Liberia and Back

So much to say and yet I’m not really sure what to think. The longer my stay in Ghana, the more I become tangled up in the paradox between hope and hopelessness. If you have never been to Africa, it is probable that your perceptions of this place are more informed by cultural stereotypes a la Heart of Darkness than reality. Speaking for myself, I didn’t have a clue. I referred to Africa as the ‘dark continent’ in my first blog for god’s sake! We expect Africa to be helpless and when I first arrived, I think I was so delighted with the level of success and development that I stopped looking for the cobwebs. I was overcome with successful black owned business, notions of Pan-Africanism and overarching optimism. I forgot that ugliness is sometimes so buried that you can be walking all over it and never even notice.

Today, I went to the Buduburam Liberian Refugee Camp where I’m teaching a public speaking class with my friend Candace. When you walk onto the refugee camp, you are taken aback by how much this place seems like a city in its own right. This camp is unique because while the civil war is over Liberia, politically speaking, refugees remain on the camp because they can’t return. You can tell that these temporary shacks have been made into permanent homes. For some people, they are unable to return because the situation is Liberia is even worse than it was before. Not to mention the fact that Ghanaians won’t give these people jobs, so they have no money to make the journey….

This situation is particularly distressing for the former child-soldiers that are living at the camp. I’m ashamed to say that the only thing I really knew about child soldiers was from what I saw in Blood Diamond (we all seriously need to stop watching movies about Africa!). These ‘children’ are actually about 24 years old now and have been essentially exiled from society because of the violence that they were forced into at the average age of 10. Oddly enough, these men that are supposed to be the most dangerous are actually some of the most hospitable and genuine people that I have encountered in Ghana. Certainly, my first platonic interaction with men! My friend, Emily is doing a trust building workshop with these guys, so in between my classes, I get to go hang out too. Their willingness to tell their stories really surprised me. I’m just so horrified at humanity right now. That these people should have suffered these things. Killing their own families and friends, watching their brothers be killed, having their ears cut off for trying to escape, forced into drug addiction. And the most incredible thing is that they are all so grateful for us to be there because “we have so much to teach them”. What kind of knowledge can I possibly offer?