It Is 10 Dollars If You Come Here To Die

‘Hi!’ Jess says when she opens the hotel room door.

            She smiles each time when she opens the door and sees that it is me returning from work. She smiles like she has not seen me in a long time and then she sort of tilts her head and bends one knee almost in a strange half-curtsy. I find that I have come to anticipate it - the smile and the wonderfully awkward half-curtsy - so that it taps the reward center of my brain to produce a shot of dopamine each time. It makes coming home to her an even finer thing.

            ‘I’m not well,’ I say to her on this day and her lovely wide smile quickly turns to concern.

            I have been out of work all week and this is my first day back and I feel awful.

            ‘My throat is bad,’ I say as I come in and put down my messenger bag.

            ‘You probably need antibiotics,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to the hospital now.’

            ‘No,’ I say stubbornly.

            ‘Come on,’ she urges.

            ‘Let’s go tomorrow morning during work hours,’ I say. ‘I’m sick because of the apartment that they put us in!’

            I know how I sound and I feel lousy about myself for sounding that way and for feeling the way I sound, but I made a good contribution at work today and now the chip is on my shoulder when I think about the mistreatment that I have received.

            Jess urges again that we go to the hospital but I am a stubborn baby just now.

            We eat and it hurts to swallow so that I am twice as slow as the absurdly slow eater that I normally am. Then we get into bed - actually we had eaten in bed because there is no table or chairs in our hotel room and we do not want to eat in the common area. Later, at night, we put the lights out and I lay there and I feel bad. The adrenaline from the activity of the day abandons me and I feel my sore throat close and breathing becomes difficult.

            ‘Jess,’ I say into the darkness, knowing that she is still awake because neither of us have learned to sleep sound or well here yet.

            ‘Yes?’ she says from beside me.

            ‘I think I need to go to the hospital.’

We walk the five blocks to the John F Kennedy Hospital because I will not let Jess call for a car-taxi and I refuse to ride on the back of a motorcycle-taxi. Also, I feel that the walking builds the adrenaline up in my system so that I do not feel so bad as when I lay in bed shallowly breathing. The security guards stop us at the gate but they let us through when Jessica explains why we have come.

            ‘Do they think we are here to steal something?’ I say because I feel bad and I forget that it does not make me feel better to spit venom at others.

            ‘Look at this field in front of the hospital,’ I say. ‘I could die here and no one would find me until the rain washes my decayed, MOLDY corpse to the street.’

            ‘Come on, Negative Nancy,’ Jess says.

            Earlier in the day I called myself a ‘Negative Nancy’ because I got into a foul mood talking about the moldy apartment that has made me sick. Jess likes the label and now she is calling me ‘Negative Nancy’ intermittently as we walk to the emergency department.

            ‘If I die,’ I say, ‘you tell my mother that I died bravely. No whimpering or sniveling, ok?’

            ‘OK, Negative Nancy. Hang on. We’re almost there.’

            ‘On second thought, I’m feeling a lot better,’ I say as we approach the dreadful looking reception room of the emergency department. ‘I think we should go home and we’ll visit the SOS clinic in the morning.’

            ‘Come on. We’re already here, Negative Nancy,’ she says.

            Then she tries to think what would be the opposite label so that she can be more encouraging.

            ‘Don’t be a Negative Nancy,’ she says. ‘Be a Positive Pauliana.’

            ‘Pauliana?’ I say. ‘Positive Peter or Pauline would be better.’

            ‘I like Pauliana,’ Jess says and then she says, ‘Be a Positive Pauliana,’ again as though to make it stick.

On the wall beside the entrance is a plaque that says Emergency Department and the door is open to the night air. The reception area is lit by a compact florescent bulb that hangs naked from the ceiling. The walls are bare except where printed papers with poorly written instructions hang by scotch tape.

'US$10 (ten dollars) charge for the pronouncement of death'

            ‘That one says it is 10 dollars if you come here to die,’ Jess whispers as we enter. She is referencing the processing fee for delivering a dead body to the Emergency Department.

