AKOI'S VILLAGE

Akoi’s village is about 250 km northwest of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital on the coast. It can take a full day – sometimes two or three - to drive from Monrovia to Voinjama, the Lofa County seat. During the dry season, October to April, the highway is a dusty, rutted thoroughfare pulsing with semis, jalopies, 4-wheel drives belonging to the UN or aid agencies. The vehicles stir up clouds of dust that hang silently in the tropical air for minutes afterward. They roar along impossibly fast, the theory being that skimming the top of the washboard makes it feel less bumpy. The challenge comes with the unexpected ridges and potholes that have hardened like bricks in the dense heat. Experienced drivers have learned to surge and swerve, their feet dancing between the brake and the gas pedal, regardless of the condition of the engine, seats or shock absorbers. You hurtle along, surging and swaying, and every so often something breaks, usually something serious. Sometimes you get lucky and it’s just a flat tire – probably bare and already patched – or the shock absorbers give way altogether to that the chassis grinds along on the wheelbase. Sometimes a differential breaks, or even an axle. This is accompanied by much cursing and head scratching, and, if it can’t be fixed there with some wire and a wrench, someone stays behind with the car and someone hitches a ride with whatever vehicle will take them to the nearest town with a mechanic, often a day or more drive away.

For a passenger like me, the only option is to become a rag doll and carry mints. Since most vehicles, including ours, carry more people and luggage than the car was ever built for, some small comfort and stability can come from being wedged in tightly next to someone or something, preferably by a window and not next to a live animal. Sometimes you score the front seat, being careful not to do so more often than the others, as this creates a different and sometimes worse form of torment - that of being relatively comfortable compared to everyone else who is suffering without complaint in the back seat. When someone gives us live chickens, we have to put them under one of the seats with their feet tied together. They flap and cluck for a time, then list to one side on the hot floorboards, their eyes half closed, and simply endure. When we stop, I offer them water in the top of one of our plastic water bottles. The Liberians laugh.

In rainy season, May to September, the road becomes an astonishing sequence of sinks and potholes strung together by corrugated stretches of dry road. Only the most skillful or audacious drivers make it through. Huge UN tractors continuously grade the road but never pave it, so that once the monsoons come, barren curves revert to mudslides and the lowlands revert to swamp. Sometimes the mud comes up to the door handles or even the windows. Even the UN earthmovers get stuck, their wheels spinning deep and irrevocably past the axles so that only the chassis is resting on a berm or a buried ridge of granite. Sometimes the big rigs slide diagonally until they come to rest wedged against mud banks or trees. The wise will wait until an even bigger truck is called in to tow the first one out. If you are smart, you have brought drinking water, flashlights, snacks, and a change of clothes. Fools and machos gun their engines and, horns blaring, floor it and try to swerve past the ruts and obstacles, inevitably getting stuck or worse - breaking an axle or flipping or tipping onto their side. Eventually there is a pile of mud and vehicles blocking the road in both directions so that only motorbikes and pedestrians can squeeze by. If, like me, you are impatient or claustrophobic or car sick, you decide to get out of the car, knowing that you, too, will fall into the mud’s embrace, that the hungry earth will suck at your feet and eat one shoe. Thus anointed, you look around and see that, for once, maybe just for now, you are the same café au lait color as everyone else.

Certain swampy curves that are cut into the perpetual shade of the forest never dry out, like the infamous trap at Ma Fatu’s Village. Once, in a downpour at twilight, Akoi’s former commander, Bethelson, who was traveling with us, got out of the car and issued an earsplitting whistle. Dozens of ex-combatants appeared from the shadows and, shouting and chanting, surrounded the car. All we could see was mud and the palms of hands sliding against the windows, windshield and doors, rocking us out of the mud and onto solid ground. Then they stood back grinning, beautiful white teeth and patches of blue-black skin glistening through the caramel colored mud.

People on foot or on bikes and motorcycles make their way to local market days carrying huge loads on their heads, threading their way between and around bigger vehicles, nimbly stepping aside just in time as larger vehicles careen past. A roadside stand appears, with a cluster of mud and thatch huts behind it. On the stand there are dried fish, or sometimes live ones, and often an armadillo, a pangolin, a duiker or other endangered animal trussed on a long stick, bleeding and rotting in the thick air.

