Pick-up in Liberia

March 18, 2010
Amos, my government driver, had just sped away with my laptop and clothing in the backseat, leaving just me and my $15 dollar supermarket-purchased basketball on the side of the road in Monrovia, Liberia. I laced up my sneakers on a rock, trying to look inconspicuous and unattached to the Amos’s SUV, which had disrupted the local pick-up basketball game.

There is a dearth of pavement in Monrovia, and as a result, basketball courts are scarce. This hoop, on Ninth Street in the relatively middle-class Sinkor neighborhood, rose out of the dirt above the road that took people from main drag on Tubman Boulevard to the residential compounds by the swamp. The road was wide enough to accommodate a good half-court, about as deep as the three point line; the catch is that the game had to stop every time a car or motorcycle comes down the road.

I approached the court with some trepidation. Rolling up to a pick-up game by yourself is always a little butterfly-inducing. People on the court could be way better than you. The teams could be set. Calling ‘next’ is always awkward when no one has your back. Here, of course, those concerns were magnified, because I was the only ‘white’ guy on the court. Liberia is the only place in the world I’ve been called “white.” It used to throw me off, but after a trip to up-country, where little kids shrieked “white man” everywhere I went, I’m getting used to the social experiment.

I stood by the court watching what appeared to be some kind of shooting contest. Various players asked to mess around with my ball, which was clearly the best one available. One dude practicing post moves with it reminded me of a young Kevin Garnett. I began to question whether I was ready to play with these guys. But judging by their appreciation for my ball, I figured I would be on the court soon enough, an assumption that proved correct.

After the shooting contest ended, though, a man came out with a broom, barked at the kids to get off the court, and started sweeping around the free throw area. I thought maybe he owned the store the court was in front of or something. Soon two teens were joining him in the sweeping process, and it became clear they were clearing enough dust from the road to create a half-court, no small task. During dry season, everything in Liberia is just caked in dust, and the pavement was slippery in areas that weren’t swept.

After about ten minutes they were done, and we were ready to play. Left open for a mid-range jumper, I knocked down the second basket of the game. It was 3 on 3. I did not know my teammates’ names, what we were playing to, or why they wouldn’t give me the ball after I made my shot. It turned out this court practiced “loser’s ball”- giving the ball to the team that is scored on, rather than the team that scores, as is the universal streetball practice in the United States.

Basketball is basketball, and for most of the afternoon I was able to contribute with my usual strengths, and was held back by my usual weaknesses. There are a couple things that make Liberian pick-up a little different than New York pick-up, however.

First, loser’s ball makes the pace of the game very frenetic. As soon one team scores, the other rushes to inbound the ball before the scoring team can set defensively. This leads to a lot of scrambling, and you often end up picking up the guy closest to you at the time of the basket, rather than guarding a specific opposing player. The play was made no less frenetic by the panoramic nature of the inbounds pass, which could come from any sideline, including right underneath the basket. When things settled down, however, like after a foul, we could make more appropriate defensive assignments.

Second, defense was very lax. There was decent one on one defense, in order to respond to the flashy, show-em-up one on one offense. Team defense was non-existent however, so you had to make sure not to let your man beat you off the dribble. I didn’t mind the lax defense, of course. It gave me plenty of open looks near the basket, and as people got tired later in the afternoon, even clear paths for driving lay-ups. I learned to drive from the right side when possible; the blackboard was tilted such that any attempt to bank a lay-up from the left side would send the ball sailing past the rim. The lack of defense also didn’t prevent me from playing defense, and given the sizeable community crowd that had gathered to watch, I wasn’t about to let everyone watch the white man get showed up.

While my defense was solid, I was called for a lot of fouls. A lot of fouls. If ever asked to define street ball, I’ve always cited its rough and tumble nature- a system in which you call your own fouls leads to more bumping and grinding, hand checks, over the backs and loose elbows than a regulated game. It’s just something everyone lives with, unless the situation gets egregious. One of the main reasons New York pick-up games get ugly is the perception that a prima donna scorer is calling too many fouls. Not an issue here. One player I was constantly matched up with was quick off the dribble with a low center of gravity. Whenever we made any kind of contact, even if there was no way I ultimately altered the shot, he’d raise his hand to signal a foul call.

This was not the first time that foul calls had befuddled me in an international pick-up game. I played several times in a small gym in the basement of my student dorm in Hungary back in 2000, and was straight-up astonished the first time I was called for an offensive foul. I am not a big guy, and back at age 17, I was rail-thin. Nevertheless, Hungarians would perfunctorily stop playing to call me for a charge, over the back or offensive hand check. At least in this Liberian game the foul calls were not personal- I was whistled no more or less than anyone else, whereas a Hungarian box score would have made me seem like some Shaq-like menace.

The games were up to five, a quick and preferable option to the New York style seven or eleven given the hot African sun. The second game in particular dragged on and on, as foul calls by both sides on nearly every play were driving me to the point of exhaustion. It wasn’t just the heat- I’m also in terrible shape, a function of my reluctance to go running when it’s too hot out, which is often. On and on the foul calls went, and I wondered how I’d play another game if we won.

Finally, we lost, and I was sitting on a stump nursing my water when Amos’s SUV rolled up. He handed me my laptop bag and was off to further errands. I announced my impending return and sauntered up to Jung’s apartment to drop off my laptop bag. The AC felt great, and I slumped to her flooor, drenched in sweat, mumbling to myself. I hope I didn’t freak her out.

I dragged myself back to the court, and soon was in another 3 on 3 game. Our heavily favored team fell behind 4-1 due to a complete lack of defensive effort, rallied to tie it at 4-4, only to have our dude have his behind the back pass in traffic intercepted for the game-clinching lay-up. I was displeased, but also ok with the prospect of more rest.

At this point I was asked to referee the following game. Referees were generally players waiting to play next, who would watch the game from below the basket. The referee’s primary function was to keep track of the score and make decisions on foul calls. Reffing was no joke. Even though I kept score quite loudly to avoid protest, my announcement of ‘3-1’ brought howls from one player, even though his team was leading. I think some of them just wanted to howl. A major shouting match over the score occurred nearly every game, actually, usually at moments so early in the game that anyone paying the slightest bit of attention would have known what the undisputed score was.

Players from both sides muttered at me all game to ‘keep my eyes open’ because the guy defending them was ‘shoving them around.’ I’m sorry, but this is still street ball, and I was not about to call away from the ball fouls. I called what I felt was an appropriate share of shooting fouls, let the boys play a bit, and kissed the sky when a deep jump shot ended my stint as referee.

I don’t like reffing at all. Over the years I served as a soccer line referee a few times, and it was most unpleasant. Some plays just happen so fast that you have to go with your gut and know you’ll be wrong a decent amount of the time. Things are particularly brutal for refs in pro sports that provide all their television views multi-angled instant replay, but don’t allow the access to refs, except in a few circumstances. Basketball and football both seem to be managing this process better than they used to, while baseball not so much. The moral of the story when it comes to refereeing mistakes is that any team that puts itself in a position where a single incorrect call from a ref can cost the game has to acknowledge their own complicity in creating the situation. A football drive that comes down to a single catch, a basketball game that comes down to a single shot, or a tennis ball grazing the line on a tiebreaker only matter because the two sides have basically played to a draw. It is a rare call that actually “cost them the game.”

During my first three games I had scored several baskets, but as the afternoon sneaked into evening, the already lax defense had pretty much conceded me any shot outside of 8-10 feet, sometimes from even closer. Sticking with straightaway shots, which minimize the rim situation, I began draining mid-range jumpers with ease. No one seemed interested in stopping me. Some players had decent skills, but low basketball IQs, refusing to use pick and rolls offered to them or box out properly. The same player who’d work himself into a frenzy to beat me off the dribble would let me coast deep into the paint without much resistance.

It was getting dark, close to the pointing of calling it a day, but we were using my ball, and I didn’t want to be the guy that shut things down. All of a sudden, midway through a game, a ruckus broke out on the court. Shouting angrily in Liberia seems like a national pastime, and given the track record of violence, it is quite unsettling to be in the middle of. My teammate, Pacy, explained that a group of players on the sidelines wanted to start gambling on the games, while one of our opponents, the original court sweeper, was yelling about a pact they had made not to gamble on the 9th street courts. Hessen, the sweeper, later explained to me that gambling on the games had led to police crackdowns before. That is not a crime I expected to get in trouble for in Liberia, so I appreciated his desire to keep things clean.

We finished the last game some time after the sun had set. I shook hands with a few of the guys, including Hessen, who I had been guarding for the last two games. Even though he called me for about a half dozen fouls, he expressed his wish to play as my teammate next time. Maybe he wants someone else to guard him. I appreciated the perhaps compliment.

I wandered to the local supply store and picked up a coca-cola. Glass bottle. It was great. I knocked on the compound door, and soon I was on my way up the stairs to air conditioning, a shower, work clothes, 30 Rock, and the memories of my first day of Liberian street ball.

