Birthday in Gbarnga (Pronounced Banga)
Well, I spent my birthday with perhaps the best present I could get short of spending it with Ann, which was to get out of Monrovia. After a morning workshop on human and institutional capacity development and systems strengthening (I dare you to try to say that 5 times quickly!), I took off for Gbarnga.
This time the trip was to teach a half-day course on property law and land issues in Liberia to extension students at Cuttington University. I’ll post about that tomorrow. Today’s post is about getting out of town, and it was good. Unfortunately I haven’t done nearly enough of that, but that’s what happens when you’re overworked and under resourced.
They’ve been working on the road between Kakata and Gbarnga (you can see them on Google Maps), so for long stretches in-between those two towns the normally pothole strewn paved road was replaced by a parallel, bumpy, rutted, dusty and occasionally muddy parallel dirt road as major road reconstruction was taking place. As Liberians put it, “There be big yellow machines plenty!” Except in this case they were orange - Chinese road working machines instead of our ubiquitous CATs (any type of heavy-duty machine, whether’s it’s a bulldozer, huge dump truck or grader is a “yellow machine”, regardless of the color). That led to a longer and much bumpier ride than I’d expected. But it didn’t matter, I was outside of Liberia and enjoying being away.
Cuttington University is a beautiful, expansive campus. I wish we would have had a few days there so I could have walked around, but given our schedule (arriving Thursday night and leaving Friday after class - my colleague Kula had a wedding to go to Saturday morning), that wasn’t to be. But it sure was a beautiful place.
We stayed at a guest house on the campus - nothing fancy, but decent by Liberia’s standards. (And no, the satellite TV did not work. Nor did my netspot that uses a cellular connection for wifi - I can’t believe I actually thought I might get a 4G connection in Gbarnga.)
We arrived fairly late in the day, so quickly too off to have dinner. We made a stop in Gbarnga to meet the County Attorney and several of the County Prosecutors - all classmates of Kula’s - and then to have some dinner.
The room was decent enough, though in grand Liberian tradition, the power turned off at midnight so I lost my fan between midnight and 6 am, and while there was a shower there was no hot water.
Yes I used the mosquito netting, though there were fine-mesh screens on the windows and I didn’t hear any mosquitos in the room. At night I fell asleep to the sound of rain hitting the tin roof, and woke up in the morning (before the fan turned back on) to the sound (increasingly loud) of singing birds.
Not bad for a birthday on the road.