Over Land and Over Sea: Part V

I have spent a week in Monrovia. I have experienced a bit of disappointment in the police assigned around the Gurley-Street area. I have tried to drive from the corner of Broad and Randall Streets toward Waterside. The sea of people will not allow me to go at the pace I want, so I turned right on Sao Bosoe Street and head out of town.

I have visited the Urey Chicken Farm in Careysburg and have gone to Firestone to see the damage done to the place I used to live. I have left a note in Smell-No-Taste for the friend who encouraged me in 1987 to purchase a piece of land on the Robertsfield Highway. The first week of my trip to Liberia, after almost twenty years, is about to end. I need to get out of the city and see what’s happening in Kakata or say, Ganta, in Nimba County. Let’s see what the second week brings.

I gave the truck a final check. I wanted to make sure the tires had the required air, even a bit more. I filled the tank up to the brim with gas. Gas is L$225 or $3.25 a gallon at Total Gas Station at this time. TOTAL seems to be the new rooster in town. New gas stations are springing up all over the city and suburbs. Soda, snack, anything you want is sold at TOTAL. The setup is just like Exxon or Shell or a 7-11 gas station in America. I called one of my business partners who is presently in Monrovia to let him know that I would be picking him up at 5:30 am on Tuesday, December 15, 2009. We are going to Nimba.

It is pitch dark at 5:30 am, especially in an area like Brewerville. For some reason, I forgot that I was in Monrovia, where street lights are not common. What is common is the people’s good sense of direction. To find a place in Liberia, a deep curve, a cotton tree or a yellow gas station are some of the landmarks you must remember when trying to find a home or a spot of interest. This has been the way Liberians locate each other from the day I was born.

So when my business partner directed me to pick him up from Brewerville at 5:30 in the morning, I said fine. On my way, I missed the deep curve, I missed Lott Carey Mission, and I missed the VOA Junction. After I had crossed two single-lane bridges built by the UN, I felt somehow that I had gone too far. If there were signs to VOA, or Lott Carey, I didn’t see them at 5:30 in the morning.

I finally located my partner near a long fence by a school, about a quarter mile from the main road. He walked to the truck using a flashlight. It was about 6:15 am when we left Brewerville for the trip up country.

It was easy at this time of the morning to drive through Duala, New Kru Town Junction, and Red Light. At a market after Soul Clinic, we bought a pack of many little plastic bags of water. We changed about $40.00 to L$2640, a huge bunch of money to me.

Driving to Kakata, my mind took me way back as we passed Number 7 or Kingsville on the long stretch of road to Number 8. A lot of well-known people used to live in this area long ago. Further on that route to Kakata, we entered the part of Firestone where I was born and where I was assigned when I first got employed by the company! There is an area called Freeman Reserve, opposite Division 20. I remembered how as kids, my friends and I would walk to Freeman Reserve on Firestone paydays to have fun. We would dance until our parents came and whipped us away.

As we passed Zoevahn or Todee Junction, I thought of Todee Mission, Nyehn Public School, and CLG Mission where I began my early education. As we drove toward Kakata, I tried to locate the spot in a deep curve where Tommie Bernard was killed in a traffic accident. I couldn’t remember the place anymore.

We passed Cooper Farm and then entered the area of Morris’s Farm where Keith Jubah met his untimely and horrible death. As we crossed Du Bridge and began to enter the vicinity of BWI, I remembered how I used to spend a lot of time at this place; not as a student, but as someone who had an interest on campus. The woman I would later marry spent four years at BWI.

I always wanted to attend the Booker Washington Institute. I wanted to become a mechanic. That was my wish when I graduated from the eighth grade. But my father had a different idea. He refused to even allow me to dream of becoming a Tiger. The news that students died during initiation on BWI put fear and a special stereotypical hunch in the mind of my father.

We stopped in Kakata near the Bong Mines-Kakata Highway Junction. My business partner wanted to make sure he had breakfast before going any further. As I stood outside, my friend went through a tiny door and came out smiling. The next thing I saw was a lady coming out with a bowl of steaming cassava leaf and rice. I am not used to eating rice anymore at 7:30 in the morning. So, as my man enjoyed his meal, I bought myself few bananas and ate them for breakfast.