Check out the Bull Moose Movement

Dear Roving Storm readers,
Please check out a new project I've been working on, the Bull Moose Movement. The group and site are both new, and "pre-launch," but we'll be doing a lot of interesting work in the months and years to come.
-Janos

Liberian Dispatch 4

February 14, 2010
Last night was the ragey release I’ve been looking for. Elena, an expat with USAID, was throwing a party at her place on Mamba Point, which has an awesome covered deck overlooking the ocean. We watched the sunset sipping on scotch and coke. The expat crowd was slightly different from the Lonestar party- this time there were plenty more short-termers, which made me feel more relaxed- some of these people knew fewer people and less about Liberia than I did. I also got to DJ for over an hour, mostly to acclaim, though Elena’s roommate yelled at me to change the music when a Dirty Projectors song came on. One dude observing smiled and shook his head, “You aren’t in Brooklyn anymore.”
Definitely good people all-round. One fellow named Barrie works for the Carter Center, and I’ll be meeting some of his peeps next week. Given the omnipresence of the Carter Center and the Clinton Foundation, one can only imagine what the Obama Institute will look like. I hope to work for it one day- no matter how much I sour on his presidency, I’m sure his post-presidency will be an inspirational one.
…
As the party broke up I jumped into a car heading to De Ja Vous, one of Monrovia’s premiere nightclubs, along with 69. It was surprisingly not crowded for peak Saturday night hours, and also surprisingly sweet. I could see myself hanging out there any time with the right mix of people. It looked swank, but was fairly priced, had delineated dancing and hanging out sections, and was not so loud as to overpower conversation- my main dig against clubs.
…
This morning I was far too hungover for golf, and spent much of the day in various forms of recovery. The practice of cooking pasta in a water boiler is starting to go awry, as pasta stands are getting tangled in the heating rods. Alas, pasta it will be for dinner tonight, as it was for lunch. I took an extended stroll through my neighborhood, and it’s a quiet Sunday, the market was relatively empty, stores closed. I usually just walk down Old Road, the hub street in Congo Town that I live off of, but today I did some exploring through the comparatively middle class area off of Old Road. On a side street not far from my compound I found a solitary basketball hoop. No one was playing, but if I can somehow find a basketball in town, that little court could be my salvation. The most useful spot I found during my wanderings was a gas station that sells beans, cereal, and other necessities, along with beer and liquor, should I hear the calling.
…
Good lord, why is Jerry Springer on?! Is this program really still on the air? This is unbelievably trashy. Still, it was exciting to discover that I have another channel. So far today I’ve watched some weird soapy show about Greek gods set in the present and about ten minutes of American Idol, a show that I cannot even remotely get into, erecting another small hurdle between me and mainstream America. Jerry Springer definitely has that car crash quality; I’ve survived one commercial break. The crowd just started chanting “take out the teeth,” and the woman, who had only been on stage for three minutes, responded by taking them out and waving them around. Springer himself seems like a pretty smart dude. Between the days he gets his paychecks, he must have many moments where he is just disgusted with himself. I mean, he’s the former Mayor of Cincinnati. “Throw your teeth at her! Throw your teeth at her!” That’s enough of that.
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With access to some rare downloading capabilities I’ve been getting Kings of Leon, Norah Jones and Dead Weather tunes. Did you know that the Dead Weather was Jack White’s new band? Just learned that. They will be three of the headliners at Bonnaroo that I’m less acquainted with. In case anybody out there is on the fence about going to ‘Roo, this is really a no-brainer. Plan for the vacation days now, you’ll need two or three.
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Tonight is the NBA All-Star game, which I enjoy watching more than the Superbowl. In all my years as a fan, this is about as good as the NBA has been, the woes and misfortunes of the Knicks notwithstanding. As fans we are blessed to watch Kobe and Lebron, two of greatest to ever play the game, in their primes. The talent at the top of the league, on L.A, Boston, San Antonio, Cleveland and Orlando is just ridiculous. We still have Shaq around as the old man of the league, for perhaps his last one or two years. He is one of the most colorful personalities to emerge out of this drab cultural era, and I hope he stays in our lives after he retires. The league is chalk full of young stars waiting to claim to take on the incumbent generation, just in time to replace iconic stars on their way out, like Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan and Allen Iverson. As the motto goes, “I love this game,” though I think marketers have replaced the motto with “where amazing happens.” That works too.
…
I wish every news host was as knowledgeable as Fareed Zakaria. His command of history and current events seems to startle his guests. For example, an American journalist, who, along with Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is pushing for a preemptive strike on Iran, citing their refusal to have uranium enriched abroad as an example of their recalcitrance. Zakaria interrupted, “In the 1990s, Pakistan rejected overtures to have its uranium enriched abroad, as did India.” I was impressed! Prior to having these warmongers on his program, Zarakia interviewed Paul Volcker, a brilliant economist crying out in the wilderness about the need for meaningful financial regulation. Volcker, who is now in his 80s, says that he has never seen Washington this dysfunctional, using as an anecdote the fact that even in the midst of this recession, two major leadership positions at the Treasury Department are still vacant because the nominees have not been approved by Congress. He said that when he joined the government in 1969, he was at his desk the day of the inauguration, and was confirmed a week later.
…
The power just went out in the building, plunging my world into darkness, save for the dim light of the laptop screen. Ah, it’s back, a few minutes later. Being way out here in Congo Town, it’s a little freaky to be without power. Zakaria is a rare “centrist” that I’ll begrudge, because his clarion call is a courageous one: Zakaria believes that addressing the deficit is so important that we need to raise taxes and cut spending. Governors across the country, including New York’s embattled chief, David Paterson, are well aware of this problem as they address state budgets that are not permitted to go into the red. Zakaria decries the political cowardice of Republicans (always the main deficit hawks) who refuse to concede that tax increases, or simply the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, will be part of the deficit solution. Hey, I’m down for working on this issue- but the place to start has to be military spending. When 50% of the discretionary budget gets virtually no scrutiny, it seems like the right place to trim the waistline.

February 15, 2010 What a strange morning. I was awaken by shouting and screaming, like a domestic dispute going on in my hallway. Annoyed, I rolled over and checked the time. It was 7am, almost time to get up. After some tossing and turning, I got up and flung the curtains open to reveal…darkness. That’s odd. Usually when I leave my curtains open I’m awoken by the sunlight. I made myself some cereal, but when I tried to wash the bowl, there was no water. No sink water, no shower water. Plenty of bananas though. In the market they were selling them by the branch, like $5 for fifty bananas. I only wanted a dollar’s worth, so she pointed me to a fly-ridden stack. I thought I had bought like eight, but I’ve been eating them with most meals for three days and still have five left. And guess what? Now it’s almost 8am, time for pick up, and it’s still dark outside. I heard a rumor that this might happen occasionally, dust storms from the Sahara or something. I’ll get back on it when I know what’s really going on.
…
Ah, yes, ladies and gents, it has begun. My first rainfall in Liberia. That explains the darkness- as George Bush would say, it’s “the dark storm clouds gathering over me.” It does rain fucking hard here, it really bits down on the earth. The downpour makes the complete lack of water in my apartment more ironic, I suppose. I’ve been told it’s an absolutely fiasco when it rains here, and a cursory look out the window gives me no reason to believe otherwise. From my balcony I can only see dirt roads, and they have all been badly flooded within fifteen minutes. I hear the gentle ‘thud’ sounds of things collapsing. Hopefully words can express the ferocity of this rain- it’s as if God is trying really hard.
…
Standing at my window buttoning the cuffs of my shirt I feel like one of those people getting dressed up for the day they commit suicide. Venturing into this madness is crazy. If Amos is picking up Genevieve first, he won’t be here for well over an hour. If he’s picking me up first, he would be here by now, but for the roads. Too many variables already, this early in the day. Pink Floyd is an appropriate and coincidental soundtrack, adding to the dark madness. At least the power is still on. Upside: it’s the first time the temperature has felt physically comfortable without the AC on. Downside: mosquitoes and a still partially broken screen door. Secondary upside: think I just heard a bird.
…
The rain is just regular now, and I’m getting the sense that Amos is picking me up second. Water still not working though, which is quite lame. I always wake up feeling especially like I need a shower after wild dreams, and last night’s included a vision of working with Hands On in Haiti. There were non-literal aspects to the dream, but it came right on the heels of a release I read from ole’ David Campbell announcing the HODR project being set up there. I would like to go for 10 days or so, possibly in late May, depending on flight costs, which have derailed my joining other Hands On since Biloxi.
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The hardest rain I’ve ever driven through, not including the terrifying 2006 quasi tornado of Kansas had to be the drive home from Saratoga Springs after the bar exam. Finch and I couldn’t wait to get back to the city to celebrate, but nearly died on the way, as we were hit with rain far beyond the capabilities of our fastest wipers. We had no visibility at all, and we pulled over as soon as the shoulder allowed it. When the rain had slowed slightly, we saw that every single car on the road had done the same thing, a rare occurrence. It was a jittery ride the rest of the way. Oh, and there goes the power. Still haven’t from Amos, so just gonna kick it and read the paper. …
I am happy to finish this box of cereal. It is Golden Crunch, a Liberian cereal, and it tastes like cardboard. Just awful, though bearable with the right amount of milk. The milk, by the way, is not refrigerated until it is opened. Some weird chemical contraption. So it’s not really milk in the conventional sense, but given how expensive other dairy products are, this seems to be a fair tradeoff. As for the cereal, I bought another Liberian cereal, possibly because it seems absurd to spend $7.50 on a smallish box of Frosted Flakes.
…
Ran into the super downstairs as I was headed to the car. Apparently something about a rock and the pipes…he was working on the water situation. On the ride in Amos and I listened to talk radio, where they were bashing the president again. Amos told me about how popular the footballer and presidential candidate George Weah had been back in the day: “When he came to the city to play soccer, crowds would line up in the street all the way from Robertsfield (the airport) to downtown to cheer for him. Those soccer matches were the only entertainment we had, the only things to make us happy during the war. At the games you could just think about the game, and not worry about the war at all.” Weah cashed on his popularity to run a strong campaign for president in 2005, winning the first round, but losing decisively to President Sirleaff in the run-off. Amos scoffs that Weah thinks he should be president. “He did not even finish high school. And even the high school he went to is not known for its academic achievement, but for the scholarships it gives to soccer and basketball players.”
…
The Minister of Social Welfare is in the house, and he has the most bizarre ringtone I’ve seen in some time: a beeping sound, followed by a computer-like voice stating “Excuse me, boss, you have a text message.” Mind you, that is his ringer when he is getting an actual call, not just a text message.
…
I got some leads on where to find a basketball, and will explore those possibilities as soon as possible. A random conversation on how money changers actually make money led the topic back to Myles, a well-respected journalist in these parts sort of run out of town after the Vice scandal. He had been writing a series of pieces on the Liberian economy, about how characters like fishermen, charcoal producers and money changers got by day to day. Though I don’t have the journalistic talents (or time) to bring characters to life like he did, I would like to learn more about the people in the neighborhood when I get home. I’ve often engaged cart vendors and MTA employees in conversation, being as they are a captive interviewee most of the time. The old Sesame Street tune, “These are the people in your neighborhood” needs to be updated for modern times.
…
Wow. What a day. Our office had been called down to the police headquarters to process paperwork in the arrest of two check forgers from the Ministry of Health rank and file. We followed these young men from the custody of the police Montserado County Court was like regular court tripping on mushrooms. I sat in the spectator pews, waiting for the case of the Ministry of Health v. check forger dudes. They were only being arraigned, so I figured we wouldn’t be there that long, but I was about to be privy to a land dispute dating back to prewar times, a squatter’s rights case.
Arguing on one side, on behalf of “Princess”, was a short lawyer who I had been talking to in the hallway only minutes before he began his disastrous opening statement, in which he tripped himself up so badly his opposing counsel, a boisterous woman flush with attitude, got up from her plastic chair and yelled, “Your honor, counsel does not know the facts of this case!”
Neither lawyer lacked showmanship, the short lawyer pacing the courtroom like a pro, with a movie-like cadence. The problem was that he didn’t seem to know what he was doing half the time. The boisterous woman thundered at the crowd, this of course, not being a jury trial, while the judge tried to rub the migraine out of his head. At issue was some property that had fallen into dispute years before, though evidently they had all the paperwork right in front of them. A former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court who looked like Morgan Freeman was somehow involved in the case, and he wandered in and out of the courtroom grinning at people.
…
Other random, unidentified people approached the bench at various moments to chat with the judge who fanned himself with a notepad, taking his glasses on and off for dramatic effect. At one point the symphony of cell phone rings, background chatter, gavel pounding, oration and typewriter banging gave you the feeling of a Chumbawumba concert, or some bizarre off-Broadway musical. Once the daze of the disbelief wore off, and the heat and smell started getting to me, I wondered when our case would be up. There was no docket, but our defendants did sit handcuffed about twenty feet from me. I stepped into the hallway to take a breather when BAP!! A loud sound thundered in the courtroom, causing dozens of people loitering in the hallway to rush for the courtroom entranceway. Turns out no one was shot, one of the lawyers had just reclined too far in his plastic chair, causing it to snap.

