Today is a public holiday in Liberia, Reunification Day, so I'm very happily bashing away on my laptop with my music on. We even have Pay TV here; a big luxury. I was surprised when I arrived to see this. The main thing it's good for is keeping up with world news, but it also has other benefits…so I also have the cricket on – England vs Sri Lanka!
I have been in the field for the last 2 weeks, and just came back yesterday. I went to Grand Kru county, a small coastal county in the south-east. Harper is our base in the neighbouring county of Maryland. The purpose of my trip was to do some hygiene promotion training and also to observe some health education training in the town of Garraway. Our health team train community health educators at each of the regional health clinics (which, incidentally, our WatHab program is responsible for building), whose role is to spread general health messages to the communities in which they live. The health training also covers some hygiene topics, which is the link between our programs. My hygiene promotion program involves training ICRC and Liberian Red Cross field officers, who then train community hygiene promoters. These hygiene promoters are members of community water committees responsible for the management and maintenance of the hand pumps and latrines that ICRC build. So I went along to observe the health training before undertaking my own program of training, to see how they do it and to make sure the messages are consistent between the two programs.
The training was in a coastal town called Grand Cess. It's a beautiful place but the people are still very poor and have a lack of knowledge of many issues including hygiene (ie people still take a dump on the beach instead of using the latrines we build them, even if its further to walk!). I held a workshop over three days, with community meetings at night for the field officers to test what they have learnt during the day. The first meeting wasn't too successful because the field officers didn't have a good enough idea or skills of how to run a meeting, but after the second day and some more focused sessions on running a community meeting, the second meeting was great. About 50 adults and kids attended, and one of the field officers translated the messages into Kru, the local dialect. This was particularly important for the kids and the women to be involved. Unfortunately it is difficult to involve the women because by the time they return from working in the fields, cook their family's dinner, clean the house, wash the kids and themselves, its about 8 or 9 at night. While the men work hard here, they don't work half as hard as the women do! Often they are sitting around and are therefore most available for community meetings. Involving the women in hygiene education is particularly important because they are almost solely responsible for any activities involving hygiene. Anyway, involving the kids in the meeting was also important, but they also made the meeting fun and could answer a lot of the questions better than the adults! We taught them a hand washing song which went down a treat, especially when we got the kids to translate it into Kru. So overall the meeting was a success.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to complete the third day of my training on Thursday. The ICRC expat with which I was supposed to be travelling back to Harper was ill and didn't come to Grand Kru, so his assistant came instead and wanted to leave early on Thursday morning. Because we didn't want to risk missing the plane on Friday, which arrives around midday, I left with the assistant. I was very disappointed because it meant I had to leave the training before it had finished, so I didn't get to complete it, go to the third community meeting, or do any evaluation of its success (or otherwise!). So this week I will evaluate it based on feedback from the delegate and field officers, for development and implementation in Lofa county.
Voinjama is the capital of Lofa, and I go there again next week. It will be interesting to see how to apply the hygiene promotion program here because the context is very different. Lofa is a large county that was greatly affected by the war, has a huge number of NGOs working in it, many of them also building wells and pumps, and thousands of displaced people returning from neighbouring countries to rebuild their homes and lives. Many of them have been living in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps where they had many things provided for them and the general attitude there seems to be that the NGOs and ICRC will provide everything for them for little or no input from them. Compared this to Grand Kru; a small coastal county which was largely unaffected by the war, only a few hundred displaced people and no other NGOs working there besides ICRC. The people here are more willing to participate in the sustainability of their villages and are not used to having everything provided for them. Given the scale and context, I think Grand Kru will be easier and more successful to implement responsibility and get input from communities for their water infrastructure. Lofa will be a very interesting exercise! So I'm keen to see how it will work, as well as being a bit apprehensive.
