The Bureaucrat
I am racing down Nimba County in a silver Toyota 4-runner with my driver Kamoh. We have been on the road since 5 a.m. -- A north-south road that in amazingly bad condition for a country at peace for over six years and with a presidential election coming in the fall. I am generally a thankful person, but I have recently become born again to quality tires and asphalt. I mean, how do these things work? I know of nothing more miraculous or underappreciated in my current existence other than maybe my ass and feet.
This stretch of asphalt is fine down its center, but its edges encroach too much and are jagged as if they have been lifted to the sky, frayed, and thrown back down by Zeus. The road seems to serve more a cosmetic purpose-- the lush landscape split down its center in dramatic fashion separating east banana trees from west cassava jungles. Deep pot holes are distributed frequently and randomly, some in such bad condition that they are actually improved by people filling them with jutting irregular rocks or a random spare tire half sticking out. From the back, Kamoh must look drunk as he veers between these unnatural obstacles so as to not collapse the car’s suspension. From the front, the Liberian morning stretches out in the form of a familiar mystery story of red dust, bright green trees and plants, and passerby’s. It is all rather meditative. Our thoroughbred tires go hoooom…
I am trying to make a meeting at the Ministry of health in Monrovia at eleven between the health minister and other health organizations working in Liberia and it’s going to be close. I look like a wreck. I am sweaty. My shirt is wrinkled. I have five new liver spots. I smell like cow skin, which believe it or not is an actual Liberian dish. I have been touring the areas at the Northern Liberia-Ivory Coast border receiving refugees, which currently number over 30,000. One purpose of the trip was to feel what this actually means to tired hungry women, men and children (I know I am not a woman). Another was to experience the towns and their wobbly worn signs along the refugee path so I can recall them, pronounce them as we fight to protect the displaced in host communities where they go. My task at the meeting is simply put: Carve out our organizations interest and ability to provide health care to the planned Garwe camp set to house 15,000 refugees. This is in addition to our current thirteen clinics, one health center, hospital, and four mobile teams. My country director is out of town but has made it clear that this is what he wants, “This is a really important meeting,” he said, “We need to position IRC as able to deliver what others cannot. Do you believe this?”
What I believe is I don’t know crap, can barely conjure-up our organizational chart, but I am willing to prepare. My role is to take my country director, whom I like, at his word, sit up like a grown-up and lay claim professionally and expertly. I have spent weeks studying our ten million dollar operation so as to be able to manage it, but our refugee response was planned before my arrival and frankly has been happening parallel to my daily work—two large not so stealthy ships passing amidst Liberian (melting) icebergs in the night? The trip was good but too fast. I have impressions but require bruises. I saw thousands of refugees but didn’t get to study the breakdown. I spoke with few at the bridge at Blemiplay but due to the rough road and concomitant travel time, didn’t get to see our mobile medical teams at work. On my lap is a notebook with a hand drawn map of our current operations in northern Nimba: Blemiplay, Beoyoolar, Garplay, Kamplay, Loguatuo, Duoplay…the list runs on. Maybe it’s my bad art skills, challenged spelling or now defunct vestibular system but I am getting carsick. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. I do not feel nausea. I am the nausea. I am inside the nausea. Hooooom….
While I sit momentarily with eyes closed, Kamoh, the driver, remains solid as brick. Kamoh is a giant. He is six foot four and thick. While my head bobs here and there with each jerk of the car, Kamoh’s gaze steels forward as does his grip. Sitting with Kamoh is like (me) child keeping the company of man. When I ask Kamoh if there are plans to pave the road which ails before us, he says things like, yes there are plans, just not now. It will take some time. When I ask him if Tobogee tastes good as cow skin he says cow skin you can eat but he prefers fish. If you eat Tobogee your stomach will run…
I have always wondered the specifics of where Kamoh goes after he drops me off at night at either the organizational guest house, or if it is full, the local hotel which is like a United States Hilton divided by 100 with a cold bucket shower and an occasional really large moth drowning in the toilet. Kamoh says he goes to a hotel too, but given my harry Hilton accommodations, I am not sure what this means. I confess to not digging too deep. This morning when Kamoh picked me up in the dark, I could barely make out his levitating dark green fishing hat. As usual he was there five minutes before our departure leaning against his silver Toyota 4-Runner steed. Now we are three hours on our way to Monrovia and the sun has long risen, first blinding then illuminating. I ask, “Kamoh, do you think we will make it to Monrovia by 11?”
“We will try,” he says, “God willing.”
“How many hours before we get there,” I ask
“It depends,” he says, “sometimes the traffic is just too long.”