February 16, 2010
Oh well, turns out the basketball hoop is too small. The hoop earned a revisit after a trip to the sporting goods store, where the cheapest basketball was a staggering $45. The store owner treated the balls like pieces of art, or perhaps hookers, spreading them in a fancy layout and saying things, “this one’s lovely, you can have her for $50.” Even the cheapest option required more cash than I carry on me in Monrovia, so I pledged to return the next day. Before committing such an extravagant purchase, I decided to go back and look at the ‘court’, mostly to ensure that the rim was stable and that the pavement wasn’t being used exclusively as a parking lot. It sort of was, and while the rim was surprisingly unbent, it was also super small. Picture a double rim, but just smaller. If a regulation sized ball was dropped from directly above it, the ball would go in, but it would be frustrating and embarrassing to shoot around and miss at least 95% of my non-lay-ups.
…
Last night, beaten up as usual from the day, I resigned myself to two mindless tasks- exploring my new TV channel and downloading songs and coming to understand where the expression ‘surfing the internet’ came from. In places where internet reception is really spotty you have to quickly rush to take advantage of bursts of internet, using them to log-in to sites, downloads things and send emails. Then you coast on that wave of internet until it dies. Reminds me of how a surfer swims manically into a wave, and rides it down, ending up afloat in calm waters. Some American TV is unacceptable even in Liberia, but House is kindof borderline. I’ve never gotten into any medical show, even as a guilty pleasure, even though my teenage years were the peak of E.R. After last night, House will not be in the rotation. On the other hand, I hope and pray that West Wing is on every night, because that would rock my world.
A masterfully written show, it appeals to a lot of people, but irresistibly to political junkies, specifically Democrats who came of political age during the Bush years. Alternate universes are sweet, although perhaps we thought President Obama would be a bit more like Martin Sheehan and less like Hillary Clinton. The West Wing is one of my ten favorite shows ever, a list that will be potentially challenged if I get into Mad Men over the summer (not sure I will- kind of loathe marketers). In reverse order, my ten favorite shows of all time:
10. Saved By The Bell
9. West Wing
8. Aqua Teen Hunger Force
7. Family Guy
6. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
5. Simpsons
4. Thirty Rock
3. Seinfeld
2. Arrested Development
1.The Wire
I decided in the end to not count favorite TV shows from my childhood- that’s a whole separate category, with Saved By The Bell and The Simpsons serving as something of a bridge.
…
The downloads tonight went great. I’ve always liked Joni Mitchell’s voice, but I never really got into her songs. Turns out I was missing out. “Both Sides” and “Circle Game” were among the excellent tunes I picked up, but the real treat was “Angel in the Morning.” That songs got something. And to think that all these years I’ve loved the Shaggy hit “Angel”, not realizing it was sampling Joni. What really makes “Angel” is the chorus line, “closer than my peeps you are to me.” For Shaggy, or any guy, to say that to a girl, is quite meaningful. As dudes are pretty serious about our peeps- I know I always have been, and I would not say such a thing lightly.
...
Another download tonight was the 2003 Nas hit “I know I can (be what I wanna be)”, his gushingly uplifting anthem for inner-city children. The irony of that song for me is that I’m unable to displace it in my memory from the place where I used to hear it- the weeknight Chi Gam basement scene. If there was any place that epitomized the death of dreams and being whatever you wanted to be, it was the Chi Gam basement after midnight on a Tuesday.
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I may be a complete amateur at this writing game, well short of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 genius hours, but I share something in common with one of my all-time favorites, Kurt Vonnegut, in the tremendous difficulty I’m having in writing down the pieces I care about most, the one that’s been rattling around my head the longest. In his case it was Slaughter House Five, the deeply person, largely non fictional account of his World War II experience, which he spent tens of thousands of discarded words on before settling down to publish a version that satisfied him more than two decades after the experience. Hopefully it won’t take me that long to right something compelling about Biloxi.
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Had lunch at Evelyn’s, so far the best upscale restaurant that I’ve been to. When it comes to food I'm more quantity than quality anyway. The idea of spending $25 at a New York City restaurant and leaving hungry has always struck me as preposterous. The downside of Evelyn's is that it is on Broad Street, which is just a hellish place at mid-day- hot, packed, and full of the busiest traffic in Monrovia. Finally had my Bong Fries. They look and taste sort of like French Fries, but are drier, more substantive, and feel healthier. They’ll never hit the spot like McDonald’s fries, and frankly I prefer plantains as a side. Going “into town” for lunch is such a trial that I’ll probably stick with my three-meal rotation of the cafeteria, the Liberian café up the hill and falafels for a couple more weeks.
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Major news on the post-Liberia front. As some of you know, few things have stirred the blood than the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United. I’ve decided that upon returning, the ideal work to occupy my time from May until I return to Hogan in December is to work on litigation and organizing in response to this case. Until today my main lead was a project the NLG was doing, but I imagine that will be part-time work. Public Advocate DeBlasio’s office is allegedly doing something around the issue, but I haven’t heard back from them yet. When I have more regular phone access I will reach out to Congressman Grayson- it’s long overdue that he and I got together. Today, however, I made some true forward progress. Last night I emailed three top attorneys leading the fight against corporate influence, all of whom are now spearheading the response to Citizens United. One of them is the Legal Director of the Free Speech for People Campaign, and he got back to me this morning. I forsee myself doing a lot of work with that group, as they are into both the legal and organizing response needed for this counter-attack to have any chance. Another, an American University law professor, wrote me back an equally helpful message, and I’ll soon be in touch with him as well. If anyone has suggestions, as in, specific contacts, working in this area, would love to follow up with them too.
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By the way, the air conditioning has been broken all day, again, here at the office. Everyone is asleep again. I haven’t had a truly productive day in a week, though tomorrow promises to be busier. Captain Jack will get me high tonight.
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February 17, 2010
During Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, it is untrue that he remarked, “This really is a Great Wall,” but the apocryphal story is too good to die. I took my own trip to the Great Wall last night, to check out one of the main Chinese digs in town. The food was excellent, and the best bang for buck I’ve found among the upper end eateries. It was no Silk Road of course, in that the white boxed wine did not flow freely, but I’ve stayed away from the grape juice as much as possible in Liberia, because wine hangovers are no fun in 90 degree weather.
I learned a new phrase on the radio today. During a surprisingly erudite debate on the need for a full constitutional convention, one Liberian Senator tried to interrupt the other, but she pleaded, “I’m coming,” meaning that she was almost finished with her statement. Within an hour of being at work, someone used the phrase on me. Instead of being perplexed, since we weren’t going anywhere, I just waited for him to think about my question a little longer.
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This morning was agonizing, as we got stuck reviewing a befuddling legal document. Every time he wanted to make a point, John would say, “but listen to this,” and then read entire passages out loud very slowly, perk up and raise his eye brows, then make the point he could have made from the beginning. The whole reason we were stuck on this project was that some Dutch doctor had dropped this project in our laps with almost no notice and no clue. John remarked, “She is paid well, and so people expect her to do things she does not know how to do.” He didn’t mean it as a maxim, but the longer I live the more I see how human and flawed everybody is. Our expectations of another person should never be much higher than what we’d expect of ourselves, especially when you factor in for everyone’s inclination for self-preservation.
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I spent much of the day actually working on said project, with detours to flesh out my Bull Moose project, which everyone will be hearing heaps about quite soon. There was a bit of a fiasco this afternoon when a truck arrived at the Ministry, allegedly with a bunch of computers, photocopiers and other machinery. However, it turned out to be almost completely empty, suggesting foul play at customs (it was shipped from the U.S). Apparently Customs here is notorious for stealing shit. All-round it was not a great day for the government, which is already facing a myriad of corruption scandals, and was slammed today by a U.N report declaring that 75% of Liberians lack access to clean drinking water, and that much of rural Liberia faces a drastic shortage of teachers. Several schools cited in the report had hundreds of students being taught by two volunteer teachers who survived off donations from thankful parents. I can understand criticizing a developing government for corruption, but stuff like this is tough to slam President Sirleaff for. I find it hard to believe that she would not deploy more water piping and teachers to the rural areas if she had resources.
Money is tight around here though, especially when your computers are being stolen. John told me today that he hasn’t had a vacation in four years, since he started working for the government. He technically has a month of vacation, but he says work is too intense to take so much as a week off at a time. He’s going to love the LLM program if he decides to do that in a year. Even the hapless sidekick earned some sympathy today. The “attorney” who cannot be bothered to put down his newspaper or stare absent-mindedly into space during meetings apparently is no longer being paid by the American Bar Association. That’s not to say he’s a deserving hire in these hard times, but there is a limit to what you can expect out of an unpaid middle-aged lawyer.
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The good life is picking up a little bit. I headed to Boulevard Café after work, which I’ll probably do again tomorrow. Decent internet, cheap beer, premier league soccer. It’s like going home without the commute. Hung out there for an hour before Monrovia Trivia Quiz, which is THE expat place to be. Over a dozen teams crammed into Taj’s restaurant, where an assortment of questions were shot onto a projector, booze and Indian food abounding. It was healthily competitive, and I enjoyed my team, which consisted of young lawyers from the ILO and the Carter Center. We hope to reassemble some of it tomorrow night at Boulevard Café for some Olympics watching. I’m more of a Summer Olympics guy myself, but I could use a change of place. I almost vomited when I came home to Wolf Blitzer. Better no TV at all than hearing him speculate on “the rise of the new conservative ascendency.” He does remember that the conservatives who drove the country into the ground have been out of power less than two years, right? Wait till he sees what we have in store for him. …

