Technical Error.

Looks like I duplicated photo albums, so most recent pictures are here. Will try to consolidate and fix ASAP, bandwidth permitting...

Henry Bweh

Much of my last week at work was energized by goings-on at the Firestone Plantation. Other sources can provide better and more detailed overall information, but the Firestone Plantation, “the world’s largest rubber plantation” is a million-acre concession to the Bridgestone-Firestone corporation, centered around the company-town of Harbel, approximately 45 minutes outside Monrovia. The plantation was first leased to Firestone in 1926, in exchange for 6 cents per acre and a deal that refinanced Liberia’s British and European-held foreign debt and amounted to a significant economic-industrial coup for the United States and Harvey Firestone in an era when the British empire still commanded most of the world's natural rubber and latex production.

The plantation is truly vast, section after and row after row of rubber trees leaning to one side, with spiral cut bark and tapping cups at the base to collect the latex sap. Environmental, working and living conditions at and around the plantation are terrible by all credible reports. There's an Alien Tort Claims Act lawsuit pending in Federal District Court in Indiana which alleged both forced labor and child labor (child labor claims are continuing), and there’s been a brewing, contentious fight between Firestone management and the neighboring community of Owens Grove, which sits directly opposite the Farmington River from the main processing plant.

On Thursday the Firestone company police, the Plant Protection Division, managed to capsize canoes and rock the river ferry enough to spill about 16 members of the community into the river. Three canoes (of a total of 8 in town) were permanently lost, 3 teenagers were arrested by the PPD and slapped around for “stealing” waste rubber which is discharged directly into the river and they gather up to use or resell.

After the wake settled, there were still 3 community youth who were missing in the river. So the local reformist and community leader, Henry Bweh, went to file a complaint and report the missing persons with the police.

On Friday morning the three returned to town on foot, and Henry went back to the police to amend his report, noting that everyone was now safely accounted for, except of course the three still under arrest by the PPD who weren’t released until Saturday afternoon.

Owens Grove has long complained about the unprocessed effluent from the Firestone processing plant that’s flushed into the river directly across from them. So this is not the first time Firestone has heard from Henry. On Monday, after various consultations and discussions about ways to mitigate the impacts of the high-speed patrol boat on community fishing and river use, Henry was summoned to the regional police station at Robertsfield. When he arrived he first had to wait about 5 hours for the police commissioner who’d requested him to show up, and when she did, he was arrested for “spreading false rumors” that the PPD had drowned the three kids missing Thursday night.

Word of this got to Alfred in Monrovia late in the day. Alfred and Green Advocates are long time supporters of Firestone workers and the Owens Grove community organization trying to win some mitigation of river discharge. So at about 6pm we set out from Monrovia to go get Henry released from jail. It happened that we’d had the official opening of new office space that will serve as a local resource center for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, and so for the first time since arriving here, I was wearing a suit and tie.

Heading to Firestone for the first time, while in double-breasted power suit, seemed sufficiently ironic, but only became more so when the radiator blew out, the car overheated, we spent 30 minutes refilling the radiator with swamp water from a bucket, in the increasing dark (glad I had a headlamp in my briefcase) and then had to push-start the car and head back to town. We spent all day Tuesday trying to get the car repaired, and meanwhile Henry was still being kept in jail. This is Liberia - jailed because you picked the wrong fight, with no warrant or charges, and you spend an extra two days in jail because the only lawyer likely to come get you out drives a 13-year old diesel Nissan Patrol, imported used, that never seems to runs without trouble for more than 5 days in a row.

On Wednesday, we finally got back to Firestone Plantation, having now assembled a small convoy of newspaper and radio reporters and supporters from other human rights and community organizations. The smell around the town of Harbel is overpowering, sickly-sweet and caustic ammonia and fermenting rubber odor. All of Harbel and surrounding towns wake and sleep with it, but experiencing it for the first time is very nearly nauseating.

When the police heard we were on the way they hastily transferred Henry from jail to the court. First they took him inside to sit in the dock. Then, just as we pulled up, they walked him back outside the building so that they could present him with his arrest warrant. Mind you, he’d been jailed for almost 48 hours at this point. The police provided him no food or water during this time, though they did allow his family to bring these to him.

