NEWSBYLIZZIE GOODFRIEND

With kind permission, reprinting below an email I recently received from Lizzie Goodfriend, who works in Liberia.

For the first "You Know You're In Liberia When" post, see here.

1. You learn, after much experimentation, that the frozen vegetable which tastes most like its fresh self is cauliflower. Brussels sprouts are a distant runner up, and corn comes in third place - though canned corn is better than frozen.

2. Baking becomes an exercise of commitment and diligence, particularly if you want to bake anything delicate, because your gas oven does not have a temperature control, and you therefore have to spend time opening and closing the door, as well as slightly turning the gas tank nozzle, to adjust the temperature appropriately, as dictated by the oven thermometer you keep inside. As you lament this fact, you watch the community members outside your window cooking on their coal stoves.

3. The slightest fatigue or smallest stomach ache has you wondering if you might have a parasite, but then you decide you're probably just overworked and underhydrated - though chances are you do, in fact, have a parasite that will go untreated for at least the next several months.

4. Again, after much experimentation, you discover that, for potholes less than 6 inches deep, the optimal speed at which to drive over them is 35-40 miles per hour. For anything deeper, it's best to keep it under 5.

5. It stops occuring to you as strange that your monthly internet subscription is twice what you pay for your housekeeper's monthly salary, and the cost of hosting a consultant for one day, including hotel and per diem fees, is more than you pay your drivers for one month.

7. Your moral mores about monogamy and fidelity begin to drift, the more you discuss with your male friends their many girlfriends and the more you and your girlfriends contemplate affairs with married men.

8. The country becomes panic-stricken when, along the way of the gossip chain, a public announcement meant to inform Monrovia residents to expect and prepare for the water supply being shut off briefly in order to clean the pipes (which included mention of collecting water in advance and being aware that rust might discolor it) distorts itself into a prophesy - which was widely believed - that God was mad at Liberia and thus, if everyone did not draw water at 3a.m. (the time varied, depending on the story teller) on one morning in some kind of atonement, the city's water would turn to blood.

9. No one seems to have noticed, until the very last minute, that there are not enough hotel rooms in-country, or at least in Monrovia, to house the 400 international women, and their entourages, who are expected in the country for a massive international conference that has been planned for over a year, and a week before the event, several VIPs remain without accomodation.

10. These things all strike you as somewhat amusing, but also eminently 'normal', and you are less and less convinced that you can remember how recipients outside the country might respond to them.

[Monrovia, Liberia - Photo from emadventures.org]

The piece below was written by Lizzie Goodfriend, who works for an NGO in Liberia, as part of this week's theme looking at rape as a weapon of war.

Here, Lizzie describes the end of a two-day meeting with rape survivors to discuss Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Read part 1 of this post here, and part 2 here.

I arrived  the morning of second day of the agenda, so I only heard some of the tales of these women's lives. I came in my African print dress with my broken Liberian English - which is itself a form of broken/pigeon American English - and I began by introducing myself to each of the four break-out groups.

"Women, oh, women!" I'd begin, the national refrain for calling women to attention. After they'd responded with the appropriate, "Women!" I'd launch in to my spiel. It went something along the lines of:

"Hello!" [to which everyone would respond "Hi!", another nationally recognized call to attention]

"My name Lizzie Goodfriend. Dat Elizabeth." [No one understands me when I say Lizzie so I wind up using Elizabeth a lot]

"But Elizabeth, dat the name my pa gave me. I too have a Kpelle name. Yeah-o.  I Yokweleh." [this inevitably elicited a number of pleased chortles, nearly all of the women in the room, regardless of tribe, spoke Kpelle]

"I from America, but since 7 months I been living in Liberia, in Monrovia. I work for an international organization that does work in different different countries to help the countries and the people deal with those bad bad things dat happened in the past, like those what happened in Liberia during the war."

"And my organization - we have a smaaaallllll office in Mamba Point, and we been working with Wongosol to help organize dis dialogue becau' we believe dat it very important for women to be involved in t'ings like the TRC and to help plan other processes dat might help to deal with de past. Are we wrong?" [This would get emphatic "Nos"]

"A'righ'", I'd continue, "so, t'ank you so much for traveling and being with us today. Please, you have anyt'ing, any little t'ing, you want to say to me or ask me, come to me and we can talk. I will be around and I look forward to meeting you all."

Liberian English is kind of fun once you start to get the hang of it. My attempts to use it proved a good start to a full day. Once we moved on to our  discussion topics the women had a lot to say. I was pleased and surprised by the level of participation. Our team now has a lot to digest and follow-up on.

