If you remember a piece of information from many months ago, phenomenal. If not; I and a baker’s dozen of volunteers were forced to move sites between school years as we were effectively inaccessible during the Liberian rainy season. For me that meant a new home Bopolu City, Gbarpolu County, a county seat of governmental buildings huddled in the bush near the Sierra Leonean border. Only a four hour hop and skip from Monrovia, this new land offered a different window into Liberian life.
The western part of Liberia is really the central part of Liberia in it is more integrally tied to the urban country capital of Monrovia. The good and the bad. Good because the educational setting and road networks, while still severely disadvantaged, are better serviced. Bad because the hell Liberia has suffered often grades out from Monrovia. The recent civil wars upended life, cumulatively displacing nearly half of all Liberians. Many of my peers in Bopolu spent parts of their childhoods in Guinean or Sierra Leonean refugee camps.
Ebola, a far more fatal disease than present-day COVID-19, exposed a vastly unprepared medical network and led to health workers being seen as harbingers of death. Despite overwhelming surficial similarities of green rainforest, dark skin, and rainbow fabrics, the experiences that inform the culture here are quite different than those in the Southeastern reaches of the country. I carried these thoughts into the classroom – less likely to casually ask students about their parents and more likely to classify viruses as living things.
Religiously, the region is split between Islam and Christianity with remarkable amiability between the two. Most business owners are Islam, often moving to Liberia from neighboring Guinea or southern Mali for the benefits of commanding a larger volume of sales and a more relaxed tax environment.
Food shops dot the main street, where 200 LRD (~1 USD) fetches a chicken dinner. My favorite seller is colloquially referred to as “24-hour” for her round-the-clock service. I did catch her sleeping on the job a time or two… thankfully her kids knew how to keep the oil bubbling.
Tea shops are frequented by men talking politics at non-yelling volumes while sipping sugary shot-glasses of concentrated tea. Two video-clubs, both owned by Nigerians, show football (n. – a sport played with a ball and feet) for 75 LRD. Gold-miners from temporary mountain villages come down to the valley to restock, while county officials build guest houses and entertainment centers to host them.
Bopolu sees much higher traffic than my previous site. Subsistence farming is the main livelihood for everyday citizens. Stay alert for an upcoming post on my Science Teacher Training here.
Thanks for sharing this unique insight into the current situation in Liberia with us. I haven´t seen many posts dedicated to this country here on Hive (or on Steem before). Obviously, locals have been through a lot lately...
Let me get you some extra support for better visibility.
@tipu curate
And thank you for noticing @photrun! I see you visited the Azores last year. My brother @dhimmel and I visited last August and had a similarly wonderful time.
Actually, we are still here :D We picked these island as our next digitally nomadic destination back in last November and we planned to stay here for a couple of months but the pandemic has a kind of trapped us here :D But its´s a beautiful place, no doubts. We are on Sao Miguel, where did you guys stay?
Sao Miguel and Santa Maria. Hiking around Santa Maria via the Grande Route (starting and ending at airport) was a highlight.
Wooow, that´s a beautiful shot. Camping in this stunning wilderness must have been an amazing experience. We have been on Sao Miguel only the whole time but this island is large and diverse enough to keep us entertained for months :) I actually run a special weekly series on by blog called Beauties of Azores where I introduce my readers to interesting places we have visited here. This is one of my favorite episodes. The lakes around Sete Cidades are so beautiful. I am sure you visited this part of the island too, didn´t you?
Yeah we camped at the Parque de Campismo Sete Cidades one night. It's a free campground with running water! We met some nice locals there, as it was a holiday weekend. Unfortunately, we also had some food stolen, but luckily the thieves spared taking my Trail Designs titanium inferno wood stove.
Wow, I am very surprised to hear this... We have been living here on Sao Miguel for about a half a year now and it feels like the safest place we have been to so far. I thought the crime rate is literally zero here. I think you must have been very unlucky to have such experience and I am very sorry about it... Hopefully it didn´t spoil your overall impression about the islands :)
Let me correct that link for you (:
Haha you are right! :) I need to get used to linking my older posts from Hive, even though they were actually created on Steem. Thanks for the reminder!
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Because of the civil war Liberia itself is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. I wonder what happened after August 2017. The exchange rate jumped rocket speed against to US Dollar. https://currency.world/convert/USD/LRD (See the historical change in the graph)
I would like to see the mines of gold. But as @jhimmel knows, when we visited I fell ill with traveler's gut.
Your legs may have carried you up Bo mountain, but your gut would have kept you there. Amazing we made it home in two pieces.