Two (43) sma' t'ing that amuse me about Liberia

In Liberia, and maybe this happens elsewhere, most people who know how to write, will always write out a number in full, followed by the number itself in parentheses. For example, "He has twelve (12) children". Sometimes the number written in-full is outside the parenthesis, but less often. I see this in newspapers, in letters churches write to me asking to connect them with a ministry in the USA, in notes written to me telling me how great I am and can I sponser their four (4) children. I suppose they are just being thorough, but I think in most cases it is bizarre.
Sometimes, though, it creates substantial confusion, because the written-out number and the number in parentheses don't match. Sometimes the values are pretty close, so it doesn't matter, but other times, it's way off and you wonder, 'what the hell went wrong here?'
Yesterday, a story came out in The Inquirer, one of Liberia's better newspapers - (by 'better' I mean it is only slightly pathetic) with the first line as follows:

"Some close to 4,000 (Fifteen Thousands) former soldiers of the Armed Forces of Liberia have threatened to cause havoc during the Christmas celebration if the government of Liberia refused to live up to it commitment."

Now, I was curious, because surely if either 4,000, or 15,000 soldiers had 'stormed the ministry of finance' as this newspaper reported, that would be a major deal and something to worry about. So, I went to the best Liberian newspaper, The Daily Observer, to get the facts straight. Apparently, only 'hundreds' or soldiers actually stormed the ministry; they claimed to represent 14,000 of their colleagues.

This reminds me of another thing that amused me about Liberian writing. Often, usually in the church context, whenever a year was written down, the writer would include A.D. and sometimes, 'The year of our Lord'. Quality.

Unveiling

The 'unveiling' ceremony is one of many fundraising methods in Liberian churches. It begins with a gift from some department within the church - the ushers, the choir, the youth, whatever - to the church. The group giving the gift wraps it - sometimes in newspaper, sometimes it is covered with a sheet and hundreds of affirmation messages are pinned to it. In order for the church to be able to 'claim' the gift, though, it must be unveiled. The way it is unveiled is by paying 5ld for a piece of the newspaper, or for one of the affirmation mesages (which then must be pinned to someone else within the church, so by the end of it everyone is covered with dozens of messages, pinned to their clothes. I started wearing the same shirt to church every sunday when I knew there'd be an unveiling, because so many pinholes in my clothing wears them out pretty quickly). During this ceremony, the MC or pastor will suddenly announce that 'For the next five minutes you can buy one, get one free!' so that you can pay 5ld and get 2 scraps of newspaper, or 2 messages. This ceremony goes on for as long as it needs to; by the end, they are practically giving away scraps or messages just to get it over with (once it lasted about 30 minutes). One of the gifts that was unveiled was new offering trays, which I thought was a bit rude; another was new uniforms for the choir, which is great.
One Sunday at one of my churches, there was an unveiling for a gift given by the choir to the church. It was wrapped in newspaper; I was seated in the front and at one point, someone tore off a piece of newspaper and underneath was another newspaper with a large picture of a naked woman. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed; a few did and were laughing, but nobody said anything. after about a minute, one of the ushers ran forward and tore the picture off and those towards the front who could see the photo applauded. It was pretty hiliarious.
The gift? A vacuum cleaner.

Exposing Marine Spirits

I'm going through my notes from a church 'conference' I went to last October in Kakata, a 'town' north of Monrovia. By day, I would go around the community with the pastors where they were doing deliverance services, watch Nigerian films with the ministry's choir, or talk demons with the Rev.; by night, I would go to the revival which was usually about witches, wizards, demons, etc. Here of some of my favorite 'facts' from one night of the service, which was primarily concerend with 'marine spirits':

• A 'marine spirit' is: 'spirits, people, organisations with the ability to work on land, air and water. The goddess of the water is Mami Wata, she controls rivers, lagoons and swamps. The queen of the coast controls all of West Africa. Astral spirits moniter all the waters and have contact with Lucifer, who made different tpes of spirits to do these things. His main purpose? To destroy the church, people who support the church, and marriages.
• These marine spirits invaded humanity, according to Genesis 6 (the story of Noah's Ark), through sex: 'A partial-form demon had sex with a woman. They did this to destory God's creation so everything would be evil. God has to wipe away this generational curse'.
• Today, these spirits exist all over, especially in Bush society, fraternity and celestial churches (which means, respectively, Poro/Sande, Free Masons, and Nigerian AICs like the Aladura)
  
• Female circumcision destroys a woman's destiny, it will bring demons of lust and destroy her ability to get pregnant and get married because they have made a covenant with blood and dealing with the goddess of the water.'
• 'If you have sex with a woman who is pregnant, it kills the baby, sperm are like little snakes'.
• 'I once prayed for a man, he was too full of demons. He vomited one bucket of blood and then stooled himself'.
  

Really, I'm blogging again...

...if not for other people to read, then for my own amusement as I write my thesis.
I'm going through all my field notes, writing chapters, reading pdfs and books, listening to recordings, reading Liberian newspapers....like a good PhD student should. It gets tedious at times, sometimes even a little boring. But THEN I'll come across forgotten phrases that I'd written down during a church service, newspaper articles or transcribed interviews, that are SO amusing, I am able to stop telling myself that I've made a terrible life-decision in embarking on a PhD about Liberian Pentecostals.
Because a lot of these phrases, articles, etc. I will incorporate into my thesis, but cannot do so as evidence of 'How damn amusing this stuff is', I'm going to begin recording them here, in the abandoned blog.
To begin, consider the following phrase that Winners' Chapel suggests readers of its 'Victory Bulletin' mediate on:

'If you're ugly but have money, you're beautiful.'

Or, one of my favourites that I re-discovered a few weeks ago:

'You can be the best lesbian witch but God will make you a good wife!'