The true absurdity of the whole proceeding continued to escalate as the prosecutor, who seemed convinced that he had met me before, continued to pester me to donate pens and stationery to his office. The clerk of court refused to let the defendant or his attorney (Alfred) inspect the charging sheet, “because there is no official matter open before the court…”

Eventually Henry was released, after various human rights organizers signed a “promissory note” to guarantee his return on Tuesday for arraignment. We returned to Owens Grove, where a troop of women and children was singing and clapping to welcome his release and Henry held an on the spot press conference with the 8-10 reporters now part of our concession. So those newspapers whose editors aren’t on Firestone's payroll have run the story, the National Security Advisor and the President’s office are expressing their concern in response to inquiries solicited from international human rights partners, and it’s not clear whether the whole thing will boil over or just blow past. Current level of attention and pressure is high, since there’s an important union election pending in less than a month, with serious reformers trying to take control and insist on real negotiation, transparent accounting and open reporting for the tappers’ and laborers’ union, which has ignored its reporting requirements to the government and its members for over two years.

That’s not a short version, but I’ll stop there and post more as events continue to unfold. Needless to say., most other projects at work got pushed back by about 3 days, so now I have weekend work to catch up on comments and document preparation for the national forestry strategy which has just been released and will have an all-day citizens feedback event next week.

(One last picture of some kids.) More new photos in gallery as well (link to right).

Hash!

Last Sunday I ventured out to my first outing with the Hash House Harriers, a “world-wide running and drinking club,” which is only slightly less contradictory and enigmatic than that may first sound.

The current embodiment of the Monrovia hash is a relatively mellow sort, and Sunday happened to be the 100^th, so there was a certain amount of extra enthusiasm. About 40-60 participants out for the combined walking-running, doubling-back excursion through an incredibly lush and gorgeous open forest and grassland on Marshall Island, approximately 1 hour beyond the city center.

The hash itself finished at a big house with a dock on the river, so there was some swimming which was quickly made unnecessary by the downpour, and a meal and a relatively lowkey version of some hash rituals involving some joke-telling and a little bit of boisterous singing. It’s a funny mixed group of Liberians and expats from the aid worker/NGO and diplomatic communities. Long-time hashers have goofy nicknames, so you only realize after the fact that a large percentage of the people there are the country directors of major international NGOs or the head of a major diplomatic mission or otherwise a lot more serious during the week then they appear to be while running through the bush in a mob doing a lot of unnecessary yelling.

Have been a little out of touch, so this is a longer post. If you're feeling impatient, I'll put the cute picture first. These are my boss Alfred's kids, Kona (left), Alfred (middle), and a friend (maybe a cousin?) catching a ride home from school while I was on the way to a meeting. I go to a fair number of meetings and workshops, though not as many as some. Other updated pictures are in my gallery.




Rains have been coming harder and more frequently as June winds down. Weather statistics point to July as just slightly wetter than June, on average, with a historic average of nearly a meter of rainfall in each. It's been true to form most of the last week. In town there are sections of road that flood over a foot deep in even an hour or two of heavy rain, well up over the axles of taxi cabs.

Rain makes what is already heavy, unregulated traffic situation even worse, of course. Did I write already about seeing the "No turn on red" sign at an intersection that clearly hasn't had a stoplight for over a decade? Like most of the street lights around Monrovia, there is still a post there, but no light. I admit that I have mostly stopped seeing the decapitated posts and such until I occasionally stop to notice. Some of the in-town intersection do have police directing traffic, and a couple of the major grocery stores employ their own traffic guards to walk out into the street and stop traffic periodically for customers to back out of the parking area.

Monrovia is mostly a long stretched-out city, so most of the traffic is running the same NW-SE axis and bottlenecks through the Sinkor neighborhood. There are two routes: the badly-potholed but newer Tubman Boulevard (the main commercial hub), and the "Old Road," which the Green Advocates drivers seem convinced is faster. It does have less traffic, and is perhaps shorter, but sections have become completely depaved over the years and even after 3-days of dry there is at least one sinkhole that's never less than 18" deep. Pretty exciting, or at least damp, for a low-slung taxi.