            Cobwebs, dust, and mold fill where the walls meet the ceiling and along the exposed rafters and unused light fixtures. There are two boys behind the reception desk and Jess goes over to register me. I sit in a plastic chair beside a pregnant young woman whose mother comes in shortly with the 700 Liberian dollars to pay the registration fee. After the mother pays, the nurse wraps the girl's arm to take her blood pressure and then the young boy who is a nurse’s assistant takes her to an examination room.

            ‘What is your problem?’ the nurse asks me.

            ‘My throat is infected,’ I say.

            The nurse looks at me and sighs. I feel sick and put out but I think about not spitting venom. ‘She won’t kiss me when my throat is infected,’ I say, gesturing to Jessica who has come to sit beside me after paying the registration fee.

            The nurse smiles as though for the first time tonight and I feel proud of myself for not spitting venom back at her. Then the nurse directs the boy to take my blood pressure. I am 120 over 70.

            ‘He will take you for the tests,’ the nurse says.

            ‘What tests?’ I ask.

            ‘Blood and urine,’ she says.

The face of patient care

            ‘I have a throat infection,’ I say, ‘Can we do a throat swab instead?’

            ‘No,’ she says.

            I get up to follow the boy.

            ‘Do you want me to come, love?’ Jess says.

            ‘Fuck yes I do. Don’t you leave me here,’ I say threateningly.

            We follow the boy through a series of poorly lit hallways where the smell of mold and filth is heavy in the air. As we walk, the boy tries to solicit a job from me.

            ‘You see, we must work for 12 hours at a time so there is no time to study,’ he says. ‘Maybe your company has a job for me. It’s OK if your company does not work in health,’ he continues as though anticipating my response. ‘I can do any job. It’s just so I can study, you see. I will get your mobile number before you go.’

            We wait outside the laboratory for twenty minutes and then I am called in. Another young boy who wears a lab coat pricks my finger and smears the blood on a microscope slate. Then he hands me a cup and the other boy leads me back through the corridors to a bathroom by the reception area where I fill the cup and then we walk back to the laboratory.

            When we return, Jess is trying to take pictures indiscreetly but her iPhone lacks a flash and it is too dark here to take a picture without one.

            ‘I peed in a cup,’ I tell her.

            ‘Good for you, love,’ she says in mock condescension.

The Emergency Department pharmacy is behind the bars

            Then the boy leads us back to the reception to wait for the test results. Now a man in a coat has come to the reception area. He is writing in the patient charts. He might be a doctor or he might be anything else. There are two nurses now and they are discussing my symptoms. There are another pregnant young lady in the reception area now or maybe it is the same pregnant young lady as before but I am not paying attention. When my test results come after 40 minutes, the man in the white coat reviews them. Aloud but not to me he says, ‘Negative for malaria. High white blood count.’

            ‘I’m not well,’ I say to Jess because there is only us there as there is only us everywhere we go together.

            ‘You have an infection, Negative Nancy,’ Jess says.

            The man in the white coat writes me a prescription for Cipro and an antihistamine and throat lozenges. The hospital pharmacy is closed and the Emergency Department pharmacy, which is a nook enclosed by metal bars in the hallway beside the reception area, does not have the prescribed items.

            ‘The pharmacy across the street will have it,’ the pharmacist behind the metal prison bars says, handing the prescription back to Jess. ‘Lucky Pharmacy is the one on the corner.’

            ‘You know, I've read studies that found that more than half the drugs in Africa are counterfeit,’ I say.

            ‘Come on, Negative Nancy. Let’s get your counterfeit drugs,’ Jess says.

No One Has More Or Less Right To Complain

It rains almost daily and, most days when it rains, it rains to soak everything. The soil is porous-sandy and the water table is high beside the ocean so when the rains stop the streets dry and the flooding recedes quickly. But always the air is humid. (As I write this, I stop to make a cup of coffee. When I reach for the tin of Nescafe I realize that I left the top off when I made coffee this morning and now the instant coffee is a moist shell on top.) The moisture is bad indoors and, where there is poor ventilation, you must use a dehumidifier or an air conditioning to extract the moisture.

Jess's mold shoes

            When we arrived in Liberia, the company had already leased an apartment for us. The location was great - close to the shops and the restaurants and walking distance from the office, but the building is old and the apartment was a ground floor unit enclosed by a tall concrete wall on the open sides. When we first arrived, the air smelled thick and musty but we lit candles and assumed it would freshen with use. Sunlight only entered during a few hours each day and even then only when the rains let up long enough for sunshine. Also, the wall dampened the breeze that could get through so that even when a good wind was up the air was mostly still inside the one-bedroom unit.

