screw 7 years in Tibet, try a week in Lofa

So I got to go into the field this last week and do some follow up on a workshop between the Mandingo and Loma People in Northern Lofa county on the border with Guinea. These guys had been at each other for a long time, mostly just a lot of distrust and bad stereotypes not many wars but the ones that they did have were quite brutal. The war came and exacerbated things as they split primarily along ethnic lines as to who they supported. The Loma were seen to have supported Charles Taylor and the Mandingo were huge supporters of LURD that over threw Taylor. On top of this there is the issue of religion as the Mandingo are almost all Muslim and the Loma are pretty much all Christian. So after trading off back and forth during the war, a massacre at a masque here, a retaliatory slaughter of the village elders there... (i wont go into details but lets just say ... HOLY CRAP!!!) the war ended and they now find themselves living next to each other again and things are tense. Their villages are still pretty much completely segregated especially after the war. However their villages are so close that their kids all attend the same schools and their appears to be a lot less tension in the 20 and under crowd and we are starting to see a lot of mixed marriages and what not which is always a good sign.

So it was needless to say quite an interesting week with many eye opening experiences. Hearing about atrocities from the war committed on both sides was humbling especially to be sitting in the same room with someone listening to him tell me the horrible things that he had done, sometimes the person was repentant other times not so much... I'm glad I am not the one that has to sort all this out in the end, I'm glad God is perfect and just cause I don't have a clue where to start.

there were a bunch of fun memories though... so in this one village we stayed at, i was sitting outside after the sun had gone down so it was completely dark out except for the stars, which reminds me... holy crap the stars are amazing. anyway... so I was talking to the person whose hut i would be staying in that night and all these little kids came up around me to listen to the white man talk, i would say there was about 10-20 of them... anyway... so i ask the kids if they like to sing and if they will sing me a song... they tell me to sing a song first. So tell them to start clapping with me. we start clapping and then i sang "lake of fire" (its a meat puppets' song that nirvana covered on their unplugged album) and everyone cheers and laughs, then i make them sing a song, then i sing another song and then them... we go back and forth like this for a while and the crowd has by this point surged to like 70 people standing around singing and laughing and clapping and dancing. soon some body pulls out this guitar looking thing and they are all like "we want to see you dance" I told them they had to sing a song i could dance to... they start clapping and singing and the guitar guy plays his guitar so i jumped up and did some weird little funky white boy dance in this circle of laughing screaming Liberians. the only thing i could really see clearly was their white smiles in the darkness... it was awesome... i laughed hysterically... so very much fun. Soon everyone was dancing and it was just so very much fun. I finally went to bed at like 11:00 way after the sun had gone down and after i had sung every song i could think of. I woke up the next day at 5:30 ish with the sun and the cursed roosters that I swear were right next to my ear.

I had quite an interesting diet while out and about as well. In Liberia they don't really make a distinction when it comes to meat, meat is just meat. whether it be fish, snail, cow, monkey whatever it is meat. So one of the members of our group went to the market to try to find us something to eat that night she came back dejected not being able to find any meat. we take off for the day and are driving down the long and bumpy road and we see a couple guys riding their bikes with their shotguns across their backs... from our moving car she yells at them if they have any meat. When they answer in the affirmative the drivers slams on the breaks sending everyone in the land rover flying. we reverse to talk to these two guys. One proceeds to pull out of his bag this small little dear looking animal that he had shot earlier that day. it was fully grown and came up to about my knee, it had been shot which broke its leg and then they cut its throat. there on the side of the road we bought the thing whole and unceremoniously threw it on top of the roof next to the spare tire and gasoline. awesome... that scene was repeated several times over the week with monkey, snails, you name it. whatever we could find, meat was meat. a much more simple kind of life. So for those of you that are wondering... monkey tastes alright but it has a nasty smell that stays on your hands all day long... oh and the people i was with made sure to buy extra monkey to bring back to Gbarnga with us because, and I quote "you can't get good monkey in Gbarnga these days."

So they are about to turn the power off on me, so I will write more about this last week probably tomorrow night is when the power will come back on. till then my friends and family till then.