From Voinjama it’s another 40 minutes to Zwordemai, Akoi’s village, on the road they call the Kolahun highway (named for the town where the rebels had their training base). Kolahun itself scatters as if it has been carelessly tossed from the small rise at a bend in the road, spreading like a bald spot on an itchy hide with all the fur worn off from traffic scratching the same treeless patch. Most of the buildings are constructed of cinderblock with corrugated tin roofing panels, or adobe and thatch, none of it insulated, with all the buildings defiantly squared to the sun and ignoring any breezes that might attempt to wander through. It’s drought or downpour, dust or mud, rebels or government troops, no compromises and no middle ground. The road shrugs and keeps going, no skin off its back, through emaciated towns stripped of trees, forests burned to make way for the Green Revolution with its promise of plenty that turned rainforest into dustbowl, dustbowl to begging bowl. The rains come late or not at all and hunger stretches like brittle skin, taught and leathery, clinging to the bones of the road until at last it can slake its thirst when it reaches forest again in Sierra Leone. This town, this stretch of road, have an attitude born of boredom, of stillness and heat, as if they’ve learned to amuse themselves by daring you to stop and ask for a cold drink. And if you do, the answer will depend on whom you’re with, where you stop, and if the generator’s working.

We drive and drive, as if this road has always been deserted, comes from nowhere, arrives nowhere, just a severed piece of highway cut from the forest for no reason and about to dead end. When we go for miles like this, with no one in sight, before my mind goes blank, it does a few somersaults: I wonder if we are anywhere at all, much less where we think we are, or where I think we are. I read the occasional road signs and roll the names around in my mouth, not sure how to pronounce them. How many vowels can the tongue ride over with no consonant in sight? Liberian English is all vowels, it seems, and Liberians speak at breakneck speed, like the vehicles jouncing along the road, riding the vowels and skimming the consonants, adding an ‘oh’ at the end of a sentence as if there aren’t enough vowels for the meaning to land on – “Your take it oh!” meaning, “Here, please take this.”

For Akoi and his ex-combatant brothers, driving these stretches of road is a very different experience than it is for me. Once, when we were riding to Akoi’s village, we came to a short, earthen bridge built over a small culvert. The kids were suddenly awake and chattering after riding for several miles in sleepy silence. Ezekiel said, “This place here was a very dangerous ambush place because it’s so low.” Indeed the road dipped down. “We used to hide under this bridge and others went in the bushes to wait for enemy cars. You wouldn’t want to drive here at night. Sometimes if we were in one of our cars, the driver had to go as fast as he could to get across alive. It was so scary to take this road, very dangerous!” To me it was just another stretch of bumpy dirt road. To them it was an ongoing flashback, as were so many stretches of forest, streams or road throughout northwest and central Liberia. Driving, for them, was a continuous movie of the war.

We turn off the main road and head into the forest towards Zwordemai. The grass and weeds are shoulder height along the narrow tracks, brushing against the car. They are the emergency repair crews - the first to arrive where the forest has been cleared - and they are busy reclaiming it, fast. We cross a small, swiftly flowing river on a span of 6 or 7 tree trunks placed parallel to each other to form a bridge. Carefully, we line up our tires to drive across the water. Akoi tells us that he used to swim here before the war, and catch fish in reed baskets he wove with his sisters. The family lived in a 3-room thatch and adobe house, with an outdoor kitchen where cast iron pots sit bubbling directly on hardwood coals made from the towering forest surrounding the village. The trees are felled by hand with cutlass and axe, crashing to the ground, where they are hacked into stumps and dumped into pits, set on fire and buried, burning slowly, to make the charcoal. During certain times of year you can see the charcoal pits in clearings and along the road, spirals of acrid smoke curling up from smoldering mounds like great earth-covered bellies digesting the trees that once held that same soil in place. The mother becomes a grave for her children, giving birth to their charred remains.

There are different kinds of smoke in Liberia. Charcoal-making smoke is distinct from the frantic red plumes of slash and burn before the rainy season, while the sky is still a luminous blue and billowing white cumulus clouds begin to mass along the horizon out at sea and where the earth curves in the distance; different again after the rains have begun and the clouds trap the smoke so that it lingers all day and into the night, and you awake with your hair and your clothes reeking of fire; distinct from the smoke of burning trash, batteries and all, plastic bags mixed with eggshells mixed with toilet paper mixed with bones.

A few meters away, the trees stand, thick and ready, as if waiting to close in, swallowing light and heat with insatiable thickets of cool shade, 20 degrees difference at least between the heat along the road and the padded silence of the cool, thick air pressed between the trees. The heat goes looking for shade, leans heavily against the edge of the forest, looking for an opening where it can get a foothold, but the cool air knows better than to take the dare.