            Ceiling fans helped to circulate the air and 24-hour electricity permitted the electric lights to be on during the day. But with only two phases on, the air conditioning units in the bedroom and living room did not function. So the moisture hung in the air. Also, there was leaking. Our first day in the apartment there was a large puddle on the living room floor. We dried it and it returned each time it rained. It was not from the ceiling or from the window but the wet stucco suggested that the rainwater had infiltrated the walls and pooled when it reached the floor. After the first week, I spoke to my office and the landlord re-plastered the exterior wall outside our apartment. But the leaking continued so we knew that the water was coming from somewhere else.

            Water in the walls and pooling on the ground floor and the uncirculated moisture during the day fed the mold that grows endemically here during the rainy season. Everyone complains of it and no one has more or less right to complain about a thing than anyone else, but our mold problem was worse than anyone else’s.

My moldy 'drawers'

            It grew in the dresser and in the wardrobe, under the sink and on the back side of the cabinets. It grew on the plants that we bought to freshen the air and that were wilting for lack of sunshine. It grew on our luggage and on our bathroom mats. It grew on Jessica’s leather belt and on my leather motorcycling jacket and my hiking boots. It grew on our passports and our money and the pages of Jessica’s journal notebook. It consumed where it grew and it grew on nearly everything. It grew so that we retreated our things from the dresser and the wardrobe. My clean clothes sat folded on the ironing board and everything else was strewn over the sofa cushions either to dry after washing away the mold or to stay dry enough not to grow new mold.

            After a few weeks, I spoke to my office about it and we were moved to another one-bedroom unit on the third floor of the same building. This unit was smaller than our last and the kitchen was like a nook so that the refrigerator, which was half-size, was in the bedroom. After a few days the unit we were in had been rented to another party and we were moved to a one-bedroom that had opened on the second floor. This was the same size as our first apartment but it was the unit directly above that one.

            The plaster was wet on the walls in this unit too and water pooled in the bedroom beside the closed window. This is how we discovered that the water had infiltrated the walls from higher up in the building. The mold grew in this unit as fiercely as it grew in our first, ground floor apartment. It grew so that I was washing shoes and jackets and leather belts and passports for a third and fourth time.

Why is the American passport more mold-prone
than the Canadian?

            Those who know me will know that, for as stoic as I wish myself to be, I complain as much as the next person. But my ‘official’ complaining - that is, my complaining to my supervisor at work - is always relegated to issues of program support and policy decisions and unrealistic promises made to donors. To complain about work issues when you have ideas and suggestions that have not been tried is somehow professional but to complain about challenging personal or living circumstances is for sissies. But the ‘squeaky wheel…,’ as they say, and I so have been learning to complain. Boy, have I been learning to complain - personally and ‘officially’. And what a chip it puts on your shoulder. You figure, I’m a professional and I have skills that this company needs but my needs don’t seem to matter to anyone, do they?

            After about a month, Jessica - who spends far more time at home than I do - developed a cough. Now I was not providing a safe, healthy environment for my ‘family’, so I became angry. I documented my complaints in emails and I sent photographs of the mold infestation. Only what I did not do - but should have done - was take air quality samples.

            I visited apartments and we found another place for rent, which we liked because it was newly renovated. But the process of negotiating a lease became much delayed, despite my urgings and intervention. After about seven weeks, I told the Director that I would remove us from the apartment and send the company the bill for a hotel suite. I had expected that he would suggest this himself, given the company’s liability for having placed an employee in substandard accommodations. So when I informed him of my intentions, I expected that at least he should pick up on the idea and insist upon the course of action. He did not. That was on a Friday.

            Over the weekend I fell ill so I did not present at work on Monday. On Tuesday, the company helped move us into a nearby hotel where we have been for the past three weeks.

The Underdog

‘Now, you’re just going to walk the bike,’ I say.

            It is a warm Sunday afternoon and the sky is mostly clear and it has not rained all day, which is very unusual for this time of year. The motorbike is black and yellow and a full day old with 6 kilometers from riding home from the ‘dealership’, which was just a small shop on Randall St.