Liberian Dispatch 3

Dispatch 3
February 10, 2010
Folks, I write this morning with great joy in my heart. It’s not for the internet access that I should always have from this point forward, $130 later. No, I celebrate this morning because Bonnaroo announced the lineup for its 2010 festival, which will be from June 10 to June 13 in Manchester, Tennessee. Last year’s event was one of the highlights of the year, four days of awesome music and hanging out with some of the chillest strangers around, living the dream in a tent under the hot Tennessee sun. The marquee acts for this year include Jay-Z, Stevie Wonder, Weezer, the Gaslight Anthem, LCD Soundsystem and most awesomely, the Flaming Lips performing the Dark Side of the Moon album. The announcement of the lineup spurred me into having an old fashion music tournament, which after this morning is in the quarter finals. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s when I pit my favorite songs of the month against each other in a single elimination tournament. Don’t worry, most people think it’s weird. That won’t stop me from announcing the results.
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Went on a big water shopping run yesterday, and should have enough to last me a while. I was drinking a bottle of water last week in Mamba Point when I noticed some Arabic writing on it. Curious, I read the label, which said the water was “Naturally filtered through the geological layers of the Sannine mountain of Lebanon.” Lebanon? “It’s sad,” my roommate commented. “We live in one of the wettest countries in the world, but we have to import our bottled water from a landlocked country in the desert thousands of miles away.” In general it’s a depressing fact, but partnering with Lebanon is not a coincidence. The Lebanese are big players here, controlling much of the real estate and supermarkets. This is a source of some tension in the community. There must be a healthy number of Liberians who think at first glance that I am Lebanese, but no Lebanese think so. This recalls my summer in India, where foreigners thought I was a local, but locals knew I was a foreigner, leading to periods of isolation.
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A word about the roads in this country, which until very recently all dirt. In fact, a word about “this country.” As you read the passages in this dispatch, please keep in mind that Monrovia, the capital city, 30-40% of the population, is by far the most developed party of the country. The rural areas are on tough times in every quantifiable sense. That said, Monrovia’s system of paved roads has dramatically improved in the last few years, and worker downtown are working feverishly to finish a couple new ones before the start of raining season this spring. I’d approximate that over two-thirds of the roads I use on a daily basis are paved, and since most of them were paved relatively recently, they are smooth and pothole free, if not very crowded during rush hour. In contrast, the dirt roads are full of pits and stones that jostle you cartoonishly whether you drive fast or slow. President Johnson Sirleaff is proud of her roads- the main thoroughfares in town are peppered with signs boasting of new, taxpayer supported roads. Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that her road anthem is falling on deaf ears. “Most people simply don’t have cars,” someone explained to me. “They don’t see how roads affect them.” Interestingly, the local paper this morning suggested just the opposite. In an article on the used t-shirt industry, many local business owners praised roads for bringing commercial goods into the countryside, allowing economies to grow. Whether the poor folks who buy goods transported by roads make this connection is unclear. When I was in Panama I learned that the president was riding a wave of populist support over his paving of roads, but Liberia makes most of Panama look affluent by comparison.
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‘Be a good citizen pay your taxes’ billboards messages are another ubiquity on these roads, a necessary motivator in a country desperately in need of revenue but low on regulatory ability. To some extent we face this vicious cycle in the United States- when government funding is cut at regulatory agencies due the economy, many financially or socially damaging activity is able to flourish, at a greater net loss than the cost of regulation. The consequences can range from petty street crime to financial charlatans sending the entire economy into a recession. Anyway, these highway posters speak for themselves- I’ll take pictures before I’m through.
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John is putting his foot down- we need a new air conditioner. Our little unit cools the room decently to start the morning, but the relentlessness afternoon sun wears it down. By the end of the day the mugginess is so pervasive that it’s hard to tell if the unit is working at all. This is what drives John to sleep, me to spider solitaire, his administrative assistant to another room, and his alleged lawyer sidekick to read the newspaper till he too falls asleep. That character, whose name I still don’t know, is comically averse to work. He comes to work without a laptop or a notebook, and spends the little time that he’s not on the phone or reading the newspaper questioning why an assignment John gives him is necessary. John frequently has to tell him to pay attention during meetings, like some aloof ten-year old. Oh, sweet, here comes a request. It’s about air conditioning…nah, the admin assistant has been sent to do it instead. That guy is a solid dude who sometimes picks me up my breakfast of fish, yams and plantains. He has the same last name as John, Wilson, which is convenient, because it means “Wilson” is usually around.
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Alright. All three other people in the office are asleep, and the internet is down “because it is the afternoon.” Back to spider solitaire. Hope I’ve still got the skills that carried me to a 60% winning percentage on “medium” difficulty. Yep, still do. Three in a row, son. It looks like things have broken up here an hour early, the heat is just too much, and tomorrow is a national holiday- Armed Forces Day. Tonight I’ll be heading to the Boulevard Café, one of the premier expats digs in town, with good wireless and pizza. I have plans to actually hang out with someone, so that’ll be a refreshing change.
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I have military spending on the mind this afternoon. We all recognize that Ronald Reagan’s “God, guns and lower taxes” mantra was political gold in the 1980s, and he made it easy for all subsequent politicians to hold the military as a sacred cow outside the normal debate over taxing and spending. This is folly, of course, what Brett Martin would call a classic example of politicians being incentivized to do the right thing for their reelection prospects rather than the right thing for their country. In 2010, the United States will spend $657,000,000,000 in military expenditures, easily than more than the rest of the discretionary budget combined.
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We all know these are hard economic times, and that our government needs to watch its spending, but President Obama ludicrously suggested that his gimmicky three-year spending freeze not apply to the Pentagon. He must not have noticed the exorbitant and wasteful military contracting taking place in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He probably is well aware of the wasteful weapons programs around the country- when he tried to slice a couple of particularly useless ones a few months ago he was accused of ‘ravaging the military’ by Republicans, even though his Pentagon budget was still the most expensive ever. Military spending has been hammered in as a third rail in American politics, but that has to stop. Surely some more sunlight and scrutiny would yield tremendous savings without altering military strategy in the slightest. Think of the prevalence of no-bid contracts during the Bush years, many of which are still in place. There is nothing fiscally responsible about a no-bid contract. Another issue is the hundreds of military bases the U.S have around the world. As ludicrous as it seems to have major bases in Japan and Germany, I understand that the military wants to have regional bases to facilitate transporting troops in and out of combat zones. But when you have 737 overseas bases, NOT including Iraq and Afghanistan, surely they are not all necessary. As a final thought on military spending, it’s worth noting that the military is also the largest government sponsored jobs program we have. When President Bush, yes, that President Bush, tried to close down a useless navy shipyard in Massachusetts and an equally useless plane manufacturing base in South Dakota, Ted Kennedy (D) and John Thune (R) mounted a successful bipartisan offensive to stop the closings. No one wants his state to lose jobs, even at the cost of billions to United States taxpayers. I would love to hear back from people on this issue. As Obama would say, from my friends on the left, I would love to hear where they would begin in slicing and dicing this monstrous budget, and what sources they rely on for Pentagon monitoring. From my friends on the right, I’d love to hear first a single argument for why military spending should not be subject to the same “freeze” and general scrutiny as the rest of the non-discretionary budget, and second, how your fiscal principles apply to the bloated military budget.

