Manic Monday

It was hot all day. It took John and I almost 2 hours just to get into downtown. It was hot. Really hot. The simple task of depositing traveller’s cheques into the AYDAP account took over 6 hours and somewhere in the middle I considered moving away from – away from Monrovia, Liberia, West Africa. Away to anywhere but here. Thankfully I had a Clif Bar in my bag and it sustained me through the ordeal. And I know that new beginnings are rough and that soon I’ll be livin’ la viva Liberia! But I gotta keep it real – and today I did the mental math on how long I would ‘have’ to stay in order to consider this a real adventure and in order to not be referred to as a quitter for the rest of my life! Haha When we eventually made it back to my compound I had a list of 4 crucial questions/concerns that I presented to James, in list format mind you, and which he did his best to provide answers and reassurances for. He’s a good man that James is! Once some basic needs were tended to – i.e. getting the neighbor boy to bring water to my house (for ‘flushing’ the toilet, bathing with a bucket, doing dishes, etc), assessing where to go to buy more gasoline to get my generator functioning again so that I could enjoy 2-3 hours of noise-filled electricity each evening, and determining where/how to buy some food because I could not last on peanut butter, molded bread and oranges for much longer. So as you can imagine, having such things off my mind helped easy the ‘I gotta get out of here I’m being held against my will’ feelings of mid-day.