Two Liberias

Life in Liberia is very calm and quiet. Everything happens at its own pace: at work, after work.

This is my third week here and I am already starting to know directions, places, and people. Life is definitely different from everything else I have known before. You find yourself listening to amazing life stories about war, courage and need and you can hardly belief that these people walked such a long way to get here.

The most amazing stories I’ve heard come from women. Women who lived and raised their children during the war in Liberia.  Women who hided in the bathroom with their babies, while people broke into their compounds and start shooting randomly to their neighbors. 

One woman told me that during the war it was not rare to get home after work and find strangers sleeping in her living room or bedroom. When I asked her: What did you do in that situation?  She said: “Nothing, you couldn’t ask questions at the time.”

Another woman was 6 years old when the war started. Her sister was 9. The parents sent the first girl to the US during the war. The second one had to remain in Liberia, because she didn’t have a passport. The reason why she didn’t have one was because the day her younger sister got her passport (before the war started and without knowing that she was going to need it later) she had the flu.

The girl that moved to the US was raised away from war, away from poverty and horror. She went to college and returned to Liberia three years ago to work for one of the international organizations that operate here. The second girl grew up in Liberia. Some days the only thing she had in the stomach was a cup of tea. She still lives in Liberia. She is unemployed and she resents her parents and her sister and stopped talking to them a while ago.  I could not stop thinking how life works. One single event, like having the flu when you are nine, can change your whole life. Being raised in a country instead of another can determine your opportunities in life.

In Liberia is not rare to find this kind of stories. Since the end of war and the election of President Johnson many Liberians, who grew up abroad, started to come back to Liberia.  When you talk to them they tell you that they came back because Liberia was a safe place again, a country with new opportunities where they could actually have an impact. Nonetheless, you also hear them telling you that they never felt Americans and know they don’t feel Liberians. They have a different accent; generally they have a better economic situation and people don’t treat them as their equals: they overcharge them at the market or they don’t (or pretend they don’t) understand their accent in the streets as if they were foreigners.

You can easily notice the difference between the ones that stayed during war and the ones that left. From now and then you will still heat the ones that left complaining about the slow internet or the poor quality of infrastructure. The ones that stayed never complain. This is the best version of the country that they have seen in years.  However there is something they have in common: hope. Hope that the country will continue to do even better.

I have learned that there are two ways to look at this country. The easiest and more obvious one is based on the long way Liberia has yet to walk. The other one (the one I always forget when I get frustrated at work) is how far Liberia has got considering from where it is coming from.