Better Roads

The secretary – or maybe he’s a clerk – for the Deputy Minister of Finance in Liberia has an office like a 1950s noir detective. It’s cluttered, dirty, and sparse, with papers piled all over everything – the desk, the floor, under the chair, sticking out of drawers. Some of them are in files with things scribbled on and crossed out and scribbled again. The ashtray on the desk is full and it sits beside the ancient manual typewriter on which the secretary (or clerk) types his forms in triplicate with two thick index fingers drilling up and down like toy woodpeckers. The Venetian slats on the window are cracked glass and coated with years of city street grime. The huge, broken air conditioner sticks through the window like something thrown there by a tornado. It has a thick, fraying cable running out of it into a wall socket, and above the wall socket someone has written with a marker ‘240 Volts’ as an afterthought. Outside, down on the street, everything honks and roars and yells and swarms.

Today is the second time I’ve been to this man’s office. Before I came in to watch him first search, then find, and finally show me a paper that said the Deputy Minister wanted to have a meeting with me. ‘Ok,’ I blinked, ‘What time?’ ‘What time you want?’ he blinked back me. Clearly the Deputy Minister doesn’t have much to do. We settled on 2:00 pm the next day. So now I am back for my meeting.

The secretary, or whoever he is, doesn’t offer a chair, or even look up, so I edge my way in and sit down. He roots through his files and moves his papers around and lifts the typewriter off of another pile of papers and rummages through them. There is no discernable order to his search, nor is there any obvious system to his piles of paper. Finally he finds what he is looking for in his drawer, under several other things that look like the classroom notes of a dyslexic. He shows it to me. It is the paper that I’ve already seen, saying I have to have a meeting with the Deputy Minister. ‘Mmm,’ I say. I am holding my tongue, which is the politest thing to do when faced with inanity pretending to be process. The secretary shifts himself off his chair and heads up the stairs to the seventh floor, where the Higher-Ups work, higher up. He loses his breath often and has to stop on the landings. There’s an elevator, but I’m scared of it. Maybe he is, too. Maybe he’d rather take his chances with heart failure.

The offices and the doors get nicer the higher you go in the Ministry of Finance of Liberia. People have nicer desks and they are better dressed and some of them, especially as you get closer to the Minister’s office, have computers. The people standing around in the offices look richer and better dressed, like they have a lot of expensive and important things on the go. One thing doesn’t change, though. Nobody seems to be working any harder up here. The pace is consistently languid throughout the levels.

The Deputy Minister has a really nice door, which is closed when we get there. It opens sometimes and people go in and out, but we stand outside, waiting for the invisible signal that will indicate it’s our turn. I have no idea what this signal is, but I know it exists. In places like this, you believe in the existence of such things from indirect evidence. For a long time you stand, and then nothing appears to change or alter or warn, but suddenly you are moving. Eventually this happens, and I move along the invisible flow of cause and effect through the door.

The Deputy Minister of Finance Responsible for Revenue (that’s her full title) is standing behind a huge desk and leaning over it to see some papers that two confused men are poring over and pointing at excitedly. Her hair is in little tasteful dreads with slightly orange tips and she wears dark-rimmed glasses, which make her look funky, like she’s the marketing rep for a hip New York company rather than a minister in Liberia. She has a lime green suit on most of her and every other part of her is covered with gold jewelry. The men with the papers are trying to answer her question, which has something to do with the spare parts that come with their generator. They keep pointing to different sections of their paper like children that don’t really know what the teacher’s asking about but hope that by suggesting everything they know of they might eventually get it right. It’s not working. The Deputy Minister looks up at me and leans so far across her huge desk to shake my hand that I’m afraid she might dislocate her hip before she reaches me. We manage it and she turns distractedly back to the generator question and tells the men they should highlight certain items, or all of them, or something. They look up blankly and begin shuffling the papers and pointing at things again. She looks back at me. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know about this meeting.’ I wonder fleetingly why she is even bothering with these clowns when she’s got whole floors of people below her with nearly nothing to do, just waiting for customers that they can ignore. But she looks very nice, I think. Perhaps she is a naturally helpful person.

She offers me a seat. She takes one, herself, then realizes that the immensity of her desk and the depth of our chairs make it feel like we are treading water with just our chins above the surface. It’s not very dignified, so she stands up again and we have an odd conversation with her leaning over her desk and me looking up at her feeling a little like the masses at a Mussolini speech. The generator guys are flapping off to the side, so she gets right to the point. ‘We have started charging tax now, and all the NGOs should pay it. 1% for this and 3% for that. Thank you!’ She finishes brightly, half-turns back to the generator problem, remembers to say good-bye to me, and retracts back over the desk again. She seems more like a likeable and scatter-brained school principal than a government minister.

I follow the clerk man back downstairs, where he explains the fine details of the taxes to me. The fine details are that we owe $1266.00. ‘Mmm,’ I say, but not very convincingly, I guess, because he suddenly gets animated. ‘We have to have something,’ he says, ‘or how do we make things better?’ He tells me about the traffic. ‘You used to take TWO! HOUR! driving from [place I don’t know] to [another place I don’t know]. Now,’ he snaps his fingers, ‘it takes like THAT! You know why?’ ‘Mmm?’ I say. ‘Better roads.’ He leans back in his chair and looks extremely satisfied with himself and his speech and everything in the whole world. Better roads. Life is almost unbearably good.

‘Thank you,’ I tell him. He nods emphatically and hands me the scrap of paper on which he has scribbled my taxes payable with a pencil. I fold it carefully and put it in my notebook.

