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.