Last Friday, at 11:53am, B was talking with the Frenchmen about going to Lofa. My ears perked up. Lofa? I have heard talk of this heavenly place. The people who have come before me, Matt and one of my many on again off again AIUSA supervisors recommended it. After the Frenchmen declined, I chimed in, […]
Read more "Leaving Gbarnga"Homesickness strikes. For those of you who have not been e mailing me and must assume that I want to speak with you (because of course I want to speak with you), please e mail me. I’m having dreams of the states and it makes me feel bad not knowing how everyone is doing. I’ve […]
Read more "Partying Liberian Style: Part 1"The language barrier is frustrating but getting better. Most of Liberian English is just dropping the last letter of every word and then running the words together in the sentence. But as I mentioned, there are also vowel changes. Sometimes I have no idea what words people are saying. Internet is pronounced entenet, mister is […]
Read more "On to language and development"My parents are becoming a bit concerned. Mom, Dad, don’t worry… I have phone numbers for about a dozen DEN-L staff. Now, I’m not going to sugar coat this, all of them are male and several may have an unnecessary interest in me. However, I’ve learned from organizing and over the years how to push […]
Read more "So I was going to write a post about ritualistic killing in Liberia but…"Saturday is a work day for most of DEN-L staff. Like organizers in the US, DEN-L staff, trainers and trainees work 6 day weeks (Saturday is “optional”). For my part, I did a little more reading, found a little bit more out about the war days and the rebuilding efforts. A quote from the first […]
Read more "Weekending"I haven’t asked much about the war. It seems to me to be in poor taste. I know about the extremes and it seems that most people have in some way overcome what they saw/experienced, left so as to remain safe, or just don’t like talking about it. It’s been 6 years now since the […]
Read more "So it’s time to talk about the war"This was a short trip on Thursday with one of the support staff for DEN-L (Matt, it’s the one who drove you to the waterfall, he’s talking about going there again soon!). He showed me around (this time in a truck but the drive was equally as fascinating, just no sense of danger). We went […]
Read more "Gbarnga touring"Everyone has been very curious and nice to me. Sometimes I am afraid they’re being overly nice. It goes back to colonialism. I haven’t been able to wrap my head around white people in Liberia. Liberia was never colonized (by Europeans). It never had a large population of white people show up and take anything […]
Read more "Day 2 in Africa."The office: Tuesday, my first full day in Africa, had many surprises. I worked all day, most of which was just e mailing family and friends on a very slow internet connection. Posted a couple blog posts (I write them and post them later). I did a little research into granting agencies and tried to […]
Read more "That was Monday"Yes! Success! I think I actually said that out loud in the tiny baggage pick up. Went through customs, bought a cell phone ($50 for phone and $25 worth of minutes. I can call the states but my questions about how the cell phone worked went unanswered by the saleslady.) And ran straight into the […]
Read more "Panic. Pause. Panic. Is that my bag?"
Ally Krupar 