Also, going through my field notes has reminded me of my periodic confusion about what exactl was being preached, when the message relied on certain words which I had trouble discerning from one another in the Liberian English. For example, the words war, world, and word all sounded exactly the same to me. So, you can understand the confusion I'd have when hearing the following sentence:

'Now sometimes you feel you have problem with the (war, world, word). But I'm here to tell you that you can overcome with the spiritual (war, world, word) and make everything prosper by the (war, word, world)'.

Now, having heard this type of message atleast one hundred times before, I get the gist of what they are saying. I'm pretty sure the order is world, war, word. Even if I couldn't determine which word was which, the sermon was usually so repetitive or vague that it didn't matter anyway. But it's difficult when trying to transcribe exact quotes.
BUT imagine my total confusion the day the pastor brought in the word wood. I didn't figure out he was talking about wood until I asked somebody after the service:

'When it was the time of (war, world, word, wood) I couldn't get by. I was taking the (war, world, word) to burn to make business. But it was hard-o. So I making business and one day I encounter the (war, world, word, wood) and I know that I don't need no more of (war, world, word) business. Thank God I can leave that (war, world, word, wood) and be prosperous with my (war, world, word, wood).'

Ten points to whoever guesses right.

liberia fini-o

so, my time in Liberia has (unfortunately but necessarily) come to an end as of Monday. yes, i realise the blog stopped completely; that is not due to lack of amazing stories and experiences. Quite the contrary, there were too many to even begin writing about. so, dear readers, you'll have to read my (slightly more boring) thesis next year. as i write my thesis, i might keep blogging, so don't give up on me yet. in the meantime, check out some of my favorite photos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=43347&l=52a10&id=642476079
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=43393&l=9df16&id=642476079

conda-sleeza rice

It has been a long long time, I know. I plenty busy-o. And all I am going to do now is put a picture of one of the most amusing pieces of literature I've found sold on the streets in Monrovia. I asked a seller, 'What is the most popular book you sell?' He gave me this little book, published in (where else?) Nigeria:

Yes, that is Condie. Watch out, women around the world! Condie is coming to steal YOUR man, so read this book!

Weekend Getaway for Jesus

The Background
'NGO A' is an interesting faith-based NGO; I’m not going to make any judgments about it now aside from ‘interesting’. Their general objective is to set up Christian churches in villages and towns that have no churches, and in which the population is overwhelmingly Muslim or practictioners of ‘African Traditional Religions’. They send local missionaries to these towns, fund them for 2 years (for the pastor’s salaries, to construct a church, for Bibles, materials, etc.) while the missionaries attract a congregation, and set up some community-based project so that the church might be able to sustain itself after the 2-year cutoff point.
Much of my fieldwork is based in Monrovia, so when I get a chance to get out of the city, I will certainly take it. This weekend I accompanied the country director for missions, M, on a trip to Grand Cape Mount County (West of Monrovia, bordering Sierra Leone), during which he evaluates the churches that they are setting up in the villages. M is a Liberian, about 30 years old, who spent most of his life in Sierra Leone, and a good portion of it fighting in the government army. When the war ended, finally, in 2002, M had no job, no family, few friends. He became a born-again Christian and eventually met two American missionaries and their two young daughters living in the country working in Sierra Leone; this family now lives down the street from me in Monrovia where they are working on the Liberia project.
I went to three sites that AFJ started in August in Madina, Gbesseh and Tiene, villages with populations of a couple thousand, and an 85%-95% Muslim population. Construction of the church edifice is underway in each town, so for now in Madina, the church services are held in a clinic; in Gbesseh in a school; in Tiene in an orphanage. The congregations range from 30-70 people; at least half are children under 15. The community project in Madina is well underway: a 5 acre farm which produces rice, cassava, peppers, cucumbers, etc. to sell in the village and surrounding areas. They are clearing more forest in order to expand the project. In Gbesseh, they are constructing a bakery, which is much-needed because apparently in these villages they have to buy all their bread from Monrovia. In Tiene there are no computers, printers, photocopiers, etc. for many kilometers, so they are working on setting up a business center; in

the distant future they hope to get hooked up to the internet.