The road through Kakata is also crowded with sellers of all kinds of stuff. Relocating these people, I felt, would be much, much easier than relocating the thousands and thousands of marketers at Red Light or Duala or the congregation near the SN Brussels office near Front, Ashmun, and Randall Streets.

As we passed Konola Academy, I thought of the agony I went through while in America in 1990. The surge of the “freedom fighters” toward Monrovia meant nothing to most people, including me in early 1990. I left two of my kids on Konola as I travelled to the United States for vacation. For years I did not hear from them. I was devastated.

Twenty years is a long time to be away from a place. As we drove on, places that I thought I knew went by either too quickly or it took forever to reach them. For example, I thought for such we had passed or reached Tubman Farm. When I later saw a sign that read: Coo-Coo Nest, even though I had a black-out for a minute, I knew then for sure that we were now in Totota.

I had run out of bottled water, so we stopped at the shop on Tubman Farm to see what was in there. I used the bathroom which was well maintained. An old man who sat in a chair wanted his Christmas after I asked him about the zoo and all the animals that were there. Most of the animals were killed and eaten during the war, he told me. I looked around and was saddened by the fact that without vision, a people and institutions do really perish. Across the street from the stop stood a hotel-like structure. That must be the Nest, I figured.

Even though we had to dodge a few pot holes every now and then, the Kakata-Gbarnga highway is fairly good. I remember when I used to drive on this road to Ganta in about two and a half to three hours. Sergeant Kollieta, Suakoko, Phoebe Hospital… all of these places, I recognized as we drove through. Two places I passed without noticing were Gbatala and Gbonkonima. I remembered how often I used to stop at the latter town to purchase buckets of bitter balls, corn, and fresh deer or groundhog meat hanging from cross bars made of sticks.

Entering Gbarnga, we had to slow down to go through the UN and Immigration Check Points. Gbarnga was not as crowded as Kakata. We drove through with ease, forgetting that a place named Red Light even existed.

Gbarnga was a well-known enclave during the war. It was known as the Capital City of Greater Liberia. With all the mining and logging activities that occurred in Greater Liberia, I expected to see some high-rise buildings or a complete transformation of the Capital City of Bong County. Since I did not drive all over Gbarnga, it will be preposterous for me to say that nothing of substance was done for that city during the years of war.

If I am not mistaken, the sign in Gbarnga tells motorists that the distance from there to Ganta is 50 miles or 80.6 kilometers. Going 50 miles per hour should take the slowest driver about 70 minutes to reach Ganta from Gbarnga. For us, it took forever… at least two hours.

After four dry seasons, the condition of the road to Ganta from Gbarnga is unacceptable. We were driving a truck that had not seen a gravel road in its life time. Besides potholes, we were dodging or driving into craters in order to reach our destination, 50 miles away. It was amazing and refreshing to encounter or come across very few cars on the road. Apart from that luxury, the entire trip was back-breaking. Every bone in your body felt the beating from the road condition on the Gbarnga-Ganta Highway.

I did not forget to pick up students as we drove toward Ganta. I did one pick up between Weala and Totota and another between Kpein and Nengbein. The great promise I saw for Liberia was the students. They were well dressed in their school uniforms, walking to school as I did many years ago. Who knew I would be writing something for others to read? Who knew that a poor student walking to school in Todee District would one day be brave enough to tell the government that the pace of development in Liberia was too slow? I saw hope in these students who take dust into their lungs everyday as I did. It was my responsibility to shorten their trip to school or home as Oldman Taylor did for me, many years ago.

We reached Ganta at about 3 p.m. on December 15, 2009. Ganta looked different to me. The immigration Check Point where I used to work when the death of President Tubman was announced was far away from its original spot. The Mobil Gas station I used to visit when I courted the girl that would become my wife is now hidden from the main road by make-shift homes and market stalls. The war created a new headache for mayors of cities like Ganta and Kakata and Paynesville.