Not wanting to end on a morose or heavy note, after dinner on the last night we ended with a dance party. The cafeteria at the hospital opened their dining hall to us and offered their speakers and tape deck for the festivities. We played popular African dance songs, and to my amused dismay the women kept calling for more 'Friday the Cellphone Man', a ridiculous Liberian musician. We danced around in a circle, shuffling to the rhythm in tandem, while two women at a time danced in earnest in the center. When one got tired she'd rejoin our revolving train and another women would take her place. I got pulled in to the middle quite early and thereafter quite often.

I can safely say, without too much arrogance, that my body has a better sense of rhythm than many white women who dance here. I will never be able to move my ass quite like Liberian women can, but at least I try and get closer than most. This, and the fact that I'd taken a West African dance class in college (so already a sense of some more traditional movements), meant that I surprised my African sisters that night. Mostly, I'd just copy whatever my partner was doing. However far from authentic, they were thrilled by my simultaneous crouching head-bobble, shoulder bounce and hip jerk. They could hardly believe it when I initiated a syncopated pop-n-lock fluid jerk along the solar plexus. When I cocked my shoulders, looked slightly over my shoulder, and just let my ass wiggle in double time as I slowly rotated in place, the crowd went crazy.

"You real African woman," they'd say, and I'd smile, knowing that I never would be, but also knowing that my small efforts to be more accommodating, along with their acknowledgments of said efforts, were pleasing to us both. I came back to Monrovia the next day motivated and energized. I was in desperate need of both.

[Photo from www.watchlist.org]

The piece below was written by Lizzie Goodfriend, who works for an NGO in Liberia, as part of this week's theme looking at rape as a weapon of war.

Here, Lizzie describes the work she's doing with rape survivors. Read part 1 of this post here, and part 3 here.

The consultation, our second of four regional 'dialogues', was a joint effort by the Women's NGO Secretariat of Liberia (Wongosol) and International Center for Transitional Justice, with support from UNIFEM and the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, to give women the space and opportunity to reflect on the process of an ongoing truth and reconciliation commission (TRC), to express how they think it could have been done better, to let us know what they hope comes out of the TRC, and to generally discuss how transitional justice, as a set of tools, can have meaning or use in their lives.

The goals of these meetings were twofold: 1) to be able to give the TRC input on how it can tailor its forthcoming recommendations to meet the needs of Liberian women; and 2) to identify additional areas in which we, as non-governmental organizations, can be doing more to meet those needs, now.

Over 130 women, some traveling more than two-days, came for the event, which we held at a nursing school in Gbarnga City (pronounced Bonga, sort of), the capital of Bong county. They came from near and far, rural and urban; they came with children and with backpacks. They were literate and non-lettered, teachers and farmers, mothers and grandmothers, town chiefs and day-laborers, Mandingo and Loma, Gio and Mano, Kpelle and Kissi. They came as strangers for a three-day event, and they left, I'd like to think, as something more akin to friends.

The exercise began on the first morning by offering women the chance to tell their stories. The more women came forward, the more there was to tell, and what had been planned as a half-day session wound up lasting well into the morning of the second day. "We need to talk it. Jus' let us talk" they replied when the facilitators dared try to move on with the agenda. It was messy and tearful. Some women got angry and had to go outside and talk to the counselors we had with us. Often, the story-telling had to be broken up with song and dance—anything to keep the mood from becoming too heavy. We were completely surprised by the outpouring, but ran with it nonetheless. The women thanked us afterwards.

And when the story-telling was over-when the women had settled into a tentative intimacy with each other, based not on time-spent but instead on horrors-shared—we asked them to tell us what they thought about truth-telling, memorialization, reparations, prosecutions, amnesties, institutional reform and reconciliation. They were outspoken and honest, simple but frank.

I was not one of the facilitators. My South African colleague and I, as the two non-Liberians present, left that task up our 12 Liberian colleagues who completed our team of 14.  Instead, I floated between the four break-out groups, talking when asked but otherwise content to let the process unfold as it needed, remaining a quiet background support. I offered feedback and suggestions during the team's twice-daily 'debriefs,' and my white skin gave the meeting, I think, an added air of importance.

It had taken me six months to get this project off the ground. Six months of regular meetings, and cooking lessons, and early evening drinks with many of the facilitators. Six months of constructive comments and edits on proposals for other projects. Six months of showing up at events in crowded, stuffy rooms that inevitably started at least an hour late. Six months of being present, of proving that I was there to listen and offer help when it was needed. In the end, it was they who came to me with the plan for this project. It was not, technically speaking, my idea. They came to me because they had become convinced of its importance, because I could offer a token portion of their budget, and because they thought that I would have something helpful to contribute. If I accomplish nothing else here, I think I could walk away at the end of this knowing that it was six months well spent.

[Part three will be posted tomorrow.]

[Bendu Johnson, the first woman in Liberia to prosecute her attacker under a recent rape law - Photo from AP]

The piece below was written by Lizzie Goodfriend, who works for an NGO in Liberia, as part of this week's theme looking at rape as a weapon of war.