And then the travel sagas associated with Harper continue. After leaving Grand Cess on Thursday and travelling to Harper (a 4 hour journey), I found out that the plane had mechanical difficulties and was grounded in Freetown (Sierra Leone). So once again the plane didn't land in Harper. To avoid changing plans made a few weeks ago, and because the residence in Harper was full, we jumped in the land cruiser very early Friday morning for the first leg of a long journey back to Monrovia. 9 hours later and we arrived in Zwedru, our overnight stop. We even got to pull a van out of a big mudhole on the way. The roads are terrible already, and the rainy season hasn't even properly started yet! 11 hours of driving on Saturday and I was back in Monrovia. Nothing like taking the long route! So I'm happy it’s a public holiday today because I spent all of Saturday in the car. Thank goodness that the last 100km is paved road – although it has many potholes! Reaching 100km/h was a strange experience.
So enough about work. Since I wrote last I have been getting to know Monrovia better. I have spent a lot of time watching basketball down at the Sports Commission (the national stadium, which is really an open air concrete basketball court!), and going out to practice with a team that is already in the finals, and given I have been away in Harper, I won't get to play. In fact they play one of their finals today. The men's team I have been supporting, the Uhuru Kings, were put out of the finals but appealed against their loss because their opponents had an illegal player. So tonight they are replaying their last play-off game in a last-ditch attempt to make the finals. I really hope they win!
I have become familiar with the local market down the road which sells a lot of fish, peppers, potato greens, onions, salt, chili etc – all the local stuff you don't find in the supermarkets here. I have also become friends with two little girls and their mother that own a stall in the market, so each Saturday I go down there and hang out with them. They have invited me back to their house a few times and even cooked me lunch one day. I am going to learn how to cook proper Liberian food – which is basically potato greens and fish in palm oil sauce with rice. I have been living on it for the past two weeks in Grand Kru actually! I don't know how much more of it I can eat, but it’s the staple food for people here and while its very oily, its delicious.
While I was in Harper they opened a new nightclub called Black + White. The idea of a nightclub in a small place like Harper is quite amusing but it was a good club apart from the music being too slow…more for slow dancing than nightclubbing but maybe we were just there at the wrong time! The night we were there it was absolutely pissing down with rain, more water than I have ever seen falling out of the sky at once! The rainy season is here, and soon we will be experiencing lots of it on a regular basis. I have only seen it rain heavily once here in Monrovia, and it put the place into chaos; the street drainage system is clogged with rubbish so the water has nowhere to go, and many of the streets have huge potholes. Hence they turn into ginormous swimming pools.
There are lots of good places for entertainment here. The two main local clubs here in Monrovia are called Zanzibar and Pepper Bush. They're both quite good, although US$10 entry to Pepper Bush is a bit steep! There are many popular ex-pat hangouts, although I prefer going where the locals do. ICRC is quite an insular organisation, and people tend to just hang out with other expats. This is good, as I have met lots of great people, but it also means you don't really get to know Liberian life as well as you could.
So, I've been spending more time doing 'local' things, its more interesting and fun, and there's always someone to talk to. Unfortunately it also means you regularly get asked for money to pay for school fees or food, your phone number, marital status ... For those that want to know, I am happily married in Australia with 2 kids.
Yesterday I spent the afternoon playing 8-ball in the Monte Carlo bar, which has a pokies room and big arcade games room. I was the only female in there, not to mention the only white person, but I would rather this than a room full of expats. Its funny what exists here, you just have to look to find it; many places aren't obvious. If I didn't get told about the basketball stadium I wouldn't have known it was there; there is also a cinema here and it shows only Bollywood films, which are great.
The Government recently evicted all of the market stalls from the Waterside market area because they are trying to clean up the city. Because the stalls were only temporary, people also weren't paying for the use of the land. Now they have to set up in designated areas, so hundreds of new wooden stands are being built. I can't wait until they are finished because shopping in the markets here is great. You can buy anything and everything and there's nothing like spending a Saturday morning rifling through clothes, shoes, and other stuff to find some good bargains. Just like op-shopping at home J
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