The farm in Madina

The Congregation in Tiene Orphanage

The journey
So the journey to these sites was eventful, to say the least. M and I set off from my apartment at about 10am; he had 2 bicycles and a small child to drop off along the way. He gave me one bicycle and told me to meet him at Broad street, where we’d find a car to Duala Market. I got on the small bike and started peddling- it was GREAT to get back on a bicycle; the streets were pretty empty, too. I passed by all my usual people who I always say hello to- they were a little shocked I think to see me on a bicycle- ‘Queen, where you going? You move so fast today!’ I got to Broad St. and waited for a bit- M had to pedal with the small child on the back so it took some time. We found a car and paid for 4 seats in the back to carry the bicycles; he and I squeezed into the front. We got to Duala pretty easily, unloaded the car, sent this child down the road to his autie’s house and found another car to Medina. After 15 minutes of negotiating M got a decent price. We loaded the bikes and continued. Then the drama began.
There are road checkpoints all over Liberia- most of them are just police checkpoints where they, I guess, make sure you’re not carrying weapons, drugs or massive amounts of stolen goods. There are also UN checkpoints which, I think, serve a similar purpose but are there for show and just-in-case something happens, but were obviously really important to help end the war and to maintain peace soon after. There are also immigration checkpoints, where they check for visas and passports for obvious foreigners. Any UN SUV or NGO SUV passes through without even stopping. Any other car has to stop and the driver has to get out and give the ‘official’ a ‘tip’ in order to pass; in some cases everyone has to get out and go talk to the ‘official’.
I, being an idiot, forgot to bring my passport. Also, I, being a white woman in a share taxi (a rare sight, I’m sure), was pretty much asking for attention. So, at most checkpoints (immigration and police; the UN waved the taxis through), the ‘officials’ asked me for my documents. I would say, ‘I forgot them’, and they would get a look of shock/horror on their face and say, ‘come with me now’ and I would be ‘arrested’. I would sit in front of another ‘official’ who was always wearing sunglasses and would look at me and yell, ‘what makes you think you can travel through Liberia without documents?’, or ‘What would happen if this happened in your country’, ‘why don’t you respect Liberia’, and other questions to try and display their power. Then, inevitably, ‘so what are we going to do to fix this situation?’ and then M would give them anywhere from 20-80LD and tell the ‘official’ she is a missionary, let us go.
After the second time of doing this, I told M I didn’t want to take part in this corruption any more, I didn’t want to lie about who I was, and that I would turn back at the next checkpoint instead of paying them off and lying. He said, ‘this is Africa, this is how it works,’ and I start getting theological on his ass, even getting out my Bible. Then I try to explain that ‘this is the reason your country is backwards, etc’. Totally over his head, but oh well. So anyway, at the next checkpoint in Sinje, a fairly large town in Grand Cape Mount, I tell M to keep quiet. The ‘official’ yells at me for 10 minutes and I look back at him and say, ‘Ok, so what do I do? You’ve yelled at me for 10 minutes, wasted your time, I understand that I’ve made a mistake, so what can I do?’ he says, ‘well, something can be arranged I’m sure’, I say, ‘I’m not giving you any money. I want you to do what the law requires you to do. According to Liberian law, what are you supposed to do with me? Do I turn back? Do you arrest me? Do you give me a ticket? What are you supposed to do?’ He looks at me with shock/horror: ‘What?’ I repeat my questions. He says, ‘well, I suppose if you want to go this route I can call my supervisor and find out exactly what is supposed to be done!’ I say, ‘Good, call your supervisor.’ He says, ‘surely there is another way of doing this?’ I say, ‘no, call your supervisor, I want to know what the law requires us to do here’. He ‘calls’ his supervisor, and puts the phone down after 5 seconds, ‘Supervisor not available, it is Saturday’. I say, ‘ok, so what do we do?’ he says, ‘ok I will let you go this time, but don’t let it happen again.’ I did this for the next 3 checkpoints along the way, and all the checkpoints on the way back and didn’t have to pay a penny more. I later found out that at these checkpoints, the ‘officials’ weren’t even legally allowed to ‘arrest’ me in the first place, nor ask for my documents because I wasn’t crossing over any country borders, and I wasn’t doing anything illegal. They just saw me as an opportunity to get money.
At another checkpoint along the way, the police officer, one on a particularly high power trip and most certainly drunk, looks at the used bicycles and says, ‘Where did you get those bicycles?’ Moses tells them, ‘At a shop in Monrovia’; the officer says, ‘I need to see a receipt for those’. Moses chuckles and displays the receipt- I am shocked he has one because I’ve never once gotten a receipt for anything in this country, even upon request, even from the Ministry of Immigration and Naturalisation when I extended my visa. But Moses knows the score. The officer looks at the receipt with shock and says, ‘oh, well, there is no official government stamp on it!’ Everyone in the taxi gets out, I stay put, and argue with eachother for the next 30 minutes. At one point the officer starts marching back and forth on the road calling out loudly, ‘I am an officer of the law and you will respect my authority!!! I am putting your bicycles under arrest!’ and then trips a little bit. It was preposterous. M is repeatedly requesting to go to the police station, not far down the road, to talk to the chief. The officer screams, ‘You must respect my authority! I am in charge of this checkpoint and these bicycles are not legitimate!!!’ Eventually, the officer agrees (after about 10 people from the community convince him to calm the hell down) to go to the station. The taxi drives me there, while M and the officer walk. The officer is pushing the bikes, tripping over his own feet and dropping the bikes occasionally. At the station, the chief is told about the situation, looks at the receipt, apologizes to M and I, and we continue on our way, the charges on the bicycles apparently dropped.

A Bizarre Night’s Sleep
We stayed in Tiene for the night; M slept on the floor of one of the pastor’s houses; I was given a bed in the women’s dorm at the Orphanage next door. The place was fine- clean enough and they put a fresh sheet on my mattress, which absolutely reeked of mildew but that is better than sweat/urine/sewage/fish/rotten something/etc that many things in Liberia smell like. There were about 4 women in the room when I went to bed at 10 (way too early for my bedtime, but without a generator there is not much else to do but sleep), more trickled in as I laid there, along with some children. My experience that night was surreal, to say the least. The women did a bit of ‘girl talk’, only apparently Christian Liberian girl talk is about the demons that are attacking you, your home, and your friends. It was almost like listening to ghost stories that you tell at a slumber party, when the lights are out and you are supposed to be trying to sleep. When the girl talk stopped, the women prayed individually, out loud. Typical prayers about protecting oneself from satan and bless me for this and please help me get a job. I finally fell asleep at about midnight, I think, but was woken up throughout the night, literally, with screams, ‘Blood of Jesus!’ or ‘Satan get out!’ Holy. Crap. At one point, I woke up to a women sobbing silently, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus’ and then breathing really heavily. Weird. I had some crazy half-awake half-asleep dreams that night. I was woken again, still pitch black outside but probably about 5am, to women yelling very loudly, ‘Devotion!!!!’ Devotion is what morning prayer is often called. And wow, did they pray. Loudly. And sing, even more loudly. For 30 minutes. Right in the hallway about 10 feet from my bed, so surely every man, woman and child in the orphanage saw the strange white woman laying there, pretending to sleep, and clearly not doing her morning Christian duty. Devotion finally ended as the sun started to rise, and I fell asleep, woken a few more times because the children were cleaning the dorm room and they had to sweep around me. I woke up again at 7.30, got dressed and stumbled outside into the already sweltering sun. The women from the orphanage called out, ‘Good morning, how’s the sleep’. ‘Great!’ I lied. Then they gave me this for breakfast:

It is apparently a root in the cassava family called Edo or something- they gave it to me and said, 'It can make you so fat!' Great.

