The air hung thick as static over a day moving
in no particular direction. We chose
the only road out of town,  a rutted track
 
as red as the Devil’s heart, enclosed
by jungle and the faint mirage of fires in the grass.
Last year the birds came back to Monrovia, a sign,
 
they said, some people were starving a little less.
At a checkpoint our last dollars vanish into the hands of silent men
hangdog in their slack khaki. The heat shifts, a beat
 
of drums or marching feet far off, and then
like a shadow from the shadows, the Devil
himself comes to sing.  I wish I could say he screamed
 
like glass shattering, turned stone to gravel,
but at that moment he sounded more than anything
like a man singing.  His enormous lion’s mane shook
 
above a man’s narrow shoulders, his back arching
hard against the weight, his feet stamping sparks
without light.  He shook and in his dance I saw
 
a jungle alight with birds, the sky dark
with smoke from rubber burning, and men repurposing their greed
in factories along the coast.  Who knows if even the Devil tires
 
of killing and the smell of blood, if he dreams of lying buried
in the bosom of a darker year.  But even in exhaustion, desire—
we witnessed, willed to forget, and drove on.

• “One who tries to hide with a dog, a child, a goat, or a person with a cold, will not remain hidden.”
• “Only a fool looks for dung where the cattle don’t graze.”
• “When there are many women, the cabbage will be spoiled.”  (Still trying to figure out what this one really means…)

My February trip to Ethiopia was bookended by an intense workshop in Mexico City and a mad dash to Oregon to visit my Dad in the hospital as he recovered from emergency brain surgery (thankfully he is doing much better!). So, I make no apologies for posting these pictures from my trip to Ethiopia almost a month after I got home…I guess this is just a circuitous way of saying, “thorns prick lightly the (wo)man who walks slowly!”

My album of photos from Ethiopia is here.

After the initial scramble to assess the damage and provide immediate relief to survivors, some of the conversation has turned to the role that poverty played in magnifying the impact of the earthquake. In 1989, San Francisco experienced a 7.0 magnitude quake, and 63 people died.  The similar quake that hit Haiti earlier this month crushed poorly-constructed buildings, paralized the already-marginal public sector, and killed at least 150,000 people. This is the unnatural face of natural disasters in the developing world. 

When I was working in Liberia this past fall, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the organization run by our consultant in Monrovia, Hawa Bropleh. The Centre for Liberian Assistance (CLA) works on behalf of  girls and women, running a safe house for 15 teenage girls and offering sexual and reproductive health education to over 200 more.  Hawa also works with Liberian Muslim women on livelihood and girls’ education issues. 

Muslim girls who receive CLA scholarships

 During our visit to the CLA, we sat in on a sexual and reproductive health class, watched a play that the girls had written on child rape, and ate bread that they baked in outdoor ovens as part of a skill-building project.  The girls who live in the safe home and come to its weekly classes are some of the lucky few: child rape and abuse is truly epidemic in Liberia, and there are only three safe home programs in the entire country.   

Hawa demonstrating how to use a condom

One of the girls recounted how after she had been raped by her uncle, her parents forbade her from going to the police to avoid bringing shame on her family. Traumatized and with nowhere to turn, she could have become just another one of the girls who huddle together on the corners in Monrovia at night, selling the only thing they have. Instead, she found her way to the CLA and is attending school and working as a peer educator.  

I relate Haiti to Liberia not because of some of the obvious historical parallels, but rather to draw attention to the fact that when major natural disasters draw the attention and funding of the international community, they pull it away from the more quotidien tragedies unfolding elsewhere in the world.  If you’re like me and usually delete the daily appeals for donations from Mercy Corps, MoveOn, et al without reading them, I urge you to pause and think about supporting the CLA. 

The CLA has received small grants from the Global Fund for Women and ChildFund, but money to cover daily necessities for the girls living in the safe home is hard to find. They hold classes outside under a thatched canopy, go without running water, and ration toilet paper. Because of lack of funds, this year the CLA had to drastically cut back its funding of girls’ school scholarships. Grassroots programs like Hawa’s represent the most effective ways to actually rebuild a country, and yet they are often passed over by funders in favor of proven grantees and large international NGOs.  Any money you give to the CLA goes directly towards girls’ education and skill development. In a nation where 80% of people aren’t able to read, and the average age of a rape victim is under 10 years old, it’s hard to know where to start or how to really help. Supporting the work Hawa does is a great  way to help build solutions to the unnatural disasters that unfold every day in Liberia. 

If you’re able to make a donation, please send a check or cash to my attention, c/o the Public Health Institute, 555 12th st., 10th floor, Oakland, CA  94702. I will be pooling donations and wiring them to the CLA next month.  Thank you for considering this worthy cause!

From what I’ve watched so far, there’s no obvious exaggeration of the situation they encountered. In Liberia, the truth is horrible enough. I’ve personally been to several of the locations visited, including the slums and the graveyard where people lived during the war. The first segments have also shown some of the only footage I’ve seen of the civil wars of the last twenty years.  In later segments, they will be looking into the role of the UN in post-war Liberia, and the lack of impact that massive international investment has had on the average Liberian.

Since my trip to Liberia in October, I’ve been thinking a lot about the inadequacy of the international development and humanitarian aid industry when faced with the task of rehabilitating a broken country. Present-day Liberia seems trapped at the intersection of profound domestic social dysfunction and the ambiguous motivations of the international community.

