Shortly after Voinjama’s first Mourning Feast, in November of 2004, the ancestors instructed the diviner we were working with to begin the process of restoring the land and the water by performing certain blessing ceremonies. Specific offerings were to be made to call to the animals and the birds and reassure them that the humans were returning to the land in peace and felt truly remorseful for the bloodshed they had committed. This was a very difficult ceremony. She and her entourage were to go deep into the bush and stay for 7 days without food, sleeping on the ground, making offerings, calling the animals and communicating with them. They were to capture 7 white birds and tie a thread to the leg of each one so they would take the message of peace and show it to all the other animals.
During our visit, the first of several preliminary water ceremonies was called for. We were to buy a special gourd in the market and fill it with specially ground rice flour, a favorite food of the forest animals’ spirits. The diviner gathered the other items needed – kola nuts, more gourds, some money in small bills and coins, and other sacred objects. We drove for about 40 minutes and hiked through the forest down to the Lofa River, a tributary of the St. Paul, where, during the war, many people had been shot or bound and tossed into the water to drown, and many dead bodies had been disposed of. The diviner and her husband, a powerful herbalist, made offerings and prayers to all the creatures of the forest, the land and the trees. The diviner went into trance, as she often does, as it is the primary mode of receiving messages from the ancestors. Eyes closed, she runs through the forest at full speed, and always returns without a scratch, never trips or bumps into a tree or bush. A small group of women – acolytes and relatives – run after her so they can be there when she wakes up and guide her home. They must exert a terrific effort to keep up, dodging fallen trees, brambles, and mud holes that she doesn’t even notice.
On that day, three different snakes appeared in the forest, birds called in obvious conversation, and we saw butterflies and brightly colored millipedes making their way to the offering site. The diviner later told us that the appearance of these beings in such profusion was a sign that the animals were grateful and so showed themselves by way of greeting. One of the snakes was poisonous and came to the edge of where they were running, and sat, calmly watching without attacking or running away. When they returned about half an hour later, they found that chalk had appeared on a large termite mound near their first offering site, a sign of protection and of Spirit’s presence and acceptance of the offerings on behalf of all living things.
Catfish and crocodiles, two of the diviner’s totems, appeared during the water ceremony and told her to return with larger quantities of rice flour, as they were very hungry and the amount she/we had brought was insufficient. Afterwards, she was told that the ancestors would be waiting for her at thirteen towns, in a particular sequence, that she was to visit one by one to work for peace and to continue ceremonies of cleansing and reconciliation with the water and the land. (She did.)
That night when we returned to the UN compound where we were staying, we had a scrumptious Pakistani feast with the officers in their dining room, about 100 men, attended decorously by the soldiers on serving duty and by Col. Raza and then Major Shahid, the commanders of the UN Pakistan Battalion II stationed in Voinjama. Before and after the meal we gathered in an anteroom where the men had a chance to relax, smoking and watching the latest Bollywood hits on TV. Gifts were always exchanged, theirs always more lavish than ours. We were free to ask questions and just get to know each other. Col. Raza told us, “Outside of Pakistan, this is our favorite place in the world. This is the place we would live if we couldn’t be at home. We love Liberia and we love Voinjama.” Wherever Col. Raza went in Voinjama, he drew crowds, and was greeted with shouts and cheers, “Col. Raza! Col. Raza!” A career military man, young, perhaps 40, he embodies the highest ideals of the warrior as a guardian of peace. Once people felt safe to return to Voinjama, and did so with great jubilation, he and his men could not help but fall in love with Liberia and Voinjama, the people and the place, and it immediately blossomed under his care.
The Pak Batt grounds are dotted with signs: “No White Man is superior to a Black Man. No Black Man is superior to any White Man.” and “If you kill one human being you kill the human race entire.” Because the people of Voinjama were hungry, the officers voluntarily fasted one day each week and donated their rations to the community. At their clinic, the doctor saw over 150 local patients a day without charge (although technically he was assigned only to the 600 men in the battalion).
While we were there, the men took turns standing guard along the perimeter and at their checkpoints. An off-duty soldier, in his white tunic and trousers, stood outside the guest house, which was in Col. Raza’s bungalow, and brought us thick, sweet Pakistani tea with canned milk every morning. At night a sentry stood guard outside our bungalow, armed with a long iron staff, like a Pakistani Maasaii with his spear.
On the night of the water ceremony, we stayed up late listening to our young Liberian camera woman tell a frightening dream she had had in which she was pursued by a large snake. When we finished our conversation, she stepped outside to go to her lodgings and suddenly came running back to the door shouting, “Come outside, quick! There are snakes right here!” We ran outside just in time to see two snakes streaking away into the bush between our bungalow and the little zoo that Col. Raza has created to protect feral animals when they find them. One of the snakes was about 5 feet long, thin, dark, and very fast, possibly a black mamba. There was a second snake moving beside it that was thicker and shorter, maybe three feet, and nearly as fast. A third, even smaller snake, about 2 feet long, lay dead by the footpath, victim of the night watchman’s quick reflexes and prowess with the iron staff. He said the snake was a dangerous one. Although I felt sad and horrified that our presence had caused the snake’s death, I thanked the watchman for protecting us.
Three different species of snakes, moving together, in swift parallel formation from the bush to our doorstep in the center of town, on the day of the Lofa River forest ceremony. In over a dozen trips I have only seen one other live snake. Perhaps a herpetologist will one day prove me wrong, but for now, I choose to think that their exuberant and daring appearance confirms that they risked their lives to come and greet us, perhaps to thank us for the offerings that were made.
Showing posts with label Voinjama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Voinjama. Show all posts
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
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.
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.
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