It has been an interesting week in work. Weather and traffic this morning may have contributed to the workshop on land-records documentation starting over two hours late. Even by Liberian standards, this was remarkable, and all the organizers had to make a point of how this isn't how things normally operate. Which of course only further begs the question. Did I mention the air conditioner cooling the room

Once started, the information came a bit slowly, but was a fascinating window into the truly arcane and overlapping sources of records and documentation for land ownership. There are at least five separate bureaucracies that might or might not have deeds or records of land ownership from any of the 160+ years of the Republic of Liberia. Years of war and lack of funding have left archival very troubled. Many of the offices literally don't even have tables to stack documents on, they're just piled up on the floor. Hundreds and hundreds of books and boxes of records are missing.

The national archives was evacuated during the war in two buses loaned by the University, so there are approximately 4,500 boxes of "heterogeneous records" now packed into temporary quarters with no kind of climate control. No climate control + 996mm monthly rainfall = problem.

Overlapping or unclear mandates for creating and accepting certified records mean that actually having physical possession of some kind of authentic-looking deed or documentation becomes critically important to making a land claim or sale. And many of the records that weren
So resolving conflicting or uncertain claims of land ownership is going to be an incredibly difficult, arduous process, and most observers are noting that control of the land base is clearly the issue that needs to be resolved with some legitimate confidence in rule of law to avoid the worst likelihood of recurring conflict in Liberia.

On Tuesday I was supposed to lead a meeting of a technical sub-working group (or similar, the name changes a bit from one meeting to the next), when we discovered that the same drafting project the full working group thought it was undertaking has also been started by another group. Of course at some level it's not so unexpected that the Forestry Development Authority would have "mandated" two separate groups to do the same work.

So, as Silas Siakor said to me yesterday, everyone kind of understands that the drafting work for this new law is going to be done by SDI and Green Advocates. It's just a matter of sitting down to figure out who's doing which part. In the end, I'm sure the work will get done, but of course not before we have a few more meetings and then reedit the meeting minutes and have all the right notations and satisfy the formal authorizations of the FDA staff. The six weeks I have left here are going to go by very quickly.

Another sad day for the Lone Star

Liberia's last hope of making the African Cup of Nations falters, but I am consoled by how much I love the language in this football story.

Also may be just as well as the rainy season arrives in earnest, with serious 2-inch-per hour rain falling several hours each day (mysteriously it's very nice and pleasant in between sudden, prolonged downpours). When the street is flooded with 6-inches of water all the way across I can't really imagine how the football field must look.

Forget TV, we’ve got Newspaper on the Radio!!

Back in Hipsterville, they have their TV on the Radio, but in Liberia, we get “What’s in the Paper,” a morning radio program where the DJ sits with a stack of today’s papers (there are about 6) and for half an hour reads all the headlines from the front and back pages, being careful to tell you with each story whether you’re now on the front page of the Observer or have moved to the back page of the Statesman, and eventually moving on to gossip and entertainment news. He even tells you which stories have photos and what they show.

The most curious part is the “gossip” reporting, since it includes such tidbits as “A prominent businessman trying to become very powerful downtown is now reported to regularly consult a juju-man,” and “Two big men from Congotown were seen to have a smoking contest at the end of last Saturday’s dinner. They turned the whole hall into a burning bush!!”

I am still puzzling over the social architecture of an anonymous gossip column.

The matter of rain...

Another day that began with sunshine . . . driving soccer games in dry fields on the way into work this morning, but by 1pm it was raining buckets. I think at this point 3 of the 10 heaviest rains I've experienced in the last 31 years have been here in the last 3 weeks. There can be great comfort in solid concrete construction during a downpour.

Moments before I took the rainy picture below (from my office window), a half-dozen 8-12 year old boys ran full-tilt down the sidewalk, completely naked, and obviously having a great time. I think it's the first time I've been in a capital city where children run naked in the streets, and with such glee!