If you have a strong stomach, the first three parts of VICE’s ongoing eight-part series on Liberia can be watched on their website.

A los que no se olvidan

“La sangre tiene razones
que hacen engordar las venas.
Pena sobre pena y pena
hacen que uno pegue el grito.
La arena es un puñadito
pero hay montañas de arena.”

-Letra de Atahualpa Yupanqui

Dicen que a Víctor Jara le quebraron las manos y millones lo recordamos
Y tu, quien las quebraste, quien recuerda tu nombre y ¿a cuantos te atreves
decirle en voz alta, “Yo lo hice”?
En emboscada mataron a Zapata y millones lo recordamos
Y tu, arquitecto de emboscada, ¿quien te puede nombrar?

Oye trabajador pagado por opresores que te matarían solo por hacerlo, hoy
mataste a Walter Trochez.
Odio lo que hiciste
Te perdono y te olvido como serás olvidado por todos
Y los que te emplearon se preparan para hacerte desaparecer.

Y en mí, como en muchos, Walter vivirá
Walter Trochez vive
En corazones y mentes, en acciones y compromisos.

Walter was killed for the most brutish of reasons: the will to power at any cost, and the fear of dissent. He had already been offered an asylum arrangement by the government that would have allowed him to leave the country in exchange for his silence. Just ten days ago he was beaten by the police as they attempted to kidnap him. He fought back and somehow managed to escape.

Walter and I became friends earlier this fall over email and phone, as I tried to arrange transportation for him and other participants from Honduras to our training in Antigua, Guatemala. A 24 hour curfew had just been put in place by the government in response to mass protests. Although the borders had effectively been sealed, after two days of trying everything we could think of, we managed to get Walter and four others out of Honduras by bus. Walter took charge of the group, working to find a solution that would allow them to participate in AGALI, and maintaining a sense of humor under impossible circumstances.

When I finally got to know him in person, I was humbled by his dedication to the intimately connected causes of gay rights and human rights.  Today, I can’t help thinking about the costs of that kind of dedication.

Walter (center) celebrating the end of a week of advocacy training in September, with me and Guillermo Leverman, a participant from Guatemala.

Walter after being attacked and beaten by the police

Not surprisingly, I can’t find any mention of Walter’s death on any of the major Honduran news sites. Slightly more information, in Spanish, is here:

http://silviatostado.blogspot.com/2009/12/asesinan-un-activista-lgbt-en-honduras.html

Walter is not the first human rights activist to be killed or disappeared by the regime in Honduras. Please do your part to spread the truth about what’s happening there, so that we can at least have hope that he will be the last.

UPDATE: Posts about Walter are starting to appear in English. Amnesty International released this:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/honduras-full-and-prompt-investigation-needed-death-human-rights-campaig

-Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton with my favorite African First Lady, Chantal Biya of Cameroon

I spent last month working in Africa, which, in between interviews and meetings, gave me a lot of raw blog material. The program I coordinate, AGALI (the Adolescent Girls’ Advocacy and Leadership Initiative),  works in Mexico, Central America, and a random trio of African countries–Liberia, Malawi, and Ethiopia.  No, there’s no secret connection between them, at least not that I’ve been able to divine. They are the UN Inter-agency Task Force on Adolescent Girls  “Africa focus countries” for 2010, and we’re funded by the UN Foundation, so that’s where we work.

Liberia and Malawi were my introduction to the great, big continent of Africa. They share the same ubiquitous red clay soil, an insane love of Barack Obama, and a per capita GDP below $900, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.  The most telling difference is that Malawi has never been at war, while Liberia’s second civil war ended only with the arrival of armed UN peacekeepers in late 2003.

Driving into Monrovia from Liberia’s tiny international airport, that history revealed itself almost immediately. Power poles trailed frayed electrical wires, burned out houses had been repossessed  by squatters. We drove past Charles Taylor’s mansion on the outskirts of town, empty because he is on trial at the Hague for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone. Groups of men in their 20s were hanging around on every corner, leaning against a motorcycle, or a bullet-scarred wall.  They had the hardest stares I’ve ever seen, a nearly archetypal reflection of the ruthless desperation of the “Africa at War” stereotype.

We were in Liberia to interview people who had applied to participate in our advocacy training program. These were leaders who work on behalf of adolescent girls–running safe homes, managing girls’ clubs, or working in the Ministry of Gender.  After a few days of interviews, I started to notice a pattern. Our applicants were almost all either over forty or under twenty-five.  There was a lost generation there that had watched its opportunities disappear during the war, forced to either fight for one of the guerilla factions or hide out in the jungle instead of going to school. Now, the people in leadership positions are either older adults who were educated before the first civil war and had escaped to refugee camps during the worst of the fighting, or those who had been very young during the war and have now been able to go back to school since the end of the conflict.

The evidence of this missed childhood is everywhere, and it is horrifying. Eighty percent of rape victims are under the age of 15, and the national literacy rate stands at only twenty percent.  Even if the still-precarious peace in Liberia holds, it will take years of children going to school, girls living without the constant threat of abduction or assault, and young adults creating their own opportunities, to repair the damage inflicted by the war.

It’s not always easy to remember that even the most war-hardened men and women were once children, but they were.

A young girl selling cassava leaf in the market

Boys playing at fighting near the Sierra Leone border