Lizzie writes about working with Liberian rape survivors.

Lucy looks and acts like a crazy person. All of her front teeth are missing, and her lively, goofy personality is just a little too manic to feel natural. The facilitators of a workshop I recently took part in called her 'traumatized.' In 1990, rebel soldiers butchered (and I mean that literally) Lucy's husband while she was forced to watch. The group of seven men then took turns raping her for five hours. They beat her face with the butt of their rifles, smashing out eight teeth in the process, and then they left her for dead. Lucy has not had sexual intercourse in 19 years. Her uterus now hangs too low for sex to be anything other than painful, and besides that, she doesn't want a man to touch her ever again.
******

When Victoria encountered a group of five rebels in 1994 she was alone, and they gave her a choice. Let them beat her or let them rape her. She chose rape. They raped her and then they beat her anyway. Victoria has been partially blind in one eye ever since and still walks with a limp.
******

Elena spent several weeks as a conscripted porter for a rebel group in 2003. Not only was she forced into labor, she was also forced into sex. When Elena escaped, her boyfriend at the time turned her away. He said: "Why would I want you now when that thing I wanted from you those men spoiled?" Elena found another man with whom she now shares a one-year-old son. After she gave birth her ex-boyfriend said to her, "once that boy is walking, come to me and we will sit together." She did. Once he found out that, as a result of her rape, Elena 'menstruates' 2-3 times/month and requires regular clinic visits because of severe abdominal pain, he sent her away again.
******

These are some of the stories, and only small parts of them at that, of the women of Liberia's Bong, Lofa, and Nimba counties. These are not even the worst ones—those involve forced killing, forced cannibalism, forced acts of ritualism and carnage, and I cannot quite find the words in me to share those horrors with the delicacy, depravity, and dignity that they warrant.

Collectively, these are the stories Liberian women shared with me and with each other at a three-day consultation International Center for Transitional Justice has been helping to organize and support with a local partner organization, the Women's NGO Secretariat of Liberia (Wongosol). These are the stories of Liberia's civil war. These are the stories that break my heart. And yet, as I continue listening, when the tales get past the then and move on into the now, my heart becomes somewhat restored--stronger now, perhaps, for the scar tissue. These stories are tragic, but they are also inspirational.

Martha's youngest son of five, now aged 15, dreams of going to college. Martha has not yet told her son that he is not her son, that he is one of five orphaned children that she collected, some sitting besides the still-warm bodies of their dead parents, in her flight from Liberia to Cote D'Ivoire in 1994. Martha's birth children, two twin babies who she never got a chance to name, were eaten by ants when she left them on the forest floor--where she'd gone to give birth when rebels attacked her village in the middle of her labor--while she went to see if she could find help. Now that her other adopted children are out of the house and into households of their own, through her small-scale cassava farm, Martha has already saved enough money to pay for her son's first two semesters.

Viola will graduate from high school this year--despite being abducted at the age of three by a warring faction; despite not remembering her mother's name nor knowing how to get in touch with her family; and despite all the unspeakable things Viola was raised to do in ritualistic 'bush ceremonies'. Viola thinks she is 22, and her three-year-old daughter, Princess, already knows how to write the alphabet. She showed me while sitting on my lap during one of the sessions.

Frances plans to run for the position of Paramount Chief. She lost her husband, three children, mother, father, sister, and two brothers as a result of the war. With no family and no income she was destitute and 'crazed' until she became a community organizer, setting up a local community development association. Her community now has a rice field and a rock quarry. She thinks she will win the elections.

If these women prove anything, it is that humans are incomprehensibly resilient. "I have not lived your lives," I told them at the closing. "I have not suffered what you have suffered…But we are all connected, not so?" They agreed. "Your pain," I continued, "I feel it. And I also feel your strength."

[Read part two here, and part three here.]

[Photo from Merlin / www.herwigphoto.com]

With kind permission, reprinting below an email I recently received from Lizzie Goodfriend, who works in Liberia.

How to Know You're in Liberia:

1. It makes more sense, late on a Saturday night, to let your drunk friend throw-up all over the back of your car than it does to stop and pull over so he can puke out the door in the middle of the downtown area where excombatants tend to congregate.

2. The lights going out in a public restaurant causes neither a pause in the conversation nor a hesitation in your present action/movement.

3. On your way home from dinner, the contents of two of the two public trash collecting barrels on the side of the road, which read, "No Lighting of Fire" are on fire.

4. You can't pay your electricity bill at the electric company because when you go to their offices they cannot look up your account due to the fact that there is no electricity.

5. You can tell a drunk driver from a sober one by the fact that he's driving in a straight line, and not swerving - to avoid the potholes.

