Halt, I Speak English!
It’s a privileged world and folk outside the United States are friendly, so I’ve met a lot of people since coming to Liberia 3½ weeks ago. My first connect was the woman who broke me out of Port au Prince University hospital to work at a new resettlement camp 45 minutes from the city when I was volunteering in Haiti last Spring. She is now the Country Director for the American Refugee Committee here. I saw her almost casually my first day at an emergency preparedness meeting at UNHCR over the Ivory Coast refugee situation: “Carrieeeeeee!!!” “Wiiiiiiilson!!!” (not a reference to that horrible Tom Hanks movie). That night we went for drinks and accompanying my new-found friend was her intern, a funny smart Canadian, who in turn connected me to folk at the Clinton Foundation, CHF, and World Bank. The CHF person was an interesting man who taught me the importance and means of teaching squatters how to care of their “poo”. The World Bank people have since located for me the only dry cleaners in Liberia because one of my many shortcomings is a refusal to wash and iron dress shirts.
Then came my cable guy, who took me to play Basketball in his hood of Paynesville. In about two seconds I got to know seemingly anybody who’s anyone in Monrovia and even the lone lonely Chinese guy Hong Lu Yu who helps out at the local radio station. Now I play with my friend Taps, whose half brother is Tapis of the Miami Dophins, and members of the former Liberian national basketball team on the court next to the water’s edge in Sinkor. Their mascot I hope is the live goat that supervises the outdoor facility. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, the Vice Presidents son Joe Joe has a run at the American school across the street from the apartment I stay. I never thought one could get actually get muddy playing basketball indoors but it turns out with sufficient dust, heat and sweat indeed one can!
Saturday I went to pick up a couple who are friends with Seongeun’s childhood friend Kathy at the checkpoint leading up to the President compound off the main road. The couple works as part of a Connecticut surgical team, which is volunteering at the national hospital JFK, which I hate because it pretends to be free, under the auspices of President Sirleaf’s son, who is an Emergency Physician in Connecticut. Normally doctor teams stay in the dorms at JFK Hospital, but Dr. Sirleaf provided special living arrangements to his posse including a six bedroom residence next to his mothers overlooking the ocean. Inside were air conditioners that worked, a zebra skin covering the living room floor, gold plates on a white laced table cloth, and all the cold diet coke and 8 ounce can of Sprite a thirsty disheveled man in wool pants and Thai dress shirt working for a NGO could want. Oh the luxury of progeny of benevolent leaders following the reign of despots!
When I pulled up to the guard station in my organization’s car, four men in black suits, red shirts and side arms stood up. They had been sitting under the shade of a tree whose branches formed a canopy above a UN soldier in full combat gear including Kevlar vest behind a circular wall of sandbags with mounted machine gun. I thought to be confident. I rolled down the window and as two of the black suited men approached me, I took off my Top Gun sunglasses. I said in a low loud voice to the man who leaned down, “I am Wilson Wang from IRC. I am here to pick up doctors Jenn and Eric, who are part of the surgical team brought in by the President’s son, who work at JFK as part of the HEART Program.”
“You must move your car down the road,” the man said.
I repeated myself drawing deeper from the recesses of my diaphragm, “I am Wilson Wang from IRC. I am here to pick up doctors part of the surgical team brought in by the President’s son.”
“The Chinese embassy is down the street.”
What???? In the distance, I could just make out the bright red fading sign with yellow sickle and poka-dotted starts marking the entrance of the former Chinese embassy of Liberia. I said, “Sir, I don’t need to go to the embassy and by the way that’s not the Chinese embassy. I am here to pick up friends who are staying in the compound.”
By this time the second man had headed towards the front of the car and was signaling for me to move towards the former Chinese embassy. Like a blind man I pretended not to see, holding out my hands with splayed fingers as if I was going to have to feel myself there before I would willingly move the car forward. I contemplated getting out of the car so as to be able to fully express myself and just when I was about to do that; make my Taiwanese-American and language origins very clear to this group of armed Liberians sworn to protect their President, Jenn, Eric, appeared at the passenger window and tapped, “We’re here.” Maybe it was a sign.
Jen and Eric don’t have problems getting in their compound but they confirm that Liberian English is a challenge to comprehend and be heard in. Someone said that Liberians drop all their consonants and vowels but that doesn’t make sense. I will say that sometimes when my friend Taps breaks into Liberian English I ask, “Are you speaking French?” This I guess reveal something about my French.
Taps explains, “Liberian is just cool and fast. Sometimes we don’t even know what language we are speaking.” He laughs. Even if you can make out the words from the swift tongue tipped cadence, certain expressions are unique to Liberian English. My stomach is running means I have diarrhea. My eyes are turning means that I am dizzy. Big sickness is HIV. She got belly is she’s pregnant. [Silence] even with head nod, following a question like, “Do you have a refrigerator to store your insulin?” means a definite no. It’s an entirely a whole another language to learn. This was not in my lonely planet Liberia guide.
I’ll admit that sometimes I have acted like a retarded colonist. I decided years ago with subsequent amendments that I would focus only on Mandarin, French and Spanish thinking that my brain had finite storage capacity. When I lived in Francophone Rwanda in 2007, I refused to speak the dialect Kinyarwandan spoken by the majority of the population besides the occasional Amakuru (hello) or Murakoze (thank you). Though my interpreter’s English was infinitely better than my French, I instructed him to interpret my French into Kinyarwandan and then responses back at me in French with whatever patient, bureaucrat or victim I was trying to communicate with at the time. My rationale was to get good in a language that has great utility in sub-Saharan Africa, which I don’t regret, but the situation was often disastrous with Emmanuel the interpreter looking at me funny as I butchered phrases literally translated as “for long how vaginal fluid hurt, yow” or “tell him that tomorrow he go come back or die…Murakoze”. I often lectured in French to the doctors, nurses and lab techs at the hospital, who could speak French because all schools until now were conducted in French. After describing concepts or telling stories that I found particularly moving, Emmanuel would yell across the room, “They don’t understand.” Sometimes by the time I figured out how to conjugate reflexive verbs with both direct and indirect objects, half the audience was checking their cell phones despite us being off the coverage grid while the other half was flitting in and out of sleep. With time, Emmanuel learned my erratic linguistic tendencies and was able to know exactly what I was trying to say though I never could get him to wipe away that dastardly brown toothed smile.
All this is to say is that I should have learned Kinyarwandan while improving my French in Rwanda. It was not mutually exclusive. My brain is as big or as small as I want it to be. Perhaps this could be said of my other organs. Similarly, I must learn how to communicate better in Liberian lest I be a total culturally incompetent nut. It's entirely selfish. There is so much to do and I don’t have time not to be heard.