In fact, I am steadily backing away from my early sense of the similarities between Liberia and Latin American countries that I have visited. The level of poverty and subsistence-level need here in Monrovia is, if anything, even higher than it first appears. Only a tiny percentage of the urban population has running water or electricity in their homes. A great number of Liberians live in and out of a variety of make-shift structures that may include some corrugated roofing, some woven-reed panel walls, some frame-construction. In comparison, it does make an only-slightly-leaky and unplumbed concrete building feel mighty secure and cozy.

Sub-Comm.

Well as some of you may have heard by other channels, I am now (unofficially) a subcommittee chairman within the comprehensive steering committee on community forestry in Liberia. I'm not quite sure how that happened. A man named Moses did it, rather against any desires of my own. I am pressing to retain the title "reporter" instead of "chairman," myself. It's kind of a lawyers' trick.

Rains have been pretty serious, though not at all constant. Today was sunny in a way that was a bit hard to believe considering an inch of rain probably fell between midnight and 10am. I continue to tread the funny line between daily life in Monrovia - buying 500mL plastic bags of drinking water for L$5 - and making budgeting and course selection decisions for my fancy private law school, easily requesting $300 to support student events and enrolling for courses like "Problems in Modern Jurisprudence," while operating in a city where average earnings are probably around $1 per day and half a packet of crackers can really make a difference to someone I meet.

Mass & a move...

Highlights of my weekend: I moved; I went to Mass (i.e. Catholic Worship).

Moving was a little anti-climactic after worrying over it a couple weeks. The new place is a small apartment in a house within the residential compound of the Baptist Theological Seminary. Not too many Baptists live there, but there is a big group of American student-interns elsewhere in the compound. Several from the Kennedy School of Government and other institutions. I think they're mostly placed in various government ministries, haven't met everyone yet.e c

On Sunday one of the drivers from the office invited me to go to Mass and visit around a nearby market with him. Sunday's not much of a market day, so that part was a little anti-climactic, but Mass was probably well worth seeing once while in Liberia. It was long - lasted over two hours, and involved lots of singing, every step of the way. The homily (sermon) was a forceful but rambling message which dwelt for a while on the permanence of being a priest, emphasized how the miracle of the five loaves and two-fishes fed 5,000 men, but the scriptural language really just means men and doesn't include the women and children who were also fed (thus an even larger number), and touched also on how the communion is actually the physical body and blood, and only true believers should take it, relating the story of a doubting priest who had the bread turn to a chunk of human flesh in his hand at Mass one Sunday. There was some more specific imagery shared, but I'll withhold it here.

Sunday afternoon I took a nice walk on the beach near the Compound. The closest way to get there is to wade a lagoon where a lot of boys were swimming and playing. I took a longer way back on a path winding between a set of small homes. I was dripping wet from my wade in the ocean, and my white, hairy legs drew a lot of unapologetic stares. Worth it, though it must be the warmest ocean water I've ever been in.

Yesterday and today, more days at the office trying to understand the requirements of the Forestry Law passed last year and a dozen other relevant statutes and regulations that will impact the draft law on community forestry rights I'm now working to help draft. It's a big project, due to the Legislature in October. Should keep me more than busy while I'm here.

School Parades and Rain

So here's a picture. (More are in my Picasa album, linked to the right), though I still haven't really spent time to get any very good pictures.

I load this one mainly because it's the view from my office window. Except that there's not always a school parade going by with cheerleaders and honor court, only twice so far - averaging once per week. Behind the parade is a furniture shop where they carve out and assemble chairs and bedframes by hand.

The parades seem a big half-hearted, admittedly, although the cheerleading groups and few band members are more animated than many of the students just walking along behind with their teachers. It's hot to go walking down the open road on a sunny day, after all, and traffic doesn't stop, just merges into the other lane and goes right past the parade. (which is only another poor excuse for the quality of my other pictures).

Anyhow, I'll keep a tally of school parades, apparently every school in Monrovia has one on the anniversary of its founding. I'm also

In national news, the border crossing with Sierra Leone officially re-opened over the Mano River bridge called Bo Waterside. It's supposedly the first traffic over the principal road link between the two countries in four years.