The trip up country was to confirm that the project my business partners and I were trying to setup between Saclepea and Tappita was doing fine as we were told. We wanted to reach our final destination, but the experience from the road condition made the trip a bit sour and discouraging. We had invested a lot in the project, but we had not physically seen what had been done. It was therefore imperative that we keep going, even if we had to sleep on the road.

The road from Ganta to Saclepea is much better. The news is that the Bangladeshi Unit of the United Nations assigned in Ganta is the entity that’s maintaining this portion of the road. The road is nicely paved from the Ganta-Saclepea Junction up to the UN Compound, about a mile away. As soon as one leaves the compound, it’s déjà vu all over again, but with less stress.

Driving up country, rubber farms dominate the topography of the land. Nearly everybody seems to be mesmerized by the notion of owning a rubber plantation. As we drove toward Saclepea I could not remember the location of Cocopa, the largest rubber plantation in Nimba County. I saw Flumpa and Kpetuo and Graie. There was not much to be happy about, as I saw the same huts and the same conditions that were there 20 years earlier.

From Saclepea to our destination should, all things being equal, take about 30 to 45 minutes. The road condition is similar to that of the Gbarnga-Ganta Highway, bone crushing. After 4 dry seasons, the main roads in the country should be better than what it is.

We called our contractors. They did not sound receptive at first, but when we told them that we were coming to the site and that we had their one month’s pay, the tone changed. They called us every ten minutes after that, wanting to make sure that we were safe! My business partner and I did not know the specific spot where the project had begun. The contractors told us that they would be waiting to take us to the place we hope would one day have an impact on the people of the area.

We saw two men waving cutlasses as we approached the town where our project is located. We knew immediately the gesture and waving were genuine. In earlier times, that would mean something else. We made a right turn into what we knew by now was our property. We got down, hugged and introduced ourselves. We were shown the work that had been done which was the foundation of a processing plant we hope to establish in a little town far, far away from Monrovia.

After inspecting the place and taking some pictures, we were taken to the town where we were introduced to the town chief. Before leaving the site, I had observed a cola tree that had cola nuts hanging from every branch. I told one of the contractors to pick me some cola nuts. My craving for anything natural and Liberian was a feeling that only I could experience and boast about. Those fresh cola nuts and the fresh, succulent pineapple that came later were the only food I had eaten the whole day, besides the bananas in Kakata. My business partner thought I was insane and going nuts by starving myself. To tell the truth, I was never hungry.

That cola tree will remain where it is. It will be there as we strive to make a difference in the lives of people who have seen nothing but a hard life. That cola tree and the people in the town survived the war. We must all look forward, rejuvenating the potential in all of us. That cola tree is far ahead of us.

We arrived back in Ganta at about 9 p.m. As we drove back, a sign near a bridge in one of the towns caught my attention. It read: Caution, this bridge was locally constructed! There are one-lane bridges all over the country, constructed by the UN. I saw them in Brewerville and on the road as we drove through the interior of the country. Why was this particular sign so interesting? Did the people of the town single-handedly build this bridge to standard? Was it risky for motorists? What was this sign telling me and others about this bridge that we were about to cross?

We were accommodated in Ganta by the wife of our main contact. He had traveled to Monrovia to attend graduation ceremonies at the University of Liberia. Because of our host busy schedule and because we did not inform her of our trip in advance, she put something nicely together for dinner. No GB, no rice; but it was just a nice dinner.

The heat was not nice to me in Liberia. It was just embarrassing to see myself sweating so profusely among the people. Most thought I was sick, I believe. Trying to sleep in Ganta was tough. The generator refused to come on. By 2 a.m. I was wide awake, fanning myself with whatever I could lay my hands on. At this early time of the morning and surprisingly, I heard a rooster crowing. There was something wrong with the timing, I thought. Roosters are supposed to crow around 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning. It is the rooster that tells the dawn of a new day.

As we left Ganta for Monrovia on December 16, 2009, I wondered whether the war had anything to do with the timing system of the offsprings of the roosters that survived.