February 11, 2010
Last night was great- hung out with a great, eclectic crew, my first weeknight session since arriving in Monrovia. We were at the Boulevard Café, a well known western haunt that has good pizza, decent internet, Premiere League soccer, and plenty to drink. I was working the local Club Beer, the only one at the table doing so. At $2 a bottle it seemed hard to pass up, but I didn’t have to wait till this morning for the sluggish headache I was warned about. I’ll see those folks again on Saturday night, and pending the outcome of that, we have plans to hit up the golf course outside the Firestone Rubber factory on Sunday. It’ll be my first time on the course in many years, which is a shame, because golf is one of those rare sports that are fun both to suck and excel at.
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Today is National Armed Forces Day, and that means the day off. Ah yes, the first national holiday. My predecessor said she experienced five during her two months here, and though I’m not certain how many I have, I know there are two in mid-March that I’m trying to convert into a roadtrip with some peeps to Free Town, Sierre Leone. Free Town is apparently as dangerous as Monrovia, as Sierre Leone was pretty much roped into this civil war at various points, but its supposed to have some of the most immaculate beaches in Africa, and we know people there. I mean, clearly “I” don’t know anyone there, but I’ve got people who have people.
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I felt like garbage when I woke up this morning, not just hungover (I didn’t have many drinks), but like some kind of fever was coming on- you know, the kind you can put down if you treat your body responsibly the first day you feel it, or totally exacerbate by ‘pushing through it.’ Must be the Club Beer
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New York is legendary for its ability to convince people that going to work and half assing a day is more important than resting in bed, even for a few extra hours in the morning. I set out my solitary goal for the day- to be a lighter so I could cook some pasta. It was an innocuous enough assignment. I’ve never been one for big military parades, and I didn’t know how I’d get to that part of town anyway. Plus, I’ve been meaning to check out the Congo Town market for a few days now. As it turns out, not one street vendor or local store within walking distance of me sells lighters. I have to admit, that was a little surprising. It turned out not to matter- I acquired matches, and then attempted to light my stove, which did not work. The rest of the shopping adventure was quasi-eventful. The market was crowded and photogenic for the enterprising among us, but everyone was selling the same thing, and it didn’t look that appetizing. Outside the market I reaffirmed my belief that the biggest threat I face to my safety in Liberia is reckless driving. Ok, so all this pasta, and no stove. I do have a water boiler, it comes with the room and is surprisingly effective. I dumped some dry pasta into the water boiler, and that cooked it decently enough for sauce and oregano to obscure the difference.
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By late afternoon I was feeling a little bit better, and got to working on this big progressive treatise I’ve been dabbling with since the flight over here. I won’t say much about it now, but if these entries are any indication, on some topics I have a lot to say, and this treatise will be something of a cathartic culmination, a decade of successes and, more often, failures in the progressive movement. In doing background research I came across Teddy Roosevelt’s “Standing At Armageddon” speech, which I consider one of the best political speeches ever given. I’ll write at greater length about it some other time, but his candidacy was unique to American history: he was running as a third-party outsider taking on the system, but this only a few years removed from being one of the most popular presidents in American history. His criticisms of the system come not “from closet study, or as a mere matter of theory; I have been forced to it by a long experience with the actual conditions of our political life.” I’ve also reread Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which is a stark reminder about how controversial and daring a man he was, and how hard the civil rights struggle was before it cozied up in American history books as a pleasant march down the street.
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Here are the results of the music tournament for the songs that placed 20-9: 20. Strange Overtones (David Byrne) 19. Walk of Life (Dire Straits) 18. Heart’s a Lonely Hunter (Thievery Corporation) 17. Growing Up (Bruce Springsteen) 16. ’59 Sound (Gaslight Anthem) 15. Come Sail Away (Styx) 14. New Slang (Shins) 13. Gone Daddy Gone (Violent Femmes) 12. Werewolves of London (Warren Zevon) 11. What a Wonderful World (Ramones) 10. Radio Nowhere (Bruce Springsteen) 9: You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Meatload)
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Needless to say, these music tournaments involve a lot of rules, but for your purposes, the two governing rules about participation are that the songs must have been on my playlist with some frequency in the last month, and no former tournament winners can participate, which explains the absence of songs from bands like Arcade Fire, the Talking Heads and the Clash. Today I held the quarter finals, and following songs, all excellent contenders, were taken out: 8. Time to Pretend (MGMT) 7. Electric Avenue (Eddy Grant) 6. Modern Love (David Bowie) 5. Bad Days (Flaming Lips) The four songs left in the semifinals are Running on Empty (Jackson Browne), Fight Test (Flaming Lips), Paper Planes (M.I.A) and Miles Davis and the Cool (Gaslight Anthem). There’s a back-story to each of these songs- “Running” is a rock classic that somehow escaped my playlists all these years, and it’s a real get you going in the morning tune. I’ve been on something of a Flaming Lips kick lately, and with them starring at Bonnaroo, it would be fitting for one of their one to take home the win. “Paper Planes” would be the first song by a female vocalist to win one of my tournaments since 2005, when the Sugarcubes “Birthday” (Bjork’s band) dominated the field. Ever since my friend Jodie pointed out that my Itunes collection contained very few female artists I’ve been working on it, but outside the pop scene, which doesn’t interest me, I could stand to get a few recommendations from people. The Gaslight Anthem is one of the best young bands in America, and I started listening to them on the strength of their two great singles, but like most bands you start digging, it’s this more developed sleeper song I’ve really gotten into.
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The power in here just went out, plunging every direction into total darkness. It’s for this reason that I packed a flashlight. Now that the power’s back on I’m also charging up this computer- it may be called on down the road to provide an additional source of light. Tonight I ordered from Mona Lisa, the best pizza place in town. The same person I ordered from on the phone personally delivered the pizza on his motorcycle, so I don’t know how big an operation it is. The pizza was good- cheese in this country is so expensive that I can’t drench every meal of the day with it like I do back home. In fact, other than the three pizza-based meals I’ve had since arriving, I don’t know if I’ve had any cheese. Mona Lisa was pretty damn expensive, but pizza is a privilege I will pay for. People say the easiest way to save money is to cook, but you need to have an established kitchen for that. I look forward to getting a new apartment back in New York that I can call home for at least 2-3 years, because this practice of needing to buy cooking materials, cleaning materials, spices, etc., etc., really reduces the financial efficacy of cooking.
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February 12, 2010
I write this the next morning, having crashed hard at 10pm and slept for 12 hours, catching up on hours of rest for the first time. Talking about work has become more difficult in this setting, as I engage in two projects full of intrigue that confidentiality requires I not discuss. Attorney-client confidentiality is one of the perks and annoying temptations of being a lawyer. In one of the cases, the relevant paperwork simply cannot be found. Though I am well aware why, John constantly feels the need to remind me that during the war, all paperwork was lost, destroyed or stolen. “After the war sometimes you could find it lying around on the ground outside of government buildings, or just go to the market and buy it by the bundle. The government needs to offer rewards for people to bring it in from their homes. That’s what private lawyers have been doing for a long time to complete their records,
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This Ministry, it was empty when we showed up after the war. It was like the whole building, the whole country was turned upside down. Feces everywhere. Wires pulled out of the walls. Pipes destroyed. It was nothing but an empty, dirty set of walls.” … Now that I am in Liberia, I can discuss Norman Siegel’s client, State Senator Hiram Monserate, aka the Face Slasher. Norman is defending him on the grounds that the New York State Senate doesn’t have the right to expel someone from their midst just because he is a terrible person for a variety of reasons. On the other side of the argument is State Senator Eric Scheiderman, a progressive who I have tremendous respect for, and will support in his effort to replace Andrew Cuomo as Attorney General. Though the two argue about the constitutional right for the State Senate to expel its own members, it seems like Norman has the stronger legal argument. This will be, in the words of the District Judge assigned to it, “a fascinating case.” I don’t have time to lay out the full details here, but google it- it’s a juicy situation.
