Most of my blog posts, like most of my days in Liberia, are happy, up-beat, optimistic. I love my life and my work and myself here in a way that is impossible to describe, though that doesn’t stop me trying. But Liberia isn’t all sunshine and puppies and smooth roads with perfect playlists. Daily life here is full of heartbreak and sorrow that is terribly commonplace.
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Since Lydia moved into a room in Ben and Fatu’s house before Christmas, she’s become like a sister to me. We bonded over cinnamon rolls and the depths of my loathing for laundry. She lets me practice hair platting on her, gives me cooking tips, and is one of my closest Liberian friends. Her two sons (Rashid-boy, 5, and Brodie, 7) chase the football into our yard in the evenings and “chunk dirt” (take out the trash) for us when we leave it on the porch. Lydia’s husband has a stall in the market selling pills, tablets, and sundry other medicines but we rarely see him.
One night last week Lydia came over to sit small and lecture in our living room, and she told us that her husband had assaulted her that morning. Luckily, she lives with Ben (who may be one of the best men in the world), and he was able to intervene before anything else could happen. She left the house at dawn to walk ten miles to her brother’s house to ask him to come help her, then walked back and worked all day at the house. She sat in a plastic chair in our candle-lit living room crying because she has no idea what to do. She’s been with her husband for 10 years, and he’s been physically violent for most of them, while destroying her relationships with most of her family. She never finished high school because she got pregnant right after he paid her dowry, but she’s been selling plantain chips and dried fish to pay her sons’ school fees and contribute to a SUSU, a local savings club. She’s terrified that her husband will beat her again, but she’s grateful that it was her head he kicked this morning and not her four-months-pregnant belly. She cried when she found out that she was expecting her third child because now she can’t leave him- no Liberian man would take in a woman with three children by another man- and he always escalates his violent outbursts when she’s carrying a child. She actually said that if it wasn’t for her boys, she might have killed herself.
She’ll be 29 next month. She’s one of the most vibrant and beautiful people I’ve met in my life. She wants Heather and I to be namesakes to her baby. She’s frightened and ashamed and there’s nothing I can do except hug her and be here for her when she needs it.
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Our taxi came around a bend in the road this morning and almost hit another car stopped in the middle of a crowd of keening, wailing Liberians. The passengers of the other car were all scrambling around trading places and piling in the cargo area while a man cradling a child was pushed into the front seat. As soon as his door closed, the car raced away towards Kakata, a five-minute ride away. The child, a girl, had been hit by a speeding motorbike while trying to cross the road and was being rushed to C.H. Rennie Government Hospital. One of the passengers in my car noted that there weren’t many people actually working at Rennie, since the government hasn’t paid their salaries in almost a year. And that hospital, perhaps stocked with luxuries like gauze, antiseptic, and nurses, is that father’s hope for his daughter.
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Princess moved into Ben and Fatu’s house at the end of January, 7 months pregnant and posessed of a quick laugh and a powerful punt in kickball. For the last three weeks she’s been ready to pop, and all anyone (Fatu, Ma Winifred, Lydia, Ma Fata our new neighbor, us) has been talking about is when the baby will come. On Tuesday she looked really sick and on Wednesday night Lydia took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with Malaria 3+. She stayed at Rennie because they were concerned about the baby. While I was out of town this weekend, Fatu called to tell me that she’d had her baby at last, but it was still-born. That child goes on the list of people I know who have died from Malaria, just in time for April, which is World Malaria Month.
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Car accidents, still-births, and domestic violence happen all the time all over the world (every 30 seconds someone dies of Malaria. Half of them are children. 90% of them are in Africa). They are especially scary and painful in a place where the systems in place to combat tragedies like this either don’t work or don’t exist. Waiting on the side of the road with your injured daughter in your arms, or realizing that your baby is distressed gets harder when you can’t call an ambulance, and if a car does stop to carry you, the hospital might not be staffed or stocked. The police might come to help you escape a violent spouse, or they may tell you you’ve provoked it and you deserve it, so stop crying. And there’s nothing I can do in the moment. I have to hope that my own example in my classroom and community is enough, because it’s all I have.
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