Street Preaching

Street preaching is a pretty common sight in Monrovia; it often attracts a relatively substantial crowd and can last anywhere from 2 minutes to 2 hours. If I have time, I stop and listen to what they are saying. The topics are often the same- Liberia is being taken over by the forces of darkness and in order for Jesus to come again we all must go to church. And then there is inevitably an offering or two, and the preacher will tell the crowd about his (I’ve only seen men street preaching so far) church, and give his phone number. Last week, I noticed a small crowd gathering on Randall and Benson Street, and a man franticly pacing back and forth and periodically ‘writing’ illegible things on the street with a rock. I stopped to listen, and one hour later the crowd had grown to about 40 people, and another preacher had taken over. Turns out both of these men were ex-Generals (one was called General Dirty Water) for the ‘rebels’- the NPFL – during the war. During the ‘preaching’, they were basically telling the crowd all of the atrocities they committed- killing hundreds of people, practicing black magic, traveling to the demon underworld to talk to Satan, killing and eating babies to gain demonic power, raping and killing women….fairly typical Liberian civil war stories.
After the preaching, and after 3 offerings, the second preacher did an ‘anointing service’, in which he had anyone willing to pay 60LD (1USD, a pretty high price for an anointing), stand in line in front of him (about 10 people went forward). He got a 2litre bottle of mineral water, held it in the air and turned it into the blood of Jesus. He then twisted the cap three times, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’ The people walked forward and he poured water into their hands; they were to splash it on their face and drink some. They walked away healed.



Naturally, during this whole thing, I talked to everyone and asked what they thought of the preachers, etc. There were mixed opinions- some said they were ‘holy men’, others said they were ‘robbers who are not preaching the Bible, they are just here to make money’. One man I met told me he was a Secretary in his Pentecostal Church, and he had some very interesting opinions on these preachers: ‘they are only here bragging about their stories, when what they should be doing is talking about how Jesus has changed them into better people’. This man, Bropleh, told me he would pass my card along to his pastor.
Later that day, I got a call from Bropleh’s pastor, Rev. RS. He told me he was interested to meet me, would love to give an interview, and could I meet him later in the week. I assumed I would be meeting him in his church, but when I arrived at the place he told me to meet him, he begins to tell me about ‘God bless Liberia ex-combatant rehabilitation center’, which he has opened and which is where we are going. Awesome. We arrive at the destination, and there are two older white men, one interviewing a large man; the other filming the room, and about 30 young men sitting around, listening silently. Turns out the 2 white men are with Youth For Christ and are in Liberia for a few days to ‘highlight the plight of ex-combatants in Liberia’- one of them starts crying as he tells the group, ‘To see what Jesus Christ has done for you is truly touching’, and it takes the power of Jesus Christ Himself to keep me from rolling my eyes. The man being interviewed I quickly realize because I’d met him briefly before after a crusade and seen plenty of pictures in the newspaper, is former General Butt Naked, Joshua Blahyi. This guy has recently become a bit of a celebrity, since appearing in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and admitting to killing 20,000 people, many of which were women and children, eating human hearts, traveling to hell and back, etc…but who is now a prominent evangelist and a bit of a hero for the born-again ex-combatant community. I’ve been trying to arrange a meeting with this guy for ages, so it was total luck that I happened to walk into this room. It also turns out that Rev. RS was the man who initially prayed over then-General Butt Naked and caused him to receive Jesus Christ and become born-again. Now, both Joshua and the Rev. run this center for ex-combatants-turned-Christians. So, now I have an ‘in’ to this community, which is a major breakthrough for my fieldwork. Just when I thought my life here couldn’t get any more interesting….

Sow seed me shoes-o!

