Gbarpolu

About a month ago I was lucky enough to take a trip upcountry to Gbarpolu County with one of my roommates and check out some of the livelihood and water and sanitation (watsan) projects we have up there.  This was a pretty cool trip for many reasons, but let’s start with the first—the helicopter.

That’s right, I got to ride in the helicopter up to Gbarpolu (silent ‘G’ friends).  Our helicopter is fairly small –five people in the back and two up front, including the pilot.  I got to sit in the front seat, which is especially awesome because the floor up there is made of see-thru plastic, so you can see everything out of the front and side windows, as well as through the floor.  It’s amazing how beautiful Liberia looks from above.  Here you aren’t consumed by the madness of people and the busy streets and car horns and the trash everywhere.  You’re able to see the big picture, and it’s beautiful.  The ride was short and sweet and we landed in a football (read: soccer) field by a school.  All the children came running out to see the helicopter and wave.  From here, we sling-loaded some supplies into villages around the county that are hard to get supplies to by foot (because roads aren’t an option-there are none).  Cement, paint, and a few other items made their way to these villages so they could work on building wells and latrines.

I was whisked away to check out some or our projects in the county.  I spent the day looking at soon-to-be-stocked fish ponds, rabbit shelters, snail habitats, goats, etc.  The fish ponds are pretty awesome.  They will stock the first two and then after a certain amount of time, stock the next two, and then the next two.  They’re rotated so they don’t harvest all the fish at the same time, this way they can have fish throughout the year.  The community will be involved with the harvesting of the fish.  They can then use the fish to feed their families or sell them to earn money.  The rabbits are given to women after they complete a literacy course.  They receive one male and one female rabbit and are taught how to breed them and care for them.  They can then use the offspring of these rabbits as food or to produce more rabbits.  The same goes for the snails.

Later in the week I hiked to a small village with one of my roommates to check on their water and sanitation projects.  They were building a well and a few latrines.  This is an example of how monitoring and evaluation can be difficult in these settings.  There are no roads leading to these villages, so we were in fact hiking through the jungle.  This was also during rainy season, so it the ground was soaked to the point of our trail being a small creek and it rained on us for most of the six hour hike-three hours in, three hours back out, for a visit of about 20 minutes.  It was a lot of fun, though, and nice to get out of the city and see the smaller villages from which so many Liberians come.  We were also gifted a chicken by the village.  Now this is the first time I’ve been part of a group to receive a chicken, so I was pretty excited.  Unfortunately, that meant someone had to carry the live chicken back through the jungle in the rain.  He was pretty good, but every now and then he crowed (he was in fact a rooster, not a hen).

Overall a fun and interesting trip upcountry.  It was topped off with the car ride back to Monrovia.  Over three hours in a Land Cruiser packed full with people and their luggage, including a sick little boy who suddenly sat bolt upright from his place laying across his mother's lap with wide eyes and then looked around in panic.  Turns out he felt a little vomit coming on.  We pulled over, he got it all out and we packed back into the Land Cruiser.  Remember, these Land Cruisers have bench seats across both sides of the rear, they are not seats like in a car.  The child’s mother then experienced some motion sickness and threw up in a bag that she then proceeded to throw out the window onto the dirt road.  Bear in mind that ‘road’ is a loosely used term here in Liberia.  As it was still rainy season, road meant more mud pit with huge potholes.  Mom was not the only one feeling the effects of bouncing from side-to-side and back and forth (even hitting heads on the windows every now and then) and up and down (feeling like your spine has just been shortened a bit by way of compression when you hit those potholes hard enough.)  It was hot, sweaty, smelly, and painful, but we made it back.  It was fantastic.