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.