Last night, after Day four of the Church C Paynesville Crusade, I was riding home in the church truck with the Church C driver and some other church workers. Just before we reached my area of town, he says to me, totally nonchalantly, 'Sow seed me shoes-o.'
This statement is absolutely loaded, and really sums up so much of my 4 months in Liberia thus far. Let me break it down.
1. 'Sow seed' - this is the Pentecostal way of saying 'Give me', only if you consider it as 'sowing a seed', then you are doing it because whenever you give something to someone else (especially the church), you can expect, some time, to get a blessing in return that will be greater than the original seed (because, of course, the seed will grow into a plant). I have found that this 'seed faith' is quite pervasive in other Christian churches and among Liberians generally. It is an extremely common way to get people to offer money in the church: 'If you sow 100LD seed today, you get 100-fold next year!!' Most people I speak to consider this ideology as fact. Most people also tell me, upon my asking, that if they had $1000 USD, they would sow it to the church before putting it in a bank in which they could recieve interest: 'If I die tomorrow, then God will know where I put my money,' or 'I have guaranteed blessings if I sow seed to God, a bank might close down and take all my money', or 'This is God's money, not mine, I cannot rob God'.
2. 'Sow seed me' - English is pathetic in this country. No, I'm not talking about Liberian English, which is certainly a different language altogether. But when most people are speaking or writing in 'American English', it is absolutely terrible. Surely this is down to lack of education and such widespread illiteracy, but even the educated Liberians don't speak in perfect English. The newspapers are pathetic, at best. A lot of journalists will throw around big words that they clearly don't understand the meaning of (thanks to the thesaurus?), and string these big words together in totally unintelligable sentences. Sometimes I'll be reading an article and I'll think, 'Wow, finally, a decent article with good English' and then towards the end I will see, in bold, 'Click here for more information.'
3. Shoes - This guy has owns a truck, he has a job, he's relatively well-off by Liberian standards (which means he's just above the poverty line), but he's still finding it necessary to ask me for shoes. Shoes, in rich countries at least, are a pretty basic necessity. Here, they are almost a luxury (most people will wear flip-flops). If a person owns shoes, they wear them until they get holes in them or the straps break. Then they repair them with patches of leather or rubber. About five different people have asked me to help them buy shoes.
4. 'Shoes-o' - In Liberia, 'o' is added to the end of sentences in order to add emphasis to the statement. It makes the English, which is pretty brutal to listen to, a little bit prettier. I am often amused by the things Liberians have added 'o' to, for emphasis: 'Jesus is working for me, I will not worry-o'. 'Amen-o'. 'George Bush-o'. 'Thank God-o'. And so on.
5. 'Sow seed me shoes-o'. As a person from the West, and as a person who is seen to have untold amounts of wealth compared to an average Liberian, to ask me a question like this is totally appropriate. I get asked for things all the time, many times a day, by strangers, acquaintances and 'friends'. If a stranger asks me for something ('Hey missy, buy me scratchcard-o', I will usually respond with a firm 'No' and keep walking, but, if I'm in a particularly irritable mood, I'll say, 'Ok, I buy you scratchcard then I buy everyone around here scratchcard, then I buy all of Liberia scratchcard, want me to do that? Huh, HUH??!!'). If an acquaintance asks me for something I'll usually say, 'Sorry-o', chat for a bit, and move on. If a 'friend' asks me for something small (a newspaper, an orange, water), I'll usually buy it. If it's something big (camcorder, mobile phone, US Visa, wife, job), I'll try to patiently explain why this is not possible for me to do. I told the driver, who is an acquaintance, 'Sorry-o' and the issue was dropped. My refusal to buy him shoes did not offend him, as far as I can tell. He was just trying his luck, I guess.

You know you're in Liberia when....

....a woman pulls up her skirt to show you her rotting prosthetic leg, and asks you if you can bring her a new one from the United States...