6. You start keeping a running tab of the bizarre things that happen here that remind you, without a doubt, that you are, indeed, in Liberia...

[Street scene in Monrovia, Liberia - Photo from dlc.dlib.indiana.edu]

Who could ask for more than Liberia-tales and rhyming doggerel on a quiet Saturday morning?  On to this morning's list:

- I realize that oftentimes this blog focuses on the deeply depressing, a parade of horribles from various unpleasant corners of the world.  Which sometimes obscures the fact that, on a day-to-day basis, humanitarian and development work is often more absurd than depressing, one long trip through the looking glass.

To that end, wanted to copy below a recent email from Lizzie Goodfriend, which captures that sense of absurdity far better than I could.  Lizzie - a friend from Afghanistan-days - is now working with an NGO in Liberia.

1. After its second break-in, one NGO decided to spend the money on a large, heavy, expensive safe, which took two men to maneuver. the weekend after it was installed, it was stolen. Someone, or someones, broke into the office again, threw the safe OUT THE WINDOW, packed it up, and took off with several thousand dollars-worth of cash, all the keys to their cars, and other important documents. They then decided to buy an even BIGGER safe and have it cemented into the floor. They explained their desire to cement the safe for security purposes and left the task to the hired workers. They returned to find that the safe had not only been cemented to the floor, but it had also been cemented shut. it now sits in the corner of their office--empty, unmoveable and unusable--affectionately referred to as  'Decoy.'

2. Once, the driver of a second NGO got into an accident with two taxis, and after an argument with the police, landed himself in jail. The organization had to pay $20 to get him out, and one of their honest accountants, in itemizing the receipt, described the expenses as 'to get Joseph out of jail.' When their grant was being reviewed by internal auditors, the country director was contacted about this description. "Um, yeah....please change that to 'traffic violation'" was her reply. And so it was done.

3. When the same NGO was moving into a new office space, they decided to get custom-made desks to fit the new layout. They wanted desks that were a bit shorter than the standard dimensions, and they agreed to pay twice the going prefab price in order to get them. They did not, however, specify that they wanted the drawers to be shorter as well, and so, after nearly 4 weeks of waiting for their furniture, the desks arrived with shorter desktops, standard-sized built-in drawers below, and not enough room for two legs, let alone a chair, to fit in the space that remained.

4. Recently a container with pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream arrived in-country, and my roommate left work early to go to the grocery store and buy 3 pints of her favorite flavors before they disappeared. We had a last-minute dinner party that evening with a couple of other friends as a pretext to eat the ice cream. In between Ben and Jerry's shipments, when supplies are extremely limited, the price of the Ben and Jerry's pints can skyrocket.  Over her coffee heathbar crunch, one friend who works in the Ministry of Gender admitted that--in a country in which the minimum wage for government employees is less than $100/month--in a moment of menstrual suffering and emotional weakness she'd actually purchased one pint for $30.

- It's always somewhat embarrasing when rhyming couplets seem to sum-up your recent existence.  That said, just came across the poem "The Development Set" by Ross Coggins, which in some ways hit a little too close to home.  Especially as I tried (and failed) to make a reservation at the Sheraton in Djibouti.

Tho, in my defense, I've never used the word "epigenetic", or at least not yet:

Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet
I'm off to join the Development Set;
My bags are packed, and I've had all my shots
I have traveller's checks and pills for the trots!

The Development Set is bright and noble
Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;
Although we move with the better classes
Our thoughts are always with the masses.

In Sheraton Hotels in scattered nations
We damn multi-national corporations;
injustice seems easy to protest
In such seething hotbeds of social rest.

We discuss malnutrition over steaks
And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.
Whether Asian floods or African drought,
We face each issue with open mouth.

We bring in consultants whose circumlocution
Raises difficulties for every solution --
Thus guaranteeing continued good eating
By showing the need for another meeting.

The language of the Development Set
Stretches the English alphabet;
We use swell words like "epigenetic"
"Micro", "macro", and "logarithmetic"

It pleasures us to be esoteric --
It's so intellectually atmospheric!
And although establishments may be unmoved,
Our vocabularies are much improved.

When the talk gets deep and you're feeling numb,
You can keep your shame to a minimum:
To show that you, too, are intelligent
Smugly ask, "Is it really development?"

Or say, "That's fine in practice, but don't you see:
It doesn't work out in theory!"
A few may find this incomprehensible,
But most will admire you as deep and sensible.

Development set homes are extremely chic,
Full of carvings, curios, and draped with batik.
Eye-level photographs subtly assure
That your host is at home with the great and the poor.

Enough of these verses - on with the mission!
Our task is as broad as the human condition!
Just pray god the biblical promise is true:
The poor ye shall always have with you.

The most amazing - or depressing fact - is that it was written in 1976.

[View of Monrovia, Liberia from infocrministries.org]