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Holiday Season in the Tropics

It has been quite some time since I last updated. Life recently has had it's ups and downs, but I am currently coming off of a high, wrapping up a holiday vacation spent in Ghana and Sao Tome. I fly back to Liberia in a few hours.

Before leaving the country, I must say I was a bit of a hot mess. Upon arriving back in the village from the whole med evac situation, I was unexpectedly surprised to feel happy to be home. It was nice to be in my own space again and to see my neighbors and community. I felt rejuvenated and ready to try to get things started with work again.

For about a month, I was in and out of site at different meetings with the County Health Team, Last Mile Health, and Peace Corps.

Just before Thanksgiving, I got to see one of my fellow volunteer's sites way out in the bush (about a 2 hour motorbike trip from my village). The road was terrible, and I got extremely carsick when we were close to reaching it. So that part wasn't fun, but I enjoyed getting to wander around her little town the next 3 days. There's a ton of bush meat there—with stacks of dried deer, hog, monkey, and groundhog seemingly on every corner. On one day we even went out along the main road going to the southeast –me running and her riding her bike-- so I really got to see the deep bush out there. It's astounding that the main road running close to the coast and all the way down to Maryland county (the same one I live off of) is so bumpy, muddy, and rural. You can always tell the cars coming from that direction because they're literally brown with dirt and mud!
My Rivercess ladies along with Liberian colleagues at a meeting

After that training, we had another meeting, but this time with Peace Corps staff in Monrovia to discuss how the health project is going and to provide feedback on the first 3 months. Since the 6 of us are piloting this program on the ground, there was a lot to talk about and adjust before the next group comes in. This experience has been extremely different than the well-oiled, long-standing health program in PC Malawi in many ways, one of which being the lack of structure and framework. Peace Corps in general is already a pretty unstructured organization considering everyone's work and community is different, so combined with being in Liberia, an already difficult place to work, things can be challenging to say the least.

I was back in my community for about a week before heading out on Christmas vacation. During that time, I spent a lot of hours with my children (the neighbor kids), I worked on getting my new computer set up (thanks family!... my first one got fried from a power surge the first week in Monrovia), and I sweat (a lot). I also got to go out into the field with my counterpart one day because we had a visitor from the Ministry of Health in Monrovia who came for supervision of the rural health worker project I'm helping to support. We didn't leave until after lunchtime which is abnormal for us. My counterpart likes to go in the mornings since she has a young baby and also because it's cooler. The four of us journeyed across tree bridges and through dense forest to visit and interview two different health workers on their experiences and skills. These interviews took longer than anticipated, and we actually ended up venturing through the dense bush during complete darkness for the last 45 minutes of our trip—just using our phone lights to see the path. This trip included one semi-sketchy river crossing and seeing a snake. Needless to say, I was very excited when I could hear the car and motorbike engines on the road as well as the normal noises of the village and when the path opened up into the houses of my community, I felt very relieved.

Upon reaching my house, I noticed that my neighbors had put up a strand of Christmas lights on the front of their house and even just this small, simple touch made me feel the holiday spirit....despite the sweltering humidity and the salty, grimy sweat residue covering my body from hiking for 3 hours in the bush.

I then packed up my things for an “extended” vacation, as I'm not going home upon my return to the country, and peaced out on a motorbike the next day. Before leaving for holiday, I went to the education volunteers' in-service training and did a session with them about Grassroots Soccer (a program I was trained on during my service in Malawi). Then I rushed off to the airport dreaming of the air conditioning, wifi, and good food I'd find in Ghana and Sao Tome.


I will write again soon about my holiday, but for now, time to go catch this flight back to good ole Mama Liberia. I hope my friends are not lying when they tell me that it's “cold” there right now...  

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