The Deliverance Tarp

Because the rainy season is over, it is crusade season for Pentecostals in Liberia, also known as My Fieldwork Candyland. I have written about revivals (also called conferences), which are slightly different from crusades. To be very brief and general, with respect to what I’ve seen in Liberia thus far so my assessment might not be totally correct, revivals are special events put on by a particular church, in the same town (or nearby) as the host church, usually lasting for a week and are oriented around a specific theme and biblical passage. They are generally held in church building (not necessarily the venue of the host church) and might involve a guest speaker from another Liberian church or abroad. Attendance ranges from 50 to 500 people (although I did go to the last night of a revival led by an extremely boring American, which was attended by 9 people, 6 of whom were children and the assistant pastor of the host church fell asleep during the sermon). Each night, the service will begin with at least 2 hours of praise and worship, then a few testimonials, a number of offerings, sometimes the selling of souvenirs, introductions of pastors and other church staff, announcements, a sermon of at least one hour, an altar call to give your life to Christ, and then deliverance. A crusade is essentially the same in terms of how the service in organised each evening, but it is a LOT bigger and a LOT louder, it is held outside in large fields or stadiums, will travel to different parts of the country and perhaps into neighboring countries, might be put on in collaboration with different churches, and will often involve (in some cases spotlight) a guest speaker from elsewhere in Africa, the US or Europe. So, when rainy season is over, a crusade does not run the risk of being ruined by a sudden downpour that would inevitably destroy the huge amounts of electronic equipment brought in for these events.
Despite that, Church C ‘always experiences rain on the first night of a crusade’. This is attributed to the devil, naturally, which keeps the Reverend D under close watch and is always trying to bring down his incredibly successful (in terms of soul-saving and demon-expelling) crusades. So, when we got rain on the first night of the crusade which occurred all of last week in Barnersville, a ‘suburb’ of Monrovia to the north, we all prayed against the demon of rain and it stopped after 5 minutes. Naturally.
The first night was relatively uneventful. I stress the word ‘relatively’ in that statement. It was a total carnival, as usual, but the main thing I want to draw attention to in this blog is the deliverance tarp, which I saw for the first time ever on the second night of the revival.
Let me first paint a picture of this entire scene. I am, in addition to Church C Editor-In-Chief and Founder of the Newsletter, a card-carrying, t-shirt wearing and photo name-tag bearing member of the Church C Secretariat. One of the pastors calls me Secretary of State. I got this job, I think, because I am one of the few that can read and write (I accepted it because it gives me that extra bit of access that might really help my fieldwork, and since they are so nice to me I really would like to help them in a non-financial way). There are about 6 members of the secretariat, 5 of them are women. One of our main jobs, during the crusade, is to count all the money that comes in and bundle it into stacks of 1000LD. Because there are at least 4 offerings (at most, 8), one souvenir selling period, one hour of ‘voluntary’ opportunities to throw money at the pastor’s feet (or in a trash bin below the stage) during the sermon, and one call for tithes (at least 10% of your income to be put in envelopes that the secretariat folded and glued during that day), we are busy. Very, very busy. So on this Wednesday evening, as I was counting a large dustbin of money on my lap, I heard a frantic, ‘Queen, bring me plastics!’ from the Ol' Ma as they call the pastor’s wife. I grabbed all the plastic bags I could find and ran to the front of the stage to give them to her. My first thought was ‘maybe they will vomit into these bags, at least that is a little more sanitary than letting people vomit all over the ground, like they did at the prison revival and in Kakata’. I was wrong. Instead, the pastor was demanding that anybody who has given his or her life to Christ and wants to have a successful and lasting deliverance must give up all of his or her jewelry. I saw this in Kakata, but it was more of a polite piece of advice than a direct demand from God. Gold chains, silver rings, bracelets, earrings, you name it, it is evil. Unless it was a wedding ring given to you from a good Christian husband, the piece of jewelry was most likely cursed and causing demonic influence in your life. So, hundreds of people spilled forward, dropping their jewelry into these black plastic bags. I immediately put my silver and turquoise ring into my purse. When all the jewelry was collected, they poured it onto the stage and the pastor prayed over it, broke the curses over it, and explained that he would be burning and destroying the jewelry later. Um. No comment there.
After seeing that, I went back to my bucket of money and continued counting while the pastor began the prayers for deliverance. I never though I would get to the point where I was so nonchalant about deliverance, but I didn’t mind being occupied with counting money because I figured I wouldn’t really see anything too out of the ordinary on this night. Wow, I was wrong. First, they started laying a tarp on the ground right next to our money-counting table. ‘Hmm, that’s interesting’, I thought. The prayers were going on, tongues were spoken violently into the microphone, people screaming and falling down, prayer warriors going into the crowd to assist the man or woman being delivered. Totally normal. But then, as I stacked another 1000LD pile of 5LD notes onto the table, I looked next to me to see two prayer warriors and two ushers carrying a woman, each person holding onto one limb, and the woman screaming ‘blood of Jesus’ at the top of her lungs and having a typical deliverance-fit (seizure-type of thing). They carried her to the tarp, put (dropped) her onto the tarp where she continued to have her deliverance-fit, and they ran back into the crown to grab another person expelling his or her demons. This went on for about 20 minutes, with about 30 church workers continuously carrying men and women expelling demons in various ways (yes, there was some vomit) to this tarp, and just leaving them there. (I learned later that there was a tarp on the other side of the stage too)
So, dear readers, imagine a tarp about 20ft x 20ft, with 30 Liberian men and women on it, many of them screaming ‘blood of Jesus’ at the top of their lungs, many speaking in tongues and thrashing about wildly, some kneeling in silent prayer, crying, some having full-on seizures, many kicking or slapping each other because the tarp was too small and as time went on it turned into a pile of people thrashing about wildly, some people dry heaving on one another, some people spitting on one another, some laying there completely motionless (I had to look closely at their chests to see if they were, in fact, still breathing) and all the while the pastor is speaking in tongues, which is a pretty consistent ‘rabababababababa’ sound probably heard in the entire suburb of Barnersville, and the keyboard is playing some little tune that I can only compare to what you might hear at the state fair outside of a funhouse.
When it seemed there were no more people left to be carried to the tarp, and it was nearing 11pm, the pastor began giving his closing prayer. While he spoke, there were still about 20 people on the tarp, most had advanced to the motionless-and-possibly-comatose stage, but others were still screaming at the top of their lungs. The crusade ended after the prayer, and as people left the field they politely stepped over any people remaining on the ground.
The deliverance tarp reappeared on Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday I gave E my camera so that he could get this brilliant production on video. As he began to record the part where they steal, err, request jewelry from believers, the Ol' Ma confiscated the camera from E, telling him, ‘Queen can buy the video’. I was a little irritated at that, but I understand that if I am allowed to record, then everyone is allowed to record, and then the church won’t make a killing, I mean, raise money for Jesus, from selling their tapes. Business is business. But their videos are crap. So I asked the Old-ma (pastor's wife)what I could do in order to have permission to record deliverance. She went on about how the Church C cameras were the only ones that had permission to record, something to do with spirits and praying, and I said, ‘Well, can I give you $10 (the price of one of their DVDs) to record the deliverance,’ and she immediately responded, ‘Yes’.
So, I gave E the camera for the Sunday deliverance, since I’d be way too busy counting money. He had specific instructions: ‘I want you to film when they carry people to the tarp, and then film the tarp’. After the service he says, excitedly, ‘Oh, I got so much Queen, you will love it.’ I uploaded the videos to my computer the next morning, excited to see what I would be able to share with my friends and family (my explanation does no justice to the actual visual impact this event has), and I see 15 clips, each about 20 seconds long, of E’s feet.
So, I will give E a training session about when the camera is and is not recording, pay $10 more, and try to get the deliverance tarp on video at next week’s crusade in Paynesville.

Bigger is better!!

In Liberia, it is beautiful to be ‘fat’. By fat, I don’t mean USA and UK-style obese. But for men, it is good to have a big belly. For women, it is good to be curvy. This is to do with fatness as being an indication of being well-fed, and thus of being relatively well-off. Well-off enough to ‘eat plenty’, at least. I can understand that it is beautiful for a woman to have curves. I can also understand why it would be considered a sign of health for a person to be fat. I can understand that if a person looks emaciated, it is not beautiful.
That said, when a woman from the US is told, ‘Wow, you are getting fat!’ it is quite difficult to take this as a complement. Although I try to convince myself that these comments can be translated into, ‘You are getting more beautiful’, it obviously isn’t so simple.
I have been told, ‘you are getting so fat!’ on a number of occasions. The comments started last November. E grabbed my arm and said, ‘Queen, wow! You are getting so fat!’ This totally caught me off guard, because I thought I was losing weight and toning up, thanks to my membership to the World Food Programme gym. Then E’s uncle J, and 3 of his uncle’s friends agreed, ‘Yeah, Queen, getting fat, like a true African!’ and J did a little muscle flex; J's sister poked my stomach. I told them, ‘I know you mean that as a complement, but you should know that when you tell a whi’ woma’ that she is getting fat, she will most likely get really offended.’ They could not understand why, but I told them to trust me. That didn’t stop them from commenting on my ‘fatness’ ever since.
When I went to Portugal for Christmas, maybe I did get ‘fatter’, thanks to my mom’s fantastic cooking and thanks to a week on the couch with the sinus infection from hell. Wow, did Liberians take notice of my slight weight gain upon my return! In addition to being told again, by E and his family, that I am getting ‘even fatter’, I have been told by 9 new individuals that I am getting fat. In Church S on the Wednesday evening service, which is attended by about 100 men and women, I got my usual moment in the spotlight, but this time the head pastor said, ‘We want to welcome back our sister Queen, she has been away for the Christmas time but now she is back, we bless her in Jesus’ name, and wow she is getting FAT like a true Liberian!’ I said a few words: ‘Praise the lord, glad to be back, yadda yadda yadda’ and the pastor, as usual, said, ‘and may you be filled with the Holy Spirit and given the gift of tongues’. After that moment, I began to seriously consider the ‘fasting’ part of their prayer and fasting weeks.