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After work a co-worker and I went to the Golden Beach, a trendy, pricey restaurant-bar on the Sinkor beach. After almost two weeks in the country, it was the first time my toes had touched the soothing beach sands. It reminded me of an ill-fated 2006 expedition. My brothers and I were in Germany for the World Cup, and were taking side-trips to neighboring countries on our Eurorail pass, including Italy. After fun times in Rome and Florence, we decided to part ways for a day. They would stay in Florence, and I would head down to San Viscerno. We had stayed with the same hostel company in both Italian cities, and on a poster I saw a third location on the Mediterranean. The poster show a guy and a girl talking through the window of a little hut on the beach. Having never set foot on a Mediterranean beach, running low on funds, and itching to get out of the hot city, I jumped on the next train to San Viscerno, with plans to rendezvous in Venice 36 hours later.
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Other than excursions into the Hungarian countryside, where I speak the language, this was about as off the beaten track as I’d been in Europe. No one at the sparsely populated station spoke English or had heard of this hostel. I wrote out the address to shove in peoples’ faces, and finally someone in broken English explained that I would need a taxi, and that it was about 12 kilometers away. I was incredulous. “No bus?” “No bus on Saturday.” Upset that paying for a taxi would partially defeat my thrifty goals, but without much choice, I hopped in a cab, and pulled into the outdoor hostel. The scene was grim. This place seemed to be a vacation spot for middle-aged, overweight, working class Italians, hardly a single young person in sight. A sad receptionist gave me the key to my hut. The hut was dark and windowless, problematic, as the light was busted- the only way to see anything was to prop the door open, letting in bugs and preventing privacy. No worries, I would just check out the beach. It turned out the beach was not on the hostel property at all, but a 15 minute walk across and down the road. Seething, but what could I do? I set off, determined to reach the water before sunset. After a while the woods cleared, and the splendor of the Mediterranean lay before me. It wasn’t the prettiest beach I’d ever been on, and the sandy was rocky and uncomfortable beneath my bare feet, the water too cold for swimming, but no matter. This was the famous ocean where Romans did once tread. Overwhelmed with history, I dove into the ocean, and as I dried myself off, I watched the fishermen down the beach reel in their lines for the day.
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That night I watched World Cup soccer with the hostel’s partisan clientele. This was before the ugly and awesome battle between Italy and the U.S, and obviously before people suspected that Italia would win the whole thing. In the morning I checked out about as fast as possible, and asked when the next bus was coming. “No bus?” “No bus. It is Sunday.” Livid, I refuses to call another cab, which would have upped the cost of my excursion to Florence-level prices. Having finished my bottle of water in the morning and skipped breakfast, I slung my duffel bag on my shoulders and marched in the direction of San Viscerno, twelve kilometers away, on the wet, rocky sand of the beach. If Roman soldiers could so march, so could I. By the time I go to town, dehydrated and drenched in sweat, it took my last reserve of energy to fish for the change necessary to buy and down the biggest carton of juice they had at the gas station on the border of town. One of the adventures you try to only have once.
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As you can tell, my arrival at Monrovia’s beach was not so fraught with drama, but rather, amusement. When it came time to order food, I was feeling like my first Liberian burger, so I asked the waiter what the “Golden Beach Burger” was. He replied, “Well, it’s the beef…and an egg on top. Pretty much everything…bacon…tomato…cucumber…” I interrupted, “Does it have cheese?” “Oh yeah, cheese, whatever you want, it has everything.” Suspicious, I greenlighted the order, and my coworker went with fish samosas. A few minutes later, a second waiter popped over. “Hi, this is my section. The waiter told me you ordered.” “Yes, did he tell you what we ordered?” “No, he just said that you did, and that I should check with you.” Somewhat amused, we repeated our orders. “Wait,” I quipped as he began walking away. “What is on the Golden Beach Burger?” “It’s ground beef, with ham and cheese.” “That’s it? Just ham and cheese?” “Yes, ham and cheese. That is why it’s called a Golden Beach Burger.” I decided to downgrade to a simple cheeseburger, which they cooked about right.
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For some reason Michael Jackson came up in conversation. “It was crazy in New York,” I explained. It might have been the biggest news story of the year- we were all glued to the TV.” “It was huge here too,” my coworker replied. “People were mourning, blasting his music in the street for a whole week.” That’s pretty crazy when you think about it. I’ve been pondering fame ever since I heard Lady Gaga on the radio within an hour of landing in Liberia. Whether we’re talking about musicians, athletes or political figures, it’s pretty wild how a certain amount of talent and skill will fall short of a recording contract or a chance to play in the big leagues, but a few notches up you have fans literally all over the world. Sometimes the adulation is more warranted than other times. President Obama is not only of African descent, but he is the leader of the free world, so bumper stickers on local taxis bearing his name are at least partially warranted. And Michael Jackson did spearhead the concerts for Africa, so I can see why he’d be a hero over here. But Lady Gaga and Sarah Palin- what strange pretenses brought them to these shores?
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Amos had been waiting for us to finish dinner. We dropped off my co-worker first. She lives by the bridge that takes you out of downtown Monrovia into the ramshackle suburbs, and there is usually a huge crowd of people waiting for the bus to take them across the bridge. I saw the bus coming, and noted that they clearly wouldn’t all fit. “They’ll catch the next one,” Amos replied. “It will come in about an hour.” Damn. An hour between buses meant the madness of India was coming. People would hang out of doors and windows. I told Amos about my experiences on the Mumbai trains, including the first time a dude casually sat in my lap when he couldn’t find space. He laughed, “Yeah why not sit on someone’s lap, it’s better than standing.”
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Soon after getting home I got a text inviting me out clubbing. Clubbing is really not my thing, but maybe it would be different in a foreign country. But I rarely enjoy dancing at clubs with friends, and I certainly didn’t have the energy or interest to dance with strangers. I almost got a second wind when I saw on Facebook that my friends, Midnight Spin, had played a show with Guns and Roses. Maybe I can have a crazy night too! Nah, I’ll wait till tomorrow. To bed I went. February 13, 2010 The trial of Charles Taylor is coming to an end. The war criminal is being tried for acts committed in Sierre Leone, rather than crimes in his own country, where he is still popular enough that his wife is being considered as a VP choice on the opposition party’s ticket. There have been several articles about the Liberian community, both here and in the U.S, showing a lack of interest in the trial, partly out of frustration that only crimes committed in Sierre Leone were charged, partly because people want to move on, and partly because The Hague is a somewhat ridiculous institution. I am all for providing fair trials to all accused, including war criminals and terrorists, but when Slobodan Milosevic’s trial went on for so long that he died before a decision could be rendered, you have problems. How long does it take these whiz-kid prosecutors to prove genocide? This is the 21st century- there is no lack of evidence.
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A friend commented about the Taylor trial while we were driving: “The Taylor trial fits really oddly with Liberian history. The revolution started against President Tolbert, who is on the currency. He was overthrown by Samuel Doe, who has the country’s main stadium named after him. Doe was opposed by Prince Johnson, who is now a Senator, and Charles Taylor, who is being prosecuted for war crimes. Is he really the only bad guy?”
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Multiple people have suggested that Charles Taylor would be a legitimate contender for the presidency if he ran, even though he overthrew one government, engaged in two bloody civil wars and is on trial for war crimes. The opposition party to President Sirleaff has not put forward an agenda of its own, but instead is banking on dissatisfaction with the incumbent and the empty charisma of their candidate (sound familiar?). In their case, that is embodies by former soccer star George Weah. Amos shook his head as we listened to the radio. “This country has so many problems, what we don’t need right now is a soccer player in charge of the country.” Especially a soccer player who has openly discussed putting Charles Taylor’s wife on the ticket as his VP. She’ll make Sarah Palin look peace prize worthy.
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That’s some heavy stuff for a pleasant Saturday afternoon. How about hearing the results of the Music Tournament? Fight Test (Flaming Lips) and Running On Empty (Jackson Browne) both went down in the semifinals. In the finals, Miles Davis and the Cool (Gaslight Anthem) triumphed pretty easily over Paper Planes (MIA). On an unrelated note, I was listening to the Clash song “Straight to Hell” this afternoon, and found its intro very similar to “Paper Planes”. If you have both songs, check it out. These music tournaments were for many years a monthly occurrence. How often I do them these days is dictated by the influx of new music I listen to, which will probably be limited in a country where downloading is nearly impossible. Though they are usually solo affairs, I have partnered with multiple people over the years, most notably with Guillermo in the Great Indiana Road Trip Tournament of 2006.

