I'm back home in Liberia after a nice long vacation in the USA. Mornings are cold and foggy, and there's a film of dust on everything (inside and outside) as the Harmattan wind is blowing from the North. The days are still hot though, and it gets dark around 7:00pm
The good news: Our pipes were fixed while we were away so we have running water in our home at last, having lived here for two years using buckets of water (sometimes muddy) from the well. Now that we have running water I don't know how we managed for so long without!
The bad news: Sometime before we left, our little dog
Frisky was stolen, most likely to be killed and sold for meat. (Yes, that's a new reality here. People had to eat dogs during the war and some apparently developed a taste for it.) I just couldn't bring myself to write about it when it happened. And now, despite leaving him in 24-hour care, our other dog Skipper, who was a lovely lively white dog when we left, looks like a mangy stray with cuts and sores and patches of fur falling out, with flies following him everywhere. We are keeping him in the yard and nursing him back to health.
This is the corner of Broad & Randall Streets (the heart of Monrovia) almost two years ago. Recently, the long row of trees in the median, once majestic with their bright orange blossoms aflame all the way from Crown Hill to Snapper Hill, were cut down. The tiny booths too, where one could buy newsmagazines, were destroyed.
This is Broad & Randall today. The trees are gone, and the luggage sellers driven off the corner (several months ago) with their black bags and rainbow umbrellas. The renovation isn't finished yet, but for now I miss those trees and the rich color we used to have at this intersection.
