Liberia

A man swipes at a wall with a paint-laden brush. The paint was white when he began, but now, a few yards past his starting point, it is quite gray – polluted by the dirt of the wall he hadn't cleaned. Next to him, lizards try to scurry up the wall. Their feet slip on the wet paint, and they fall back to the ground – a failure. A girl wearing a glittery “Obama” shirt waits to cross the street. Next to the river one boy sells large fish, fully two feet in length. Nearby, a smaller boy holds a string of frogs, hanging by their front arms. Small children stand, naked except for the soap bubbles, next to the bucket that is their bath. A woman inside a food stand presses cooked rice into a mold for the sake of convenient consumption, while a child peddles tiny bags of plantain chips. The smell of lunch alternates with the smell of feces. A boy, by appearance around 12 years old, steps fearlessly into two lanes of flowing traffic, arms spread wide to stop the cars. Amazingly, they slow and then stop, and a pastor escorts an elderly lady across the street.

We wait for a taxi, finding one after twenty minutes. They want to charge us more for our skin color, but the local people accompanying us talk them down, insisting that it's not right.

This is Liberia.

I'll tell you a secret: I didn't really expect Liberia to mean very much to me. In Sierra Leone, I was kind of swept off my feet . . . I really loved it and didn't want to leave. In Ghana, I spent the whole first port at home; the second port was pretty neutral for me. It was fine, but not great; I was expecting my time in Liberia to be basically the same. But now I'm beginning to wonder otherwise . . .