Liberia. Part II

Map

November 7–12, 2010

Liberians have a special Liberian handshake.

First, they shake hands once the regular way.

Then they do an overhand grip.

Then back to the normal handshake.

Then—and this is the most incredible part—the shaking parties snap their fingers against the middle finger of the person they’re greeting.

And conclude with a gentle fist bump.

You can skip the first and last part, but the mutual finger clicking is pretty much obligatory. If you’re short on time, you can shake hands and continue delicately touching with your middle fingers when you release. That’s approximately how I imagine a gay secret handshake. But here it simply means that you’re familiar with the local customs.

Cutouts in cement fences and windows are the main ornamental architectural element. They not only look pretty, but also provide air circulation.

The prettiest household objects are the plastic buckets or tubs. There are no simple single-color ones, they all have swirly injections of a different-colored plastic.

Plastic chairs that say “God bless you” on the back are quite common.

An account of Liberia’s beauty would be incomplete without mentioning the monuments. Single-color monuments just don’t cut it: people in monuments are always portrayed in full color or painted in some other way.

Liberians don’t understand the point of clotheslines. Laundry is dried right on the grass or laid out on the roof.

Construction shoring.

Windows in a shuttle bus.

The irons used here are state-of-the-art coal ones.

The latest model of washing machine.

The thing is, Liberia doesn’t have a single normal power plant. Perhaps they did exist once, as evidenced by the overgrown transmission towers.

But today, people use individual generators.

Not everyone has a generator, of course. Many simply can’t afford one. But on the other hand, every single person has a cell phone. So what do you do if you have a cell phone but no generator? Elementary, my dear Watson—you take your cell phone to a charging kiosk, where they’ll give you a numbered ticket for your phone while it’s charging.

At a gas pump.

The traffic signs are American. They’re few and far between.

Street signs.

There’s a grand total of about three traffic lights in the entire country, and not a single one of them works.

A phone booth.

A trash can in the capital.

A fire hydrant.

A water pump.

The postal worker uses a glue stick to stick stamps onto the postcard (even though the stamps already have an adhesive layer).

There’s absolutely no point in dropping your missive into the one and only street mailbox (a typical American model)—like in Armenia, no one ever checks it.

The local video store.

The mystery meat shop.

Individual portions of mayonnaise for sale. The shop owner scoops mayo from the jar using a spoon taped to a pencil, puts the mayo in a plastic baggie, ties it off with a knot, puts in a second portion, makes another knot, and then sells the whole thing for five cents. The same guy also sells individual portions of chlorine.

Couches for sale.

Freshly killed marmot for sale. For ten dollars, the salesman promises to serve it fried.

Taxis.

An advertisement for traditional medicine with an illustration of symptoms.

Computerized methods of creating individual images haven’t been discovered in Liberia yet. So everything is hand-painted.

Every shop invariably has something painted on it.

Barak Obama is very popular in paintings and on merchandise—he’s black too, after all.

There are video salons everywhere, like in Russia in the early 90s.

Inside is a crowd of people and a tiny TV on the far wall. To make up for the lack of visibility, they blast the sound so loudly that you can hear it all the way down the street.

A village.

Schoolchildren.

Cooking lunch in the schoolyard.

A young woman walks down the street pulling a toy car made from a shampoo bottle behind her. Homemade toys don’t raise any eyebrows here.

There’s an abandoned cemetery inhabited by drug addicts right in the center of Monrovia (the capital).

Even the police prefer to stay away. There’s no point in trying to kick the drug addicts out, they’ll just come back.

Addicts who have hit rock bottom sleep on the graves. “Yo, check out those passed-out junkies!”

A junkie tells the story of how she stepped into one of the many open graves, cut herself, and subsequently developed these sores all over her leg.

At this point, the reader may rightly inquire: why does Liberia even exist? What is it that allows people to do absolutely nothing all day but eat oranges and shit on the beach?

The answer is simple, my dear reader. Liberia has unimaginably large deposits of gold, diamonds and iron ore. So while some dig and pan for gold, the rest can afford to lie back on a log and relax.