It is 10:40 when Kamoh drops me off at the World Health Organization building at Mamba Point. I send Kamoh home because it is now his day off and I know that after dropping the car at the main office in Congo Town-- office policy-- he will still have to local taxi it two hours back in the direction we came. I am less a wreck. Thanks to Kamoh, I have had time to go to my apartment, wash my hair in the sink, dry shave and put on my pressed Thai tailored blue dress shirt and black slacks. It is hot but I almost look hot and though on the verge of sweating, I make it to the fifth floor from the meandering staircase without a single temple drop. My notebook is still open to that dastardly map. I study as I walk and wait. In between I say this is my time. This is hammer time. God I am old. Garwe camp , Beolooyar, Gharplay…I am muttering.
First five minutes, then ten minutes, then fifteen. The minutes click off and slowly, like the passage of time through torture, it becomes clear to me the irony of the day’s planning: I am in the wrong place. By this time I should have seen the usual array of white and black characters, some in patterned African bright ostentatious short sleeved dress shirts, some in full dress suit with red or blue tie (are you kidding?). I walk into the WHO office. I ask the woman behind the counter if the Secretary is meeting this morning at 11:00. She picks up the phone, dials, says something or another, hangs up and says, “Yes, but the meeting is not here. The meeting is at the Ministry of Health as it always is.”
Mother fucker! Down the stairs I fly. Outside, it is now the customary 95 degrees and wet. Kamoh is gone. I don’t have a ride. A meeting has just gotten out at the UNHCR building across the way and there are tens of people around with their white SUV’s, drivers, and “UN” in simple bold font plastered against the front car doors. As I start moving in large concentric circles not unlike a mentally ill chicken, I ask a few of the well dressed passerbys if I might just get a ride to the Ministry and they look at me as if I am a crazy sweaty Asian male stranger asking them for a lift to where they never go. After three rounds of this, I deduce that as usual, the UN will provide little in terms of solutions. I stop circling.
Organizational security protocol dictates that we never ride in local cabs under any circumstances. I flag the second one I see. The cabin of the beaten down yellow cab with all four windows down is blistering hot. The seats are worn and tattered with a vinyl black scorching to touch covering revealing a kind of nice original bluish cotton polyester material beneath that is oil stained. Thankfully, there is no one else in the car. Taxi cabs in Monrovia are almost never empty. The more passengers (usually five), the cheaper.
“Ministry of Health,” I say loudly, voice too high, a little out of breath, “As fast as possible.” The car lurches forward before I am fully in the car and accelerates in putts. The driver looks at me through the rear view mirror as if I am a cultural specimen. We drive a few blocks slowly and not surely and it occurs to me that the driver doesn’t know where he is going. “Excuse me,” I say, “You do know where the Ministry of Health is, don’t you?”.
“Je ne parle pas Anglais,” the driver says.
“Savez vous ou est ‘que le Ministre de Sante,” I ask thinking momentarily that I am facile.
“No,” the driver says, “Je ne le conais pas.”
Mother fucker!! What are the odds? I am in Monrovia, Liberia, an English speaking nation with American roots. I have just come back from an eighthour trip from the border where people only speak French. I have never been in a local cab before and yet my driver here only speaks French. I speak French, but apparently this Ivoirian is plying his trade in a town far away from home, he doesn't know the streets but he has not problems picking up victims. No wonder his cab was empty. The degrees of freedom of this scenario are infinite and I would normally enjoy winning my first sub-Saharan lottery but I have places to go, people to see.
I ask the driver to stop. “Arretez le voiture,” I say and he does. I am about to get out of this literally and figuratively defunct car when an amazingly blue chipped rickety cab stops along side ours and my Ivoirian begins to ask in local dialect the location of the Ministry of Health to the other driver who must lean over two small children residing in the front passenger seat to hear. The blue taxi carries five passengers in total and as the drivers converse and gesticulate, all passengers on deck including the two children being crushed by the chest of their driver, look at the yellow colored taxi with yellow flaking rusty paint with front and back bumpers dinged, which has halted their journey, with the overtly well dressed Asian man sweating from his forearms sitting therein. I am aware of the scrutiny. I wipe the sweat streaming down my face with shoulder shrugs as if I am in a Liberian boxing match. Back and forth. Back and forth. I may be losing but I am quick.
I am about to give up. I can’t stand the heat. This day is too much. Suddenly, the other driver lets loose a serious guttural noise that startles and like that, all his passengers jump out of his vehicle and into my mine. “Come,” the other driver says. “Changez,” my driver says, which is great because I no longer have sitting space. I switch cars.
The now blue taxi accelerates with a more sturdy lurch and putt. I wonder if this driver knows his Ministries as well as the next, but wah lah we arrive at the Ministry of Health in no more than five minutes. The driver charges me $5 dollars, about 10 times what I should pay but I don’t have time to fight though I do let out a high pitched shriek to voice my discontent and to confirm stereotypes. I run up the dusty ramp leading up to the meeting room of the Ministry on the third floor. It is 11:30. I tuck in my shirt. I rub out the inside corner of my eyes. I shoulder shrug one last time and open the balsa wood door. Faces including that of the Minister and my Funder seated around the center table immediately look up. “Mother Fucker,” I whisper. I purse my lips, nod and with tummy sucked and chest out, I walk in
