Monrovia Musings
It’s Saturday morning and pouring rain outside. Not so unusual I guess given it’s still the rainy season (the “second” rainy season to be precise). What’s unusual, this morning and a few other mornings earlier this week, is the rolling thunder founding off in the distance. Sure, it’s still not the heavens unleashing hell on earth, building shaking, you can see the room brighten up even with your eyes closed thunderstorms that we have in Spring (we don’t really have a Spring here, that’s just to give you a reference to the months when nights can quickly turn into the 4th of July), but I don’t recall thunder at all last year around this time. We also didn’t see this much rain in the second rainy season last year. Then again, the guards last year kept saying something was wrong last lear - not enough rain. Now I know what they meant. I hope it stops raining after a couple of hours, I was planning on walking downtown to get a hair cut today. . .
The Champions League (football/soccer) starts around now and lasts until late May. For me, in Monrovia, that means trips down to the Mamba Point Hotel on Tuesday and/or Wednesday nights to sit at the bar and watch the game. I don’t get DSTV because if I did, I’d be holed up in my apartment all weekend (and every weeknight) watching games from La Liga, Serie A, the English Premier League, the Bundesliga and probably a few from the Dutch League and French League. Instead I regulate my football watching to the Champions League and a few other key match-ups at the Mamba Point Hotel where the bartender - Tarr - takes good care of me. Face it, he starts pouring my beer before I even sit down (Franziskaner Hefeweizen) and he has even made customers move aside so I can have a prime viewing seat to watch the game (which I did twice this week - Real Madrid 6-1 over Galatasaray [I admit, I left with 10 minutes left in the game and the score at 5-0] and Barcelona 4-0 over Ajax). But this isn’t about football, it’s about waves, and not The Wave at the stadium.
I’m talking about ocean waves. Because on the walk down the hill to Mamba Point I get a great view of the ocean, and for a couple of hundred yards not much else - there’s corrugated aluminum sheeting on one side blocking the view of a construction site, and the white walls of the Old Embassy Compound on the other side of the street and a beautiful ocean view straight ahead. So on my trips to Mamba Point I’ve come to study the ocean and this week I saw something new.
Now there are two characteristics to the ocean that I tend to note, and a very useful reference device that is often, though not always (people aren’t all stupid), out there. First are the waves (or swells - wikipedia both terms if you really want to know; I’m talking about that up and down motion that makes people get sea sick!). You can see the swells coming in from quite a distance because (now the reference device) the log canoes that local fisherman use will appear and disappear as they hit the crest or the trough of the wave. I’ve never seen the ocean flat here - there are always swells - but I’ve seen them to be so gentle as to make you wonder how that could be given how rough the ocean is most of the time. Most of the year they seem to come from the direction of Brazil (W/SW) but occasionally they seem to come from the west, almost north west. Sometimes I wonder how those guys in the canoes can do it, but they do.
The second characteristic is the wind. The direction varies substantially from the same direction as the swells - which leads to huge crashing waves on the beach - to winds from the N/NE, the Harmattan. I’ve also seen winds from the south. The wind intensity also varies. The wind can get pretty bad, blowing to the point of whitecaps. So what you can see often are these deep swells coming in from one direction, with winds blowing white cap waves in a very different direction than the swells. It’s very visually confusing. And those are the conditions you don’t see the canoes out in the ocean - at least not if it’s been like that all day. If the winds and overall conditions change suddenly during the day, then you see theses poor souls hurrying back to shore as quickly as they can. Like I said, they aren’t stupid.
So this week I saw something so visually different I stopped walking and watched the ocean for a minute or so, first to figure it out and then to enjoy it. You know how you see something and you know it’s not “normal”? Well that’s what it was. There was a very light breeze, which barely left a trace on the ocean - the ocean was still but it wasn’t. There was a lot of power there, a calm still power. You could sense a lot of energy in the ocean (confirmed by the loud booming of waves on the beach and rocks) - but the ocean looked still. Then I noticed the swells. I first noticed the very broad bands of surface color on the ocean - almost abstract, but not interfered with by a roughed surface texture - and then realized that the swells were huge. As I studied the flow of the waves and the patterns off to the horizon (the road is about 50 feet higher than the water line) I could see that the swells continued way out into the ocean, and you could distinguish the swells way farther than normal because they were much less frequent (i.e. bigger) than normal. It then made me wonder what the difference between the crest and the trough was. And I noticed, despite the very calm appearance of the surface of the water, there were no canoes off in the distance.
Wow!
. . .
Coming back from the Real Madrid game on Tuesday night I glanced out onto the ocean and saw Venus near the horizon. It was strange looking NW at Venus instead of SW for the planet. It was brilliant as ever.
. . .
I have 7 more work days left, but the problems keep rolling in. I guess it never really stops. Ugh! We now have three new people in our office, with one more to come after I leave. Unlike most positions at USAID, I’ve been able to have a handover of duties for all my different positions. A 4-month handover for land stuff (which I still work on), 1 month for rule of law, 1 month for team leader stuff (not just to the new acting team leader, but also to the acting deputy team leader [I admit to enjoying a sick humor in taking pleasure at seeing 2 people struggling to keep up with the workload I was doing alone for the past 5 months - and they’re putting in longer hours than I did]) and a very slow hand-over for GEMS. These past couple of weeks I’ve had a lot of meetings that have consisted of brain-dumping (sometimes it feels like pontificating) everything I know about a given topic. This sharing and transfer of information and knowledge is what is lost in the normal cycle (where one person leaves and a week, or a month, or 3 months later a new person arrives to take over the position) and is what we all agreed was probably the best use of my remaining time here. So I spontaneously get called into a lot of meetings to share my knowledge, thoughts and opinions on things - especially things that really require a broader history or perspective for input. I am now one of the old-timers with only a hand full of US USAID folks having been here longer than me. Some of the conversations have been quite interesting, particularly those involving the new Mission Director. Sometimes I’m surprised at how much I’ve learned over the past 21 months. Then again, reality hits and I’m surprised at how little I feel I’ve been able to accomplish in that same time period. I recognize that it’s not my fault that USAID made major changes to its bureaucratic processes this year, that personnel changes rocked the boat even further, or that I did all I could do (no body is complaining about my job performance), but I’m leaving Liberia with 4 major projects at the 80-90% completed stage and that doesn’t sit well with me.
. . .
And it’s still pouring. The rolling thunder came our way, passed overhead and disappeared off in the distance, but the rains continue. The haircut may have to wait till this afternoon. I guess I could start cleaning my apartment. My check out inspection is this coming Wednesday.