View from our balcony in Mamba Point

Liberian Dispatch 2

Thank you for your responses to Dispatch 1. I'll address a couple of them in a separate post. Below is the next set of reports- as always, questions and comments welcome.

February 6, 2010
For assistance, contact the person who manages your network. Who the hell would that be? They don’t exactly provide you their contact numbers. What a dumb error message. … Drinking sangria on the porch with some expats last night, I saw a bird fly by and commented that I had seen virtually no animals of any kind since arriving on Sunday. The reply: “There are a lot of hungry people in Monrovia.” This spawned multiple stories of expats as passengers in cars deliberately aiming for animals on the road so locals would have something extra to take home to dinner. “I stopped my driver from hitting a chimpanzee once,” one said. “And everyone gave me dirty looks for the rest of the ride.”
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Last night my roommate and I went to Mamba Point Hotel, one of the three luxury hotels in town. We ate sushi in a restaurant that felt like a retro diner. The bill came out to $26 a person, including a glass of wine, not bad for the fanciest restaurant in town. The scene in the restaurant was odd, but not as odd as the casino, which was a tacky little scene (aren’t casinos always adorably so?) filled with Chinese businessmen who have come to take over Liberia. As someone explained to me, “There’s only 3.5 million of us, and most of us are poor. It will not take very much effort for China to control everything.” “Taking over” Liberia is clearly within the United States’ capability too- for a sneak preview there’ the Firestone Rubber Plantation. For those who don’t know, we get much of the rubber for our tires from rural Liberia. After decades of human rights abuses, Firestone has consented to provide education, running water and a hospital to the workers there. For the more affluent they have also opened a golf course and a nice restaurant. Generally, however, we don’t have China’s zeal for exploiting third world mining opportunities, that was so last century.
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We live in a secure compound, but random Liberians have been waltzing in and out of here all day. Six so far. I presume the most recent wave are here to fix the washing machine, which for the last three weeks has apparently made everyone’s clothes wet, but not clean. I had envisioned Saturday as a serene day of respite, but the sound of loud drilling and a heat that overpowered my AC drove me to the living room, which is the latest frontier in the ants’ war to take over this apartment. The last thing I need is for these critters to fuck up my laptop all crawling up inside it. My roommate gave me a book on Liberian English, which I’ll study tomorrow morning before I move into my new digs. It’s still astonishing that I can understand such a low percentage of a typical conversation between two Liberians.
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February 7, 2010
Last night was an epic rage, and a slightly risky one in that I don’t really know anyone in this country. As I write this, a movie is playing on the TGH lounge TV in Hindi, with Arabic subtitles. I don’t think any of the employees here know either language, and I’m the only customer, but when you only have four channels your options are limited. This Bollywood channel exists to serve the middle-class Lebanese. The other three channels are CNN International, which is heaps superior to CNN in terms of delivering quality news programming, a sports channel that plays mostly soccer, and a music video channel that plays predominantly Christian reggae music. It is highly disappointing that the internet is down here. I’ve already come to terms with it not working in my room, which is a bummer, but it worked so well in the lounge when I visited the compound. Sending out the Dispatch will have to wait until tomorrow, which is just as well, because it allows time to generate the content for Dispatch 2. Interesting, the Bollywood movie, otherwise entirely in Hindi, uses English only in the courtroom scene for motion procedures (“Objection sustained!”). I have just ordered the $10 pasta, which will be a quite common dinner for me unless I learn to cook. Depending on the quality, it could be a pretty strong motivator.
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The occasion last night was a going-away party for an ex-pat, held at the beautiful abode of the CEO of Lonestar, the primary cell phone service network in the country. It was as pimp a place as I’ve seen yet in these parts. His compound has a house, a garage, a pool, a partly enclosed patio with a full bar and a great outdoor speaker system, attended to by a retinue of servants. We were among the first guests, and got to take in the bar in its full glory, which was an awesome spectacle. There were about ten bottles of gin, twenty bottles of whiskey, forty bottles of wine and three coolers of beer. It was more stocked than our humble Brooklyn parties, to be sure, even though it ultimately ending up having the same number of attendees, if not fewer. … I made small talk with a couple peeps, including a South African working in hospitality willing to discuss World Cup strategy. He scoffed at the sensationalized Western media, reporting on only the bad in South Africa, reporting that European tickets for the Cup were still not sold out. “South Africa is a modern country, go around and it’s like any European country,” he confidently asserted, before conceding that he had never been to Europe, or any other country besides Liberia
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So when you typically hear about an afternoon pool party, you imagine it dying down by the evening, an assumption that caused me to calculate the pace of intake quite erroneously. But when you are in a pool under the hot African sun, sipping scotch from a floating table, you are living the dream and kicking your cares away. It wasn’t until quite late in the evening that I realized I was one toke over the line, throwing ice at people, creating all kinds of splashes, twirling the floating table like a French waiter. Really though, with the possible exception of a thrown beer can, which I’m not sure I actually did, most of my antics were pretty harmless, but I got a stern talking to from one of the hosts, who stressed that he was “going to ask me once nicely to tone it down.” I guess you are a true rager if you’re raging too hard for a South African party stocked with twenty bottles of whiskey. What did they think was going to happen? I left the pool in search of food, but it had all been eaten, at which point it occurred to me that I had had nothing but a bowl of cereal all day. I soon fell asleep in a poolside chair. When I woke up and made the rounds, multiple people chuckled that “people had taken pictures that would wind up on the expat listserv.” To this I retorted, “If the best picture people can get of me after eight hours of drinking whiskey is me asleep in a chair, I’ll count that as a win.” Ten of us piled into an NGO vehicle for a bumpy ride home, and I curled into bed for a peaceful final night of sleep in Mamba Point.
…
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: soccer will never truly catch on as a spectator sport in America because unlike all other popular American sports, it lacks signature moments of drama that you can hone in on. Spectacular moments can happen in any moment of any sports match, but in football when a team is in the red zone, in a basketball game’s final two minutes, when there are runners on base in baseball, during a tie break in tennis, that’s when you stop everything you’re doing and tune in. In soccer, goals can be scored at seemingly any time, but they almost never are. The closest thing they have to a ‘stop what you are doing’ moment is the corner kick, but these are very frequently unsuccessful. And while football TV timeouts, basketball end of game fouls and baseball pitching changes can annoyingly drag thing out, you need to have some breaks in a game to do things like answer the phone, go to the bathroom, get another beer, etc. In soccer, doing any one of those things could cause you to miss a goal, and that goal, in turn, maybe the only goal of the entire game. Incredibly, at the soccer game I went to in Argentina the jumbotron did not show replays, even of goal scored by the home team. Note that I am not knocking soccer. I loved playing it for many years, and should I deem myself in good enough shape, I’ll try playing some pickup here. Bill Simmons believes that two things will make soccer more popular in the next five years: American access to Premiere League games and high definition television, and on the latter point I tend to agree. Watching a soccer game, even with the improvements of the last few years, is like playing one of those old Nintendo games- all the players are miniature and the ball seems to ping off them. Though the ball frankly just travels too far and fast for great camera angles some of the time, I’m sure watchability will only increase. Why is drinkability a real word but watchability not?
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Breaking GREAT news. The Superbowl will be shown in my compound. The owner of the compound seems to have a part American part Liberian accent, so he’s probably repatriated. He’s hooked the TV up to ESPN. I’m pretty sure that in the states you can only get the Superbowl on CBS or whatever major network owns the rights these days, but it’s on slight delay, so maybe that’s how its broadcasted internationally. By the way, the pasta was ok, but was it worth $11? I’ll give cooking a try…
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Lest anyone chalk up these constant refrains about internet connectivity to whininess, as there are clearly bigger problems in third world countries, even for Westerners, let me explain. If you had told me that I would be stuck on a random island with no internet access, a ala my friend Anna in the Marshall Islands (she was limited to one hour a day for two years), that would probably be ok. I’d get into a rhythm about how to constructively use my time. Heck, brutal as access could be in India, wandering the dusty roads in search of a reliable internet café, when you finally sat down it usually worked good, and you could count on it as long as you could stand the sweltering basements filled with sixteen year old boys playing video games and downloading porn next to you.
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The problem is that the internet is constantly supposed to be working, when it isn’t. You stare at a page trying to load for five minutes before it fails completely. Whether at work or at home, much time is wasted trying to connect or reconnect, and approaches to the day are predicated on false assumptions. Unlike in the U.S, where the computer or home connection might have something screwed up, here the service itself can go awry, which leads to this icon in the corner taunting me that I am connected at a high speed, when nothing of the sort is true. It’s the same phenomenon that makes spending 14 hours in a New Orleans jail cell incredibly miserable. If someone tells you, ‘Hey, get ready to spend 14 hours in jail,’ you can brace yourself for an unpleasant day, but knowing only that you are in jail, with no idea when you will get out, or who knows you are there, that is what sucks.
February 8, 2010
Worn out from a long, hot weekend, I slept through the first half of the Super Bowl. For me the Super Bowl is about 50% about the social ritual, the same crew getting together at my friend Adam’s place like a mini New Years party. Another 25% is the commercials and the half-time show, and the final 25% is the football game, with exceptions, like Giants-Patriots. ESPN was broadcasting the game internationally, and while I could have had some company in the lounge, I was so wiped by the time the game started (close to midnight) that I was content to watch it from bed. The ESPN broadcast did not have sweet commercials or a halftime show; they instead had endless ESPN promos for other programming. Among these were advertisements for Wednesday and Friday night basketball, which I’ll definitely rearrange my sleeping schedule to watch at 2am Liberian time. Don’t know if Mr. Outland has committed to ESPN for the rest of the month tho…
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The game itself was a pretty good one- Drew Brees and Payton Manning were both impressive, Brees considerably more so in the second half. The game was remarkably devoid of flags, which can really break the flow of a game, and bad turnovers, until the final three minutes. Like a majority of the country, I was rooting for the Saints. A political poll I saw the game had Democrats supporting the Saints by a wide margin, Independents by a small margin, and Republicans by a single percentage point. … In 2005-2006, when I was working in Biloxi, I listened to 870AM New Orleans Radio when I was driving around, which was quite often. The New Orleans Saints lifted the spirits of a totally beaten city on their shoulders when they went 10-6 and battled into the second round of the playoffs that winter. They and LSU, which had an incredible football season that year (attending their homecoming was one of the wildest days I ever had in the south), gave people hope and something to rally around. When the cameras flashed to celebrators rejoicing the Saints victory on Bourbon Street I had to look away- the emotion still run very deep for me in those parts.
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There are minor problems in my new apartment: lack of hot water, a terrace door that doesn’t completely close (worry is mosquitoes), a closet that is locked with no key, and of course, the usual lack of internet access. John laughed when I recited this list. “This is Africa…this is Liberia!” “I know,” I replied. That’s why I said they were minor problems.” I hope to resolve these problems when I get home and still have time to hit up the Congo Town market while there is still daylight. It is a bustling hub near my compound, and I get the sense that if I spent an afternoon there I could find a lot of useful groceries and appliances on the cheap. However, the area is very poor, and I would feel uncomfortable traipsing around, flaunting my relative wealth after sunset.
