Please keep your legs off the wall

Today was a fun day in Liberia. It started with me getting a new dress! For someone who really is not a fan of clothes shopping, this is definitely the way to go: have a friend who is your same size and whose mom is a seamstress and knows how to make beautiful dresses out of African lappa fabric. Pay her to make one for you! I wore it to start the day, and then a meeting we had with the deputy minister of education was cancelled till tomorrow, so I changed so I can wear it again tomorrow.

First thing we headed off to CHAP farms - an initiative based in Liberia that is working on using agriculture to enable Liberians to live sustainably and independent of outside aid. Robert showed us around their farm and explained various aspects of rice, okra, and other types of farming they're doing there. (In the picture, I'm uploading their brochure to my laptop).

We next headed to Margibi county to look at agricultural initiatives there. Mr. Willie Cooper is Mr. Solunteh’s counterpart in Margibi county and he and his staff were fantastically knowledgeable. We wandered around their experimental farm and nursery, and learned a lot more about how agriculture works here. Mustafa will use a lot of this info in his upcoming presentation for aid funding.

The day has ended in a series of unfortunate events. They didn’t have room for both of us at the guest house for tonight, so earlier today Mustafa volunteered to go to (a much less nice) one nearby. We were both struck by this sign we saw on the wall as we toured the place. The story gets more serious: as Mustafa dropped some of his stuff off in my room he was chagrined to see an unmannerly wretch, smugly sitting on my bed with about the filthiest feet you can imagine. What IS the world coming to? But that’s nothing to what comes next: about an hour after he left there was a sudden loud banging at my window. When I worked up the nerve to lift up the curtain and investigate, there was David, our building’s guard. He told me that “a guy” was outside and wanted to be let in. I went to the front door and peered through the bars to find David and… Mustafa! Perhaps there is some hope for human decency in the world after all: I happened to be in a fairly decent mood so I decided to let him in. Apparently they’d given him the wrong outside key, so he’d spent an hour with their security guard trying to make the key work or wake someone up to let him in, all to no avail. So the poor guy gets to spend the night on one of the lobby couches here.
Tuesday morning update: apparently that was NOT the end of Mustafa’s misfortunes: he had skeeters biting his feet all night, and was awakened at 5 AM by other residents who were ready to get started with their day. Guess if he’s grouchy today, I’ll try not to hold it against him.