a food crisis sparked by a worldwide rise in prices, Liberia banned all food exports Monday, to prevent profiteers from taking advantage of its relatively cheap rice prices by selling the grain to neighboring countries with higher prices.

Rice is a staple food in many countries in West Africa, where the high cost has hit the poor people hard as they have to resort to importing. In Liberia, which is recovering from war, the price increase has put yet another obstacle in the way of economic recovery, as rice is already in short supply in Liberia.

The ban on export applies to commercial foodstuffs also, Commerce Minister Frances Johnson Morris said. Liberia also dropped all import duties on farming tools to promote production.

The government said it is launching a campaign to urge Liberians to eat alternative food products such as yams, cassava, and plantains to reduce consumption of rice.

Although Liberia heavily depends on imported rice, dealers from neighboring countries have been buying up sacks of rice on Liberia's market to resell in countries like Guinea, where it is more expensive.

Mercy Motto

"All [humans] are equal, but some [humans] are more equal than others."

-butchered quote from Animal Farm by George Orwell

Mercy Trap