            It is a Sunday so the streets are very quiet but this is Jess’s first time on the bike so we are on 16th St seaside of Payne Avenue where it is good tarmac and especially quiet expect for where cars occasionally enter and exit an apartment complex. I have explained to Jess how we go through a checklist before we ride a motorbike: how we check the brake fluid and the brakes, the engine oil, the tire pressure, the lights and turn signals, and the horn. I have explained how the clutch works - Jess has never driven a standard automobile before (she starts lessons a few weeks after this first day of motorcycle training) - and how there is a range and a ‘sweet spot’ where the engine begins to engage with the wheels through the transmission.

Local girl becomes lil' Darth Vader

            ‘Walking the bike teaches you to find the sweet spot,’ I explain. ‘ You give a little gas and you ease off on the clutch so that you feel the engine engage but not all the way. So you go slow and you just let you your feet walk on either side to keep the bike balanced steady. But the engine is what makes you go forward.’

            She tries this and she stalls a couple times but she gets it quickly, more quickly than I expect her to. She walks the bike forward only she is not walking, just using her feet to steady her balance. The bike feels heavy between her legs but that is because she is new to this and anything between her legs would feel heavy but soon it will feel light because this motorcycle is a pip-squeak.

            Soon and before I tell her to she is riding. She rides in first gear which is not a smooth gear but it is riding. When she comes to the end of where we are training she puts her feet down and holds the clutch and turns by walking the bike with her legs.

            ‘You’re riding!’ I say.

            She does not smile because she is focusing and she is not happy while she is focusing. Also, she is expecting something to go wrong, for the bike to fall over and pin her, even though it will not, and she cannot have been smiling only moments before a fall. That would make her feel silly.

            Jessica is the underdog and the way the underdog works is to set low expectations and then beat those expectations every time. If she is smiling, then she is having fun, and, if she is having fun, then this is easy. If this is easy, then she must be doing something more challenging, but, if she does something more challenging too soon, she might not exceed expectations.

Who is the more bad-ass in this picture?

            ‘You’re riding wonderfully!’ I repeat and only her frown acknowledges my remark.

            She rides to the end of the cul-de-sac and back and then does it again and then many more times after that. She practices starting and stopping. She does wonderfully well that day.

            It is hard to find time to practice in the days that follow. There are only a couple hours of daylight when I return from work in the afternoons. Also, most days it has rained so that the tarmac is wet or it is still raining in the afternoon when we have planned to practice. She is scared but she wants to learn. When she is hesitant I nudge her and we go out and she rides wonderfully.

            Over the next few practice sessions, which occur over the next few weeks, she learns to shift into second and then third gear. She learns to stop with the handbrake and the footbrake. She learns to turn without putting her feet down and weave through an obstacle course that I make of fallen coconuts; she turns circles, one after another, and she rides crazy eights in both directions.

            When Jessica decides to learn something, she learns it all the way. She reads every online motorcycle magazine and all the blogs and especially the discussion forums for and by female riders. She is fascinated by the experiences that people have learning - mostly the problems - and she quotes from the blogs and sends me questions about riding techniques through Skype during the workday.

            ‘How can people fall over when they stop?’ she writes.

            ‘What do you mean?’ I respond.

            ‘Someone wrote that she forgets to put her feet down when she stops and the bike falls over. How can someone forget to put their feet down?’

            Often my answers are meant to console as much as explain because I am afraid that she is scaring herself by reading about all the silly mistakes that some beginner riders make.

            ‘Remember, these people who are posting are mostly the uncoordinated minority - the extremes. Most who, for example, don’t fall off the bike every time they stop, don’t post because they don’t have these crazy problems to write about.’

            But she is not scaring herself. She is learning about the problems that others are having so that she will know what to do if and when that happens to her, so that it won’t happen to her. She is the kind of learner who reads all the books before she ever takes the class so that she will already know the answers before the questions are ever taught.

            After a few practice sessions, it is a Sunday and I suggest that she is ready to leave 16th St and go onto Payne Avenue, which is a secondary road with some traffic but is still ‘residential’ (if that term means anything here).

            ‘I’m not ready,’ she says.

