Last Day!

2-7-13

Our last visit was to the THINK home. This is a pretty amazing place. It is a home and school for young mothers and their kids. Some of them are as young as 13. Many of them have been sexually abused and come from very vulnerable and difficult backgrounds. Here, though, there is a tangible sense of female community, safety, and support for these young mothers and their children. Aside from school, they are also trained to be seamstresses, bakers, or hairstylists so they can go back out into the world with marketable skills.

The girls went about their business as usual, caring for their children and doing chores in between classes and schoolwork. Cooks prepared the herring for lunch as we did observations and interviews, tried to stay out of the way, and riled up some cute kids. 

The outdoor classroom.

Mama and her baby.

 om nom nom

precocious as ever. 

So that concludes our work here for this trip. Last night I was chatting with a Liberian banker named Cromwell who asked me, "Will you ever come back to Liberia?" I said, "No, I can't really afford it unless I'm working here, so I doubt it." He said, "You can afford it. It's a question of whether you want to or not." Touche! Until next time, Liberia, its been incredible and unforgettable. 

Herring People

2-7-13

This morning we stopped in for a visit to the THINK home and JTC. This is a place for vulnerable youth who need a supportive and safe place to stay. Some of them are young girls who have been abused. Some kids as young as 5 have been basically forced into slave labor into roadside shops, and are brought here by the police. Rarely will they be reunited with their parents. These youth are a vulnerable group, and have been eating the herring for the past nine months.

Vivian Badu is the matriarch of this center. She is small and raspy-voiced and dynamic, and utterly in charge. She greeted us with a hug and then marched around the outdoor kitchen cooking a herring lunch for 26 people in 95-degree heat and 4-inch wedge heels. She wrenched open like 20 cans of herring with a knife, arm muscles bulging. 

We hung out in the courtyard and ate some rice with spicy Liberian herring gravy on top. When we left, a grinning 13 year old girl started singing, “Goodbye herring people….goodbye herring people!” It made us all laugh and I still have the tune stuck in my head. 

 This is how you mash up peppers. Peppers are a non-negotiable ingredient in Liberian food.

Vivian cookin' up a storm.

                                                     This was on the wall inside.

                                                   Dining on herring gravy with rice.

                                          Nicole loves kids and they love her!

Monrovia Snapshots

We are in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. It was named after US president James Monroe. Liberia is kind of a nation-child of America. English is the official language. It was settled by freed American slaves, the flag is really similar to ours, and they even say the same pledge of allegiance to the flag of Liberia. I haven't seen this, but apparently in some rural areas the architecture emulates old southern plantation houses, because that is what freed slaves knew. 

Anyway, its still a big African city, full of life and colors and smells and sounds and hectic energy. An expat we met saw a woman walking around carrying a hammerhead shark on her head the other day.

 Near downtown.

 Cars are a common place to proclaim your love for Jesus or God. People also like to put stuffed animals on the back shelf of sedans here....just like America.

 There are lots of abandoned/half-built buildings.

I have no idea

Gobatown!

2-5-13

     So we’re in Monrovia again, revisiting sites here that Nina and I visited in April of 2012. Lauren Wood, another nutrition consultant from GF&N, arrived this weekend and yesterday she, Nicole and I visited the Early Childhood Development center in Gobatown, about an hour outside of Monrovia. This is essentially a pre-school, a place for kids under five to receive education and an on-site meal. The kids here have been eating herring regularly for the past 9 months.

     Since our last visit, more of the kids have uniforms, and they have moved into a larger and newer building. They sang us a sweet welcome song, and then we went back to the outdoor kitchen to see the cooks preparing a large meal of herring stew and rice for the kids.

     Most Liberian food I’ve tried consists of a plate of rice with some sort of stew on top. The stew always has lots of spice from hot peppers (YUM), and a lot of oil. This stew had cassava greens, onion, peppers, herring, and oil. They brought the huge pot of stew and the huge pot of rice into the classroom and served the kids lunch, while mothers with little babies dined just outside the door. Nicole and Lauren chatted with moms and kids about how they liked the herring. Not surprisingly, people consistently said they liked it. 

     As usual, the kids were downright adorable. They gathered around Nicole and grabbed her hands, wiping them, almost like they were trying to wipe off her white skin and she would have brown skin underneath. Some kids were more afraid and suspicious than fascinated. A toddler started crying when I took his picture, which of course made me feel terrible because he was afraid of me, but his mom thought it was hilarious and kept telling me to take his picture. 

All in all a fun and successful visit!

 Someone had written this on the wall in the kitchen.

Lauren helps dish up lunch for the kids. 

 Loves the camera.

   

Seeing the light

1-31-13

     Today (January 31, 2013), we went back to the VCT center for people living with HIV. Nicole offered
some refresher training for staff about accurately measuring the heights and weights of people receiving herring. She also provided people with valuable nutritional advice and tips on how to prepare and use the herring, and cook it with protective foods like greens and orange-fleshed squash. As people stopped by to pick up their medication, we chatted with them about their experience with the herring. I spoke with a man named Moses, who had 7 children. He said that since he’s been coming to the VCT, he gets counseling in addition to his medicine. Moses told me, “They say not to feel bad, that there is a solution. They say scientists are working on this. I see the light, since I am coming here.” The VCT is a place for people living with HIV to get emotional and spiritual support, critical medication, and now, extra healthy food. Moses and his family like the herring and he wants to continue to receive it. Again, highly nutritious fish like herring is hard to get in this upland area, and can be a great addition to people’s diets in the scarcity of other proteins. On top of that it has essential omega-3 fatty acids that are abundant in Alaskan herring and not available in local diets here.
     The reasons for food insecurity in Liberia are related to a general lack of infrastructure. The country went through a roughly 17-year period of instability, war, and violence during its civil wars, which ended in 2003. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and though the country is now peaceful, infrastructure is severely lacking and people are healing from an unspeakably dark and chaotic experience. There is no centralized electricity or plumbing system. There is deep and prevalent poverty. The unemployment rate is 80%. This really exacerbates health problems here like malaria, malnutrition, stunting, maternal mortality and tuberculosis, to name a few. It seems like even though it’s not ideal for a country to be receiving international aid and there are potential problems with it, Liberia lacks a lot of important resources, including widespread healthy food. I think everybody deserves healthy food, and this herring donation is a small step in a much greater transition toward self-sufficiency and food security for all.

VCT patients and herring recipients. Breastfeeding in public is a non-issue here. Those are boxes of herring on the back shelf.

                                                                                  Talking with Moses

                                     Lapas= clothing, blankets, slings, diapers, bags...et cetera.

                                                                                     A coupla cuties.