Sleeping with dogs

I love all the preachers, prayer warriors, praise team, ushers, etc. at Church C. They are nice, they are hospitable, they are funny, they are not extremely lazy, just a little bit lazy. I also find them incredibly amusing. I spend a lot of time at the Church C head office, not out of choice, usually, but because I might have an appointment for 12 and I have to wait until 2 to get in (because there are so many people waiting outside to receive deliverance, and their demons are more important than my thesis). Rev. D has always been aware of my ‘fantastic’ computer skills (that is, I know how to type and send emails) and has been telling me that he will put me to work in the office one day. I am more than willing to do this, because any information that passes through that office is good for fieldwork. Well, Wednesday was my ‘first day at work’, as he called it, and I would be ‘extremely busy’. I turned up for ‘work’ at 9am. Door was locked, and about 6 women were waiting outside for deliverance. We all waited until about 11, and nobody came. I left to go do a scheduled interview at Church S (I had asked for 2 hours of her time, she gave me 10 minutes, bah), then returned to Church C at 12 when deliverance was in full swing and the pastor and his wife were there. I waited for 15 minutes to see the pastor and he sat me down and appointed me to the positions of Editor-in-Chief, Founder and Chief Researcher for the new Church C newsletter, The Voice of Church C. Fantastic. We threw around some ideas for about 15 minutes, interrupted a few times by people coming in, totally excited, about some recent story in which a man who had been dealing with ‘dark forces’ for years was digging a hole and the devil pushed him in the hole and the hole filled up with dirt and the man was buried alive, and praise Jesus that a good Christian is protected from such misfortune. After discussing the newsletter, and looking through a pile of photos that I might include in the newsletter (I selected one in which a woman was bent over during deliverance, vomit coming out of her mouth- what an action shot!) we moved onto my next ‘assignment’, which was to have people come tell me stories about how the devil has ruined their lives and how jesus has saved their lives; then I was to transcribe these stories and edit them so that they sounded ‘better’, whatever that means. This was perfect, because it is exactly what I do for fieldwork, anyway. But wow, did they send in some people with some interesting stories. I will repeat one. The names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty (except Jesus, Satan, and Rev. D who is nearly God).
Bob was having so many problems in his life. He was constantly afflicted with lust. Everything he did, he was thinking about the female body and his attraction to it. In addition to this lust, he was unable to find a woman who would marry him, and he could not have the children he so desperately wanted. He couldn’t find a job, couldn’t support himself, and was consistently unhappy. He had gone to the church for deliverance time and time again, but to no avail. Finally, he joined Church C and spoke to the great Rev. D, who pointed out that Bob most likely had a curse, set upon him from up to 5 generations back. (Curses are a normal part of Pentecostal ideology; essentially anything that your family did that was ‘Satanic’ is passed through the blood line and thus negatively affects your life until you break the curse. Because ‘true bible-believing Christianity’ has only been in Africa for, at most, 100 years, this means every single African is heavily cursed.) Bob was told to go back to his village and find out from the people any stories about his family. Wow, Bob found out a lot. His great great great Grandmother, Jill, was unable to conceive. She was constantly making sacrifices to the gods and asking them to give her power to conceive. One day a strange man appeared to her and said that he would return the next day in a changed form, as a dog. Jill had to have sex with the dog, and then she would conceive. She did as told, had sex with the dog, and became pregnant. She expected a human child, but instead she gave birth to a chicken. After that she was able to become pregnant without having sex with a dog, and she would give birth to human babies. From that generation on, nobody had any problems conceiving unless they ate chicken or dog meat. So, the family has avoided chicken and dog meat for 5 generations. Bob returned to Monrovia and told this story to Rev. D, who concluded that Bob was possessed by, among others, the demon of lust. He delivered him of this demon, broke the curse and Bob was healed. The next year he met a woman, whom he married, and has since had 2 beautiful children. He is also able to eat chicken and dog meat whenever he wants. Praise Jesus.