Of course the Liberians I working with on forestry issues (from Green Advocates, Conservation International, the Forestry Development Authority) tell me, unsurprisingly, that upcountry there are plenty of border communities where clans and extended families live on either side of the River and routinely cross for football games and social gatherings with little or no sense of it as a national border. (I suppose that sense of an informal border might or might not give an interesting understanding to the accusations of cross-border traffic in arms and diamonds to support insurgency in Sierra Leone.)

Hope to get out of Monrovia myself soon and travel through some smaller communities and forest country. Since I'm quickly meeting UN staff all around town I may be able to hitch onto an excursion to Sapo National Park or elsewhere in parts of the forest country that tend to be inaccessible in the rainy season.

If no rain tomorrow, I'll hope to spend it at the beach, but heavy rain the last few days has not immediately inspired sitting outside. It does, however, cut the sun and make the temperatures must easier to bear.

There's a new UNMIL Humanitarian situation report out, which includes the following noteworthy statistics:

UNHCR reported that by May 31, 2007 it had facilitated the voluntary return of 99,491 Liberian refugees from neighbouring countries in West Africa and other parts of the world. It also estimates that 83,741 Liberian refugees are yet to return home, with the bulk of them in Ghana (29%) and Cote d’Ivoire (27%). The official end date for the voluntary repatriation programme is 30 June 2007.

The scale of that relocation effort obviously dwarfs the demographic flow of aid workers, international support staff and interns like myself into Monrovia, but I continue to discover that the latter is also a non-trivial population, and that the effect on housing market and availability is marked. I'm grateful to have a very comfortable place to stay for the time being, though I'll be glad when I know what I'm doing after next week.

Given the number of families living in makeshift homes and structures against the sides of walls and buildings around where I stay, the comfort and luxury of clean, solid indoor space with generator power and running water is hard to overstate. Another of the continuing, incredible contrasts of Liberia.

A Monday.

Taylor trial off to a bumpy start, as you can see or hear from various news sources.

The radio tends to blare in the Green Advocates office. Most of the time it blares (really, really loud) a steady stream of mediocre American pop R&B, on a very short playlist. I think there are about 7 songs that they play on this station.

But this morning the BBC announced "The former Liberian president, Charles Taylor, has announced that he will boycott his war crimes trial in The Hague," which produced laughter in the office.

Soon in the general workroom (where the average age is probably 21), the radio was back to bad music and funny ads, but in Alfred's office the live CNN television coverage is running while he works. Last I heard the prosecution will make a 4-hour opening statement today and then there will be a 3-4 week recess for the defense to prepare. They're expecting 18 months total (fortunately, I think Taylor is younger than Milosevic was.)

Later on the radio I heard an advertisement for an electronics and perfume store:
"Tired of your smell on a hot day? We sell perfumes that increase their odor as you sweat!"

Next time I'll listen closely enough to get their location.
Liberian English is still flying by pretty fast for me a lot of the time.

I've posted a few early photos here. The quality is not great, but as yesterday, I'm not complaining about bandwidth.

N.

As of Monday I've been in Liberia one week.

Also as of Monday, the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor (the former president) begins at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Hague. It's big news here, of course, though he's being charged with specific actions related to the conflict in Sierra Leone.

Closer to home, rainy season remains delayed according to the view in the street (I don't have any climatological data handy). We did have a big violent storm here last night. Lightning right on top of us and something struck close enough to fry the control board on the generator, so Michael (the manager here at Episcopal Guest House) had to wire around the board to direct start the genny, then monitor the radiator fluid and oil level closely.

As you can tell since I'm posting, we have power. Michael also told me that the generator cost US$6,000, and the one they're looking to replace it with is $10k. That's a lot of money in Liberia, further evidence of how shockingly expensive any imported goods are here, while statistically and in the way people in Monrovia seem to live, the Liberian population remains one of the most impoverished in the world.

Will post some pictures soon, (the fact that there is steadily-available Internet access at all is still pleasant enough that I won't complain about the speed).

Happy June.
-N.