            ‘You are,’ I say.

            ‘No,’ she says.

            So I suggest we practice turns onto a hard-packed dirt road that comes before Payne Avenue.

            ‘I don’t want to go on dirt,’ she says.

            ‘It’s hard dirt,’ I say. ‘It will grip good to your tires.’

            ‘There are people watching,’ she says.

            ‘There are always people watching,’ I say.

            ‘I don’t like when they watch,’ she says. She is nervous now because she knows it is time to take the next step and she playing the underdog.

            ‘You are a white woman on a motorbike in Africa. They're gonna watch!’

            ‘Let them go and then I will turn,’ she says.

            This goes on for a time until I get annoyed and then I wise up.

            ‘Fine,’ I say in the tone of voice that I know she knows is meant to shame.

            But I go one step further.

            ‘If you’re not going to listen to me, then I’m going home.’

            I start to walk. She waits for me to turn back but I do not. She inches the bike forward to catch up.

            ‘Where are you going?’ she says conciliatory and a little desperate now.

            ‘Home,’ I say.

            ‘Don’t go. I’ll do the turn thing. OK?’ she says.

            ‘No. I’m done. I’m going home,’ I say. ‘You bring the bike or you walk it or you leave it here. But me, I’m going home.’

            I continue to walk and she sits straddling the bike, thinking and wishing that she could go back to doing the easy turn on the hard, good dirt road and knowing that there is no bluff in my voice.

Jessica rides Ghost Rider on the dreaded Payne Avenue

            I turn the corner onto Payne Avenue and I continue walking. A moment later I hear the motorcycle engine come to life behind me and then she is alongside me. She rides slowly to keep pace with me but I slow my pace so that she must ride past or walk it. I know she will not walk the bike now that she is on Payne Avenue and riding and she is the underdog that has exceeded expectations once again. She waits for me at the turn onto 19th St.

            ‘OK. I did it. Now you ride it the rest of the way.’

            ‘Nope,' I say and I continue past her.

            ‘Come on,’ she says but I am walking out of earshot.

            She turns left onto 19th St and then rides up to Warner Avenue and turns right and comes to a stop before our apartment complex.

            ‘OK. I did it. Now will you ride it in?’ she says.

            The guard is opening the gate and I walk past her into the complex. Another moment and she rides into the parking lot and parks the motorbike in our usual spot beside the apartment entrance. When she parks and gets off and turns off the engine, she takes off her yellow helmet and smiles sheepishly at me.

            I hug her and I say, ‘You did great. I’m very, very proud of you, underdog.’ I squeeze harder and I feel her go limp-relieved in my arms.

Now Whoever Has Courage

Baby Joe’s House of Pain is the only boxing gym in Monrovia. From Broad St you walk through a doorway in what seems to be a large concrete wall. You walk down a narrow cobblestone passage where water is draining to the street and boys pay to play video games in an alcove beside you. You walk past a large one-room structure where there are ping pong tables and where the Taekwondo club practices on weekend mornings. Then you come to a small courtyard where laundry hangs to dry on a clothesline in the rain. The gym is the main structure flanking the courtyard. It is a one-room structure about the size of a small studio apartment. It has small windows made smaller by the concrete latticework that covers them. Sometimes the smell of burning charcoal comes through the windows. When this happens, the coach - who is just 'Coach' - shouts something out the window and, after a rustling of coals, the thick, heavy smell dies down.

            Inside, the walls are painted in the red, white, and blue of the Liberian flag with an intermittent white star. On the walls hang fight posters and tear-outs from boxing magazines and framed photographs of local fighters and expat enthusiasts. There are two heavy bags, a speed bag, a double-end bag, and a large mirror. The ring is roughly regulation size with a floor that is plywood boards that give and return as though on springs and without a canvas covering. At the entrance there is a message written over the doorway:

NOW WHOEVER HAS COURAGE AND A STRONG AND COLLECTED SPIRIT IN HIM. LET HIM COME FORWARD. LACE ON THE GLOVES AND PUT UP HIS HANDS

This is the Liberia Boxing Association.