Great Expectations

Obviously, a lot has happened since my last update. I’m not even going to attempt a comprehensive catch-up. Long-story short, fieldwork is still going very well, Liberia is still hot as hell, and I am finding myself in increasingly bizarre, fascinating and thought-provoking situations. I can’t imagine what stories I will have by July, when I’ll be leaving. I went back to Portugal for Christmas and New Years, which was lovely. I love salad, I really really love salad with tons of fresh vegetables. I love brussel sprouts. I love my mom’s fresh salmon fillets with Moroccan lemons and onion. I love cheap bubble water. I love strong water pressure in the shower. I love electricity 24 hours a day. I love drinking water out of the tap. I love cold, fresh air and I love the sound of silence. I love opening my inbox and reading 10 emails in only 5 minutes. I love talking to people and knowing the interaction will never result in my having to say, ‘no I cannot help you’. I love being able to walk down the street and not have to avoid cars, urine, trash, exhaust, wheelbarrows and random people reaching out to grab my hand and calling ‘missy’, ‘fine girl’ or ‘hey you’. Of course I love all these things, but I also love being in Liberia doing what I’m doing. I love that no matter how frustrating my day is, no matter how many conversations I have that end in me thinking, ‘And, what planet am I on??’ I can go home to my apartment, sit in my hammock, go through field notes for the day, and fully appreciate my life as a researcher of Pentecostal churches. Simply the fact that I am a researcher of Pentecostal churches is amusing enough to keep me going. I am never bored in this country, and if I start to feel bored all I have to do is look out my window.
While I was away, a number of issues became glaringly obvious to me. One is the fact that, in the eyes of many Liberians I know, I am not a nice woman from the US who is living in Liberia and when she leaves she will finish getting her PhD. I am not a friend. I am not a ‘sister’ as they call me. I am not even a nuisance who asks too many questions. Whatever I do or say, I am an opportunity. Of course I am. I am white. I am American. Not only that, I am one of the very few Westerners who do interact on a regular basis with most of these people. It seems that, for many Liberians, when an opportunity presents itself, especially as an overly polite and always cheerful young American girl who going to Europe for the holidays and has said, ‘If I can bring you back something small, please let me know’, then why beat around the bush? While I was away, a number of items were requested from church pastors. Note, these pastors have traveled to the US and Europe, they are fully literate and most have degrees (albeit from University of Liberia which is hardly university standard), they know what being a PhD student entails, and compared to the average Liberian, they are very well-off financially and they are running very successful businesses in the form of soul-saving Pentecostal churches. So, the items requested were: 2 laptop computers, 3 Ipods, 3 Digital Cameras, one Digital Camcorder, 4 mobile phones. When I wrote back, very politely, to the requests for the laptop computers, the response was, ‘ok, then if you can just bring me a used laptop I suppose that should be fine. May god bless you financially so that you may have the means to provide me with this blessing so that you may be rewarded in the future.’ When I politely responded the request for the digital camcorder, the response was, ‘Ok, if that is not within your means then perhaps you will just buy us a generator upon your return’. And so on. It is extremely frustrating, to say the least. I brought back nothing for my churches except copies of photos that I’d taken. Perhaps I should have returned with some little trinkets or t-shirts that nobody really wants, just as a gesture. But honestly I was so annoyed with those requests that I wanted to leave the issue alone entirely. I wonder if they actually expected me to bring back these items, or if they were just trying their luck. I’m trying to get to the bottom of this, for PhD purposes.
What attempts I did make just frustrated me even more. When I gave photos to the churches the response was, ‘Oh, you only made one copy, you should have made one for every person in the shot.’ Ok, sorry. ‘Oh, you didn’t print any pictures of me, why not? I know you took one.’ Ok, sorry. ‘It is okay, there is a place in town you can develop more for us.’ Ok. I brought back an MP3 player for E (a cheap one, just 1gig) and, before I left Portugal, asked him what kind of music he wanted on it, so I could download his requests. Reply: ‘I want some cool, cool music, Queen. Cool, cool. Different different cool cool music.’ I say, ‘Ok, like what’. Reply: ‘Cool Cool music, anyting, cool cool’. I say, ‘Ok, so 50 cent? Akon, Shakira, Nigger blow (Liberia’s most popular and disgusting rapper)?’. Reply, ‘Yes Queen, just cool cool music!’ I load it up with some ‘cool cool’ music and give it to him. He turns it on immediately: ‘I don’t love it’, he says, matter-of-factly. I say, ‘What don’t you love?’ Reply: ‘I don’t love it, it is not good’. I eventually had to take the player away from him because he refused to take the headphones out of his ears. I also brought a new Scrabble game for E’s uncle’s shop, where the same 10 or so people hang out every day, and I spend a lot of time sitting there waiting. The people there spend a lot of time sitting watching the television, which is usually some rubbish Nigerian movie, football or sometimes (and this is when people come in off the street to watch) WWF wrestling. They LOVE it. My opinion is that, if they are not out working and are not reading newspapers, at least they can play scrabble and maybe improve their reading skills. They thanked me for the game, and I told them, ‘I am coming back with a dictionary’, because clearly, they will need it. I return with a nice Webster’s dictionary, give it to them and they say, ‘It is not a scrabble dictionary?’ I say, ‘No, but it is the same thing, it is a dictionary. Whatever words are in here, you use in scrabble’. They take it and thank me. The next day I ask E if anyone played scrabble, he says, ‘They tried, but there is a problem with the dictionary’. I say, ‘ok, what is the problem’. Reply, ‘it is no good, they need the scrabble dictionary, all words are not in the dictionary you give them’. I have three words for my situation of trying to give gifts to a Liberian: I. Give. Up.
So that concludes my (first?) proper rant on Liberia. This all has nothing to do with my research; it is nothing to do with Liberia, really. I could go on about the reasons behind this behavior and why it is expected that they ask me for these things and why I should try and be patient and appreciate the cultural differences between gift-giving in the US and in Liberia. I could talk about how this further demonstrates my Western privilege and how pathetic it is to complain about this when there is so much suffering in Liberia blah blah blah. I don’t believe that and I don’t care, to be perfectly frank. I will address these issues academicaly, certainly, in my thesis, whatever my feelings on them. This rant is simply about my personal frustrations as of late. I figured it important to add some to my blog, which, upon reading during the holidays, appears a bit too positive to truly represent my time here. Despite all these frustrations, I must reiterate, I am extremely happy to be here and whatever annoyances I have to constantly deal with, they are absolutely worth it. I should also say that despite the fact that I am an opportunity and not a friend to most Liberians I know, I still think that many of them are wonderful people.