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Woop! There goes the power. The power here shuts down at exactly 5pm. This is to tell government employees it’s time to go home. The power eventually comes back on for the busybodies who want to press on through. I’m still waiting for Amos to come get me. Today’s legal work involved some heavy lifting. I’ve been preparing a training workshop in administrative law for rural health administrators, but found out today that the 1976 Health Law, the main statute we use in our work, may have been superseded in this particular area by the 1983 Civil Service Act. Usually it is clear when laws supersede each other, but the latter law was passed under dictator Samuel Doe, with no regard to existing health law, and it is quite poorly written (in contrast to the 1976 law, which looks to have been penned with serious Western training or Western assistance). Meanwhile, another project that I thought involved routine contract drafting is actually a foray into a major political hornet’s nest. John explained the hornet’s nest to me, and it seems that for now I can be rest assured that I work for the hornets.
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Amos was kind enough to show me to the closest grocery to my place in Congo Town. Don’t let the Banking Center written outside it deceive you- this Indian run establishment is the place where I’ll be getting my goods from now on, though I lack many of the cooking utensils needed to make anything besides insta-stuff. The Congo Town market embodied the wheelbarrow scene Carrie Stanley had told me about- available for purchase on the barrows were t-shirts, soap, bananas, sunglasses, pretty much anything you need. Amos is legit, and we made plans to check out some restaurants in the future, at least that’s what I gathered. Tonight I’m going to try a Bangladeshi restaurant in Sinkor; am pretty hungry after I showed up to lunch late only to find that they were out of fish in the cafeteria. Deep down it was something of a relief- skipping lunch is irrational, but my stomach would probably come out net even on this situation. I try to eat lunch as late as possible as a matter of course, as it makes the afternoon ‘half’ of the work day shorter. This logic will not work at law firms, where any given evening can morph into an all-nighter, but it does just fine at the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare.
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First time hearing that song “In the Moonlight,” since I left India. The soundtrack, décor and ceiling fans all take me back. The food was so-so, but I ate a lot of it, and will be content to pass out and enjoy the AC back home, clearly the highlight of TGH, which by the way, is commonly known as The Guest House. I had been misled by the signage, which is apparently just an acronym. I deduced this with Alpha, who got slightly lost finding the place, as there are two American schools (the landmark of choice) in my immediate neighborhood. I wonder what about the schools make them American. You’d think it would be the presence of diplomat and U.N kids, but all the little Liberians I saw leaving the school compound this afternoon were walking back to their homes in the neighborhood. … There are actually many similarities between Monrovia and a number of Indian cities. The informal economy dominates, with little shops and street peddlers the place to go for most food and goods. Both have their share of corrugated shacks lining nearly every street and every dusty alleyway. By the way, I don’t think I really know what corrugated means. I know that a corrugated roof or a corrugated shack when I see one, but take away roofs and shacks and I don’t think I could use the word corrugated in a sentence. Can you? Send me your best corrugated sentence.
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Indian cities are very slum-heavy and poor, and in both the Indian and Liberian socio-economic hierarchy, the government-bureaucrat class not only has much of the wealth, but flaunts it quite lavishly in the form of chauffeured cars and fancy housing in prominent places. This couldn’t be more different in the United States, where talented people often have to be persuaded out of private practice to work in government, while lifelong government workers hardly rock out like high rollers. India has a pretty impressive public transportation system, but in cities like Mumbai and Delhi there are simply too many people for the busses and (in Mumbai’s case) trains to handle, which leads to a heavy reliance on auto-rickshaws, where are cheap and easy. In Monrovia, there are virtually no busses, and the vast taxi fleet transports everyone, not just Westerners. While I ride solo when someone like Alpha picks me up, the locals generally ride four or five strangers to a cab, which goes in a straight line up and down Tubman Boulevard for a fixed fee.
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Storytelling has been a bit of an issue here. At the pool party I went with a classic and a quickie but goodie- the Indian murder story and the lesson about how South Americans speak in rhyme. The response to both was quite muted. Having participated in a small handful of kicking back spinning the yarn sessions, it’s not that my stories aren’t good enough for the expat community here. Yes, most of the expats here have worked in an average of three other African countries, and have their own crazy shit to throw back at me, but it’s more in the delivery. The school of storytelling I come from, the Chi Gam stage, is an unforgiving place, where action is around every corner, questions seek answers, crescendos build, the actors bow and the curtain swoops in. The expat school of storytelling is deliberately nonchalant, touching down with a spoken or implicit, ‘yeah, pretty crazy, but you know, whatever, that’s New Years in Rwanda for ya,’ celebrating disengagement like the old school indie rock scene. I haven’t really tried out any of the great Rage stories, but I usually hold back on those stories unless I’m talking to friends or complete strangers. The expat scene here is finite, and I don’t want to come off like a jackass, especially to people who may have been hit with the far flung ice cubes launched from my shallow end of the pool bunker.
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Almost everywhere you go around here you can hear the hum of generators. They power nearly all the power in this country, if not all of it. The cost of buying and providing fuel for generators is one of the main reasons for the expensive state of the housing economy; most Liberians live without power of any kind. Most of the neighborhoods in Monrovia are truly painful to look at, because not only are the shacks hot, dusty and crowded, but there is garbage strewn about everywhere. Little canal boast not water, but a gross green sludge full of trash. The exhaust of cars and smoke from fires fill the air, rendering it almost unbreathable in certain places. Men, women and children lug around heavy loads on their heads. I’m always on the move, so I can’t answer this yet, but I’m curious how many goods any of these families sell in the market. Everyone seems broke, and the ratio of customers to vendors is not ideal. I’m sipping Club Beer, the official local brew of Monrovia, as I write this. It is not bad. Not bad.
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February 9, 2010 I am reading over the 2007 National Health Plan, which provides some background on the Liberian economy. Per capita GDP fell from $1,269 in 1980, right before the start of the civil war, to $163 in 2005. That is staggering, or, to use a word commonly employed in this report a precipitous drop. From 1991-2006 there was “virtually no public source of electricity or piped water.” People fleeing the war in the countryside flocked to Monrovia, which has grown from a prewar population of 500,000 people to roughly 1.3 million today. The literacy rate is less than 40%, and by 2004 only a third of children starting first grade made it to fifth (a number that I’m sure has improved considerably in the last few years). I could go on and on with depressing statistics, but I think that’s enough for now. On a positive, healthcare related note, this report, published in early 2007, had a goal of raising healthcare spending from $12 per capita to $18 per capita, but in a briefing last week we were told that spending is up to $29 per capita. You are reading those numbers correctly, by the way. Here is a sentence that applies to my particular line of work: “Drug regulation is deficient, and private dealers freely import, distribute and sell medicines. The circulation of counterfeit, substandard and expired medicine considerable.”
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The president is sinking in the approval polls. Can’t create jobs for the unemployed masses. The radio hammers at the president all day. An opposition party’s unlikely recent senate election victory has bolstered their belief that that they can take out the president in the next presidential election. One supporter pleads to me, “Under anyone else, it would be a million times worse. This is just a very, very difficult situation.” As you probably guessed by now, I am talking about President Ellen Johnson Sirleaff, Liberia’s embattled incumbent. She is bright, charismatic and hardworking, no question about it. Every day you can see new roads being paved, electric poles erected, hospitals and other building under construction. Unlike some presidents, she has a solid PR effort, with billboards constantly reminding voters of these achievements. Unfortunately, by all accounts, little of what she has done has trickled down to the poor Monrovians and the country people, who formed the base of opposition against her in 2005, and will again in 2011. Yesterday I had a meeting with an old Ministry official with a reputation for hostility, which was on display until I noticed the painting behind me- a mural of Ellen and Barack side by side. Under Ellen it read, “Liberia’s First Female President,” with her date of election, and under Barack it read, “America’s First African-American President.” I told her about my work on the Obama campaign and that seemed to soften her. “He’s having it so hard right now,” she sighed.
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“What did Sarah Palin have written on her hand?” Startled, I look at John, who smirks. “Here in Liberia we pay more attention to American politics more than you think we do.” I suppose any amount of attention paid to American politics is surprising, as Liberia is a complete non-issue in American politics. It’s not like Cubans, Israelis or Brits paying attention. I shiver to think that Palinism, even as a concept, has permeated foreigners impressions of us, though I suppose every country has its national political embarrassments; see Le Pen, France. A sometimes amusing cartoon strip at Dartmouth had Le Pen as one of its recurring characters, and of course he was a living, breathing, right-wing pen. That was a different cartoon strip then the one that mockingly depicted me as “President Che.” Sadly, I never met the kid who wrote that cartoon, but if the general tenor of his strip was any indication, he was a bitter person, who may or may not have clung to his guns and religion.
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An American girl and I were looking to order lunch, which is always a trial for her in Monrovia, since she is a vegetarian. We found a place that’s supposed to have good food, so we ordered to grilled cheeses with Bong fries. I was stoked to see what Bong fries looked like. A seemingly simple order, but she texted me “Somehow that was the most complicated order I’ve ever placed.” About ten minutes after that she called to let me know that the order had been canceled. The restaurant was out of bread.
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Cell phone etiquette in this country is worse than in the United States. There people still don’t know how to turn their cell phones off before theater performances, meetings and lunches. And by “off” I mean “on vibrate,” of course. Here, however, there is no meeting too important to be interrupted by an obnoxious ring. Between the poor reception and loud noise everywhere, the whole room can hear a cannonball of static from the other line, and the recipient has to shout back to make himself heard. The polite folks will yell “in meeting! In meeting!” before hanging up. I suppose part of the problem is that no one (literally no one) has voice mail, but you’d think peeps could put their phones on silent and returned their missed calls after.
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In studying up on the issue of corporate regulation I came across this fantastic quote from President Lincoln: The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the Bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.. corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed."
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I watched a soccer game tonight on ESPN. It looks like Mr. Outland is keeping the channel, which is essential. As legit as Cristiana Ananpour’s show is, CNN International is not much for entertainment. I did learn on her show that the Nigerian president had apparently gone missing for weeks in Saudi Arabia, leading to power struggles and limiting the country’s ability to deal with rebel fighters. Tough times. The other functioning TV stations are a Lebanese controlled station that shows Bollywood movies and soap operas, and a music video channel that plays uplifting Liberian Christian music. As for the soccer game, Barcelona won its Spanish League match easily despite picking up two red cards. Days after making my disparaging remarks about soccer on television I will have it thrust upon me, but after tonight I stand by my original assertions. One of Barcelona’s two goals was scored during a two minute break I took from the game to check on my insta-ready Indian food. I am not a sweet cook yet. …