"Nothing is easy in Liberia"

A familiar saying here in Liberia is, "It not easy-o"... just stating that nothing is easy here... Things that should go smoothly, rarely do. Things that take a few minutes at home, end up taking half of your day here. Let me just give you a few recent examples from this week:

1. Six weeks ago I went down to the airline office to buy my tickets for my vacation that I'm taking next week. I booked all four flights and paid for them... only to find that when I went to confirm the flights yesterday, I had none. No worries, as of today, I am on three of the four flights... for some reason I am on a waiting list for the final flight, but I'm not too worried about that since it is the flight back to Monrovia!

2. Driving to town to confirm those flights, my first turn is a left onto a small bypass. There is a pickup truck coming off of that bypass wanting to turn left onto the road I am on. Instead of yielding to me to turn left, he decides to just keep pulling out, and out and out... where soon there is barely enough room for me to take my turn left around him. As I am trying to squeeze by him, he is looking at me like I am the one who is in the wrong. I continue driving into town, which in itself is an adventure, with little to no rules for driving, much less people dodging in and out of traffic. My mission that morning was to find a store that could make a copy of our house key... since we have six people and three keys. Sounds easy, right? I go to the first store which advertises key copies on the window. I ask the nice man behind the counter if he can make a copy of my key, but he doesn't have the right kind of blank key to cut. So off to store number two, to find the same story there. Stores three, four and five... same story. So I decide to give up on the idea since I was running out of time and the vehicle was needing to get back to the office for the next person to use. As I was driving up to store number three, there was one parking spot on the right open... one that would need parallel parking. So as I waited for the truck to pull out and completely block all traffic as he turned around, I had made sure that my blinker was on. (I have learned the hard way to always use your blinker... even AFTER you turn the corner, or you may be pulled over for wreckless driving! LOL) So my blinker is on and I pull ahead to do my parallel park, to find that a taxi is right on my rear end, BLARING his horn, ticked off that I would even THINK about reversing at a time like this. Well, this is the only parking spot in the next 5 blocks, I am not giving this one up. So I sit and wait. And he continues to honk. I put the car in reverse, waiting patiently. Finally he figures out that I am not going to go forward, and backs up enough for me to do my parallel parking. As I park, I look to my left and he is stopped right next to me, looking at me as if waiting for an explanation. Tempted to say "this is what they call parallel parking. Try it sometime!" Instead I rolled down my window and said, "My man, my signal light was on." The blank stare in return told me that my explanation meant NOTHING to him, and off he drove.

3. Last weekend we decided to make the 2 hour drive up to Robertsport for a day of surfing. Corruption alway has been big in Liberia, but President Sirleaf has been working pretty hard at stopping it, especially in the LNP (Liberian National Police). We were on our way back to Monrovia, driving through a checkpoint that we have passed through hundreds of times, when the officer signals me to stop. I stop, take a deep breath and roll down the window.

"Afternoon Officer."

"Afternoon Ma. Do you have anything for me today?"

Deep breath by me.

"No sir, I don't."

Blank stare.

Looks in the car at all my passengers.

A hesitated "ok." he says and waves me through.

A similar thing happened just the other day after I brought someone to the airport. Usually I am driving our SP vehicle which has license plates with our organization on it. As soon as the police see it is a NGO, they wave us through. This particular day I was driving one of our rental cars, which license plate indicates a personal car. Any other time I pass through no problem. This time, I get signalled to pull over. I pull over to the right and wait for the imenant request. "Ma... it is cold out today. You have tea for me right?" I just looked at him and said "Not today sir."

That is just the tip of the iceburg of regular occurances over here... many times people around me will laugh and say "wow you get excited about the little things, don't you!" and I reply, "YES!" With that being said, most days its the little things that make my day, but at the same time, its the little things that can be so frustrating. So, I'm leaving for a week of much needed vacation this weekend to Paris! I'm praying for rest, fun and the hottest showers imagineable! :)