The drive home is longer than usual, because some men are re-painting the yellow centre line. They have a few orange safety cones spread around their area marking a rough and dubious island of security in the middle of traffic, a ten-foot stencil, a paintbrush, and a bucket of thick paint. Two of them lift the stencil up and place it over the next section, another one carefully paints along the line through the stencil, and the rest of them stand around and nearly get hit by cars. They are moving at the pace of a bogged down army towards the capital, painting out our taxes in ten-foot yellow lines. They are making better roads.

Among the Living

After a day in a hot office, staring myself into blind stupidity with European Commission documents about how to carry out a tender procedure, I finally gave up and went down to the beach for a swim. The sea was rough, but honestly, it could’ve taken me and I would’ve given up without a fight. European bureaucratic rigamarole has that affect on anyone who is not a European bureaucrat. I walked down the beach to where the bay curved and waded in up to my waist, then stood staring out to the horizon, swaying like a drunk in the push and pull of the incoming waves.

There was a ship on the horizon, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with a feeling from my childhood. When I was young I would go hiking with my Dad, way up into the mountains, leaving the car and the road and all comforts behind. We’d camp under the stars, with the mountains standing around silent and the sun going down alone and the evening wind whispering like a lonely ghost in the haunted pines. I liked these trips, but the truth is that I liked going home afterwards even better. I liked arriving back at the car and taking off my boots and the way the car started up and the moment when we pulled out onto the smooth, predictable surface of the road with its neat yellow and white lines leading us to a better world. Anyway, sometimes when we were way up in the hills, trudging up a trail to another lonely, breathtaking view we’d hear the sound of cars on the highway far below, or the buzz of a plane overhead, or we’d lie on our backs and eat thick bread and cheese and see the vapour trail of a jet overhead. These things always gave me a sad sort of comfort. They let me know that other people existed, that the world hadn’t ended and left us alone there, that if we could hear and see the traces of other people, it meant that the way home was still near. It’s a bit stupid, really, because those highways and planes and vapour trails might have well been on the moon for how accessible they were, but that’s how I felt. A longing, yearning kind of assurance. It was the same when we did beach hikes along some ancient, wild coast and camped at night looking out to sea. Alone, we’d see the lights of ships at night, or their slipping silhouettes along the horizon by day, and I’d the feelings of home would rush up inside me, like sadness and hope, mixed.

Today, the ship on the horizon off the coast of Liberia was probably the farthest thing from a symbol of home that could be imagined, except that it was free to turn west and put full ahead for the New World, where, if you were lucky, you had a car parked in some clean National Parks lot, with white painted lines and a road across a clean, orderly land that leads you home.

I stood there in the water and felt an urge to swim for it.

But I didn’t. I swam across the bay and climbed out at Anna’s house and walked home, because I have to get up tomorrow and deal with an ECHO tender procedure, and like the hikes of old, you have to conquer what you came to conquer, really, before going home feels any good.

***

We sing here, and we preach. Every morning we have what they call ‘devotions’ before we start work. This means we pull up plastic chairs around in a circle in front of the house and sing hymns (all four verses) from photo-copied sheets and sometimes someone gets inspired and we sing a Liberian chorus, which makes us stand and clap and get a little more exuberant about the whole thing. Then we all sit down again and the designated person for that day preaches from the Bible. Liberians seem to come from the womb as full members of a gospel choir and with a full complement of street preaching skills. Every morning I hear an exposition of some portion of the Holy Word turned out in a fine cadence and tone worthy of a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. Sometimes, I admit, I don’t even listen to what they’re saying. I just like hearing words spoken like that.

Actually, I like the whole thing. Which is strange. I’ve been Catholic for over a year now, having entered the arms of the ancient Church last New Year’s Day, so I haven’t been sitting in on a lot of old fashioned Bible preaching lately. Catholics, contrary to the myths that circulate, do use the Bible in their worship, but they tend to read it out loud and let the words hang in the solemn air rather than expound on it at length. I like that, too. Holy words drifting through the upper atmosphere of a cathedral have the ability to take you up with them. But there is something about these bouncy hymns and this arm-flapping preaching that reminds me of puppies tumbling around or a good barn-stomping fiddler who gets the crowd dancing. Sure, I think all my intellectual things, like: Who told this guy he could interpret a story about lepers as though it applied to the fact that our vehicles were breaking down at an unholy rate? But then the clapping starts and everyone shouts ‘Amen’ and ‘Praise the Lord’ and it doesn’t seem to matter much. The lepers needed healing, our vehicles need fixing, and who am I to split doctrinal hairs when we all need so much help?

Jamba, the cleaning lady, always makes me stifle a laugh, but I think she’s got it right. Without fail, when it’s time for ‘prayer requests and thanksgiving’, she rolls out in her low earthy voice: ‘I tank de Lawd, dat we here are countay amawn de livin’ dis mawnin’ … praise JeeeeezUS!’ There it is. Just thankful that we woke up today. I’m rarely thankful for the morning. I’d rather sleep and forget the day, but I am spoiled and soft. These people have seen terrible things. They’ve seen their sons and daughters shot and raped or worse. They’ve seen their homes burned and shot up and looted by soldiers full of drugs and demons, their nation fall prey to arrogant and bloodthirsty men, the kind of men the Old Testament writers described in no uncertain terms as ‘the wicked.’ Corruption is a way of life, sanitation doesn’t exist, and the old killers are all dressed up and sitting in the legislature. I’m surprised they still sing and clap and preach with such stomp, but I’m glad they do. It makes me love those holy words that drift around my cathedrals even more:

“These are Zion’s children,”
and while they dance they will sing:
“In you all will find their home.”

Amen.