            Coach explains that there is no money from the government to support the facility or him as the trainer. He makes what money he can from the few expats - mostly Lebanese - who pay a small fee to use the facility for training or who pay him for training. I pay USD 50 per month; others pay less and perhaps some pay more. A normal training session lasts about an hour and a half. I jump rope and shadow box to warm up for about ten minutes. Then I work the mitts with Coach for about six two-minute rounds. Then he puts me on some combination of heavy bag, double-end bag, and speed bag for four-to-five rounds each. Then I do pull ups and go home. That is Wednesdays. On Sundays, I stay a half-hour longer and Henchman (that is the only name I know him by) - Coach’s informal assistant and a pretty good boxer himself - takes me through some stretches and an abs routine for which I give him USD 15 per month.

            Sometimes there is another expat or two and Coach will work with us in turn. Kate is an expat and the only woman that trains at the gym. The first time I met her was at a mutual friend’s house over drinks. She is slender and pretty and unassuming. In the gym, she is a trim fighter with good technique and plenty of wind. She is better trained on the mitts than I am and she could give me a good run for my money in a go-around in the ring - it would be my greater strength against her stamina and technique. Only she is a bit mechanical, which is common for women boxers who learn to punch in a gym rather than on a schoolyard or by watching kung fu movies.

            Of course there are a handful of locals who train in the gym too. They are all young men and plenty fit because of their youth and natural build. Some come consistently and they work together or do drills with Henchman. The good ones are wonderful to watch and you can see how they improve like it comes naturally to them. Some come once and never return and most are intermittent, I guess because of other commitments or lack of desire or, probably, work ethic. Most of the boys - and even there are a few girls - who like fighting train with the Taekwondo club. I think this is because they get a neat white uniform and they get to do fancy throws and jump kicks and because it is finesse over brutishness and no heavy sweating at all. Once an American man emailed the Liberian Expats Google Group looking for karate instruction for his son so I told him about the club that meets on the weekends but I do not know if he followed up and I have never seen a white kid in the group when I am there on Sunday mornings.

            Sometimes young boys sit at the steps of the entrance to watch us training inside. Usually they are stopping in as a break from standing on the sidewalk or walking among the cars trying to sell biscuits or drinks or produce to the passengers in the taxis. They sit for a time and watch. Everyone likes the sharp ‘pop’ you make when you connect squarely with the mitts in a quick combination or when you slug hard on the heavy bag with a straight right or a swift left hook. The sound fills the small room and it is very satisfying.
            Occasionally a small child will struggle up the steps and into the gym.

            ‘Is she yours?’ I asked Henchman once while rolling up my hand wraps after completing a workout. He was smiling and holding the child in a very familiar way.

            ‘No,’ he said.

            Then Coach explained the situation to me. He speaks in thick Liberian English so that you catch the train of though if not each distinct word as it is spoken.

            ‘The mother is 17. She has four children.’

            ‘Really?’ I said as though it affected me because I figure it is what you do even when you are very used to it and think you have heard it all before.

            He grimaced and gestured at the infant.

            ‘This is a boy. The parents are too young. They think it is funny to dress the child as a girl with the braids in the hair.’

            'Really?’ I said. That was a new one to me.

            ‘You know, there is no reproductive health here. No way to prevent pregnancy,’ Coach said. ‘The parents are still children when they fuck and they have children and they have no way to support them.’

            Before we bought the motorbike, I used to wait for a private taxi to arrive to take me home. Then I would talk to Coach while I packed my gear and waited to be collected.

            ‘Coach, what’s this I heard about the Liberian Taekwondo fighter who was disqualified from the Olympics?’ I asked. This was in August and we were going to Sajj or Hotel Royal or one of the other restaurants every night to watch the games on DSTV.

            ‘They sent him from America - he was Liberian-American - and he had never done Taekwondo before. He arrived at the match and they didn’t let him compete.’

            ‘Really?’ I said.

            ‘Yes. I have a heavyweight that I trained and the government said they had no money to send him to London.’

            Coach was annoyed about the situation so his accent was especially thick and it was hard to understand it all. Some weeks later, I learned from a Deputy Minister that the ‘athlete’ was not American but had wanted to visit family in London and had registered for the Olympics with the help of someone in the government because this was a way to have the trip expenses paid for. When they discovered this they launched an investigation and even now all public support for Liberian athletes to travel abroad to compete is suspended.