Hang a Shining Star

My Christmas was nearly perfect this year, a vacation in all the best ways. 

I left Kakata on the 21st and headed west to a teeny-tiny village on the border with Sierra Leone to spend time with my Peace Corps sisters there. All I really wanted from the holiday was some time out of the ‘hurry up and wait’ business of teaching here, time to sit and bake and 'sit small' with my friends. And I really got my wish. Red carpets were rolled out, tinsel was hung, and the whole community came by to appreciate the unprecedented 50% increase in white women at the house. These PCVs are the first volunteers to be placed in their site since before the war, and their community is enamored of and fascinated by them in equal measure.

Inside, their house was decorated beautifully for the season, with swirls of cut-paper snowflakes flurrying over the wall of the study, toiletpaper-tube reindeer and christmas tree, and a gorgeous banner with stockings hanging beneath it- so I got a Christmas stocking with lollipops tucked inside! We played card games by candle light, listened to all the classic songs, and ate delicious food. I’m including pictures, because their house was gorgeous and I am ridiculously proud of my baking creations...

One day we took a walk to the next village (even smaller with less access or amenities, but with a gorgeous mosque). The half-hour trek along the narrow path through the bush made me feel like I was in King Solomon’s Mines following the intrepid and not-at-all-PC heroine through ‘the wilds of darkest africa’ (TM). Towering, vine-draped trees and dense jungle forest overshadowing us would give way all of a sudden to palm-dotted plain or reedy swampland. Three times we had to step over industrious rivers of big black ants (able to turn into fuious swarms of painful stinging misery with one disturbance), and the jungle was alive with chirping, clicking, humming life in the afternoon sun. The vast majority of my time here in Liberia has been spent in Kakata, so spending time exploring the bush and living the village life was fascinating and a refreshing change.

On Christmas Eve, we headed to Winter Break Part II: Tropical Beach Getaway, which was a refrehing change of a different sort. Robertsport is a coastal town world-famous in the surfing community as one of the preeminient destinations for unbelievable waves. It’s situated between the beach coastline and the edge of a lake separated from the ocean by a thin strip of sand. It feels like a beach town-something about the quality of light, the taste of salt in the air, and the wide, sun-bleached streets. Of course, it is also a Liberian town, so the dense greenery of the hills is broken up by half-bombed abandoned buildings, the streets are more pothole than pavement, and the main (dusty dirt) road past the open-air market hall is lined with trash and tin-roofed shacks. The tables in front of these stores are piled with freshly-caught fish pulled from the ocean every morning, and it boasts a Total gas station complete with air-conditioned mini-mart stocking cold beer and American snacks.

The PCV’s set up a tent city with our bug huts spread out under a huge, towering baobab tree fifty feet from the ocean at a community campground run by one of the locals. There were about twenty of us chiling in hammocks in the shade, tanning in the sun, and spending the holiday with the closest thing we have to family here. Somebody brought a Merry Christmas banner and a strand of red tinsel decorated with ornaments to set the mood, and we shared food over a bonfire in the evenings. Around dawn on Christmas morning, a crew of fishermen pushed their canoe into the water to lay a huge semi-circle of net, then returned to shore to haul in their catch hand-over-hand. Some of the volunteers got up to help, and we were able to pick through the first catch and buy a sandy pile of still-gasping mackerel, which were baked in tinfoil over the fire for Christmas dinner that evening. 

Spending three days bobbing in the waves was nice, and I loved the chance to take a dawn-lit walk through the surf to reflect. Even though I am far away from home here, I am also very much at home, and time spent with friends and family here felt like a good and fiting end to a year full of change and challenge.