Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

He sets off quickly through the chaotic little alleys, sure of his way. When we arrive, Patrick says: “You should have seen it before. This is the ‘after’ picture!” Aubrey takes a photograph of the long, low concrete building, its four large, bare rooms. Patrick says: “So Liberia has this unique freed-slave history… What this means is the government structures were simply borrowed, lots of titles-minister for this, minister for that-but that was cosmetic… Now, things have changed; they’ve pledged ten percent of their budget to education, which is enormous percentage-wise, but still only twelve million dollars for the whole country. There’s too much to be done right now. NGOs fill the gap. What you saw back there was part of our livelihood project: fathers are taught how to make school furniture, which we, the school, buy from them at a fair price. They also sell this furniture to all the schools in West Point. And mothers make the uniforms-if that doesn’t sound too traditionally gendered… ”

Standing in front of the school are John Brownell, who manages the livelihood project, and Ella Coleman, who until recently was West Point’s commissioner. Mr. Brownell is a celebrity in West Point: he played football for Liberia. This took him to the United States and Brazil. “Rio de Janeiro!” he says, and smiles fondly, as if speaking of heaven. He is crisp-shirted despite the heat, broad as a rugby player. Ms. Coleman is a kind of celebrity, too, well known throughout West Point. Hers is a hands-on approach to pastoral care. She will enter homes to check on suspected abuse. She keeps children at her own house if she fears for their safety. She is impassioned: “We have seven-year-old girls being raped by big men! I talk to parents-I educate people. People are so poor and desperate. They don’t know. For example, if a mother is keeping her child home to earn fifty Liberian dollars at the market, I say to her: “That will keep you for a day! What about the future?” Another example: one of our very young boys here, he was always touching one of our girls-so I made him a friend. He was suspended-but sitting out there will not help. I went to his house. The whole family sleeps in one room. I said to his parents: you have exposed these children to these things too early. Anything that happens to this little girl, I will hold you responsible!”

And are some of your students ex-combatants? “Oh, my girl,” says Ms. Coleman sadly, “there are ex-combatants everywhere. People live next to boys who killed their own families. We, as a people, we have so much healing to do.”

Patrick explains logistics. The principal of the school is on thirty American dollars a month. To rent a shack in the slum for a month is four American dollars a week. Liberian teachers are easily bribed. You pay a little, you pass your exam. At the university level, the problem is endemic. Teaching qualifications are usually dubious. “It’s dull to repeat, but this all stems from extreme poverty. If you’re a teacher living in a shack on a pile of rubbish, you’d probably do the same.” Mr. Brownell begins to speak hopefully of the Fast Track Initiative, to which Liberia has applied for money. He puffs out his wide chest proudly. One of the aims is to reduce class size from 344:1 to 130:1. Patrick nods quickly: “Yes, big man… but that will take three years-while strategies are being made, these children need something now. Look at them. They’re waiting.”

“This is the sad truth,” says Brownell.

In the shade, four girls are instructed to speak with us. The conversation is brief. They all want to be doctors. They kick the dust, refuse to make eye contact. We have only inanities to offer them anyway. It’s good that you all want to be doctors. The doctors will teach new doctors. There’ll be so many doctors in Liberia soon!

Lysbeth sighs, murmuring: “Except there’s something like twenty-three Liberian doctors. And fourteen nurses. In the whole country.”

The visitors wilt slightly; sit on a wall. The schoolgirls look on with pity-an unbearable reversal. They run off to help their mothers in the market. Meanwhile, Ms. Coleman is still talking; she is explaining that at some point the government will clear this slum, this school, everything and everyone in it. She does not think the situation impossible. She does not yet suffer from “charity fatigue.” She is saying, “I trust it will be for the best. We made this community from the dirt, but we can’t stay here.”

Bong country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze. There are pygmy hippopotamuses here and monkeys; a sense of Liberia’s possibilities. Rich in natural resources, cool in the hills, hot on the beach. Nyan P. Zikeh is the Oxfam program manager for this region. He is compactly built, handsome, boyish. He was educated during the last days of Tolbert’s regime (“He was killed in my final year of high school”). Nyan helps rebuild the small village communities of Bong, a strategic area fought over by all the warring factions. People live in tiny traditional thatched huts arranged around a central ground. It is quiet and clean. The communities are close-knit and gather around the visitors to join the conversation. In one village a woman explains the food situation. She is “1-0-0,” her children are (usually) “1-0-1”; there are many others who are “0-0-1.” It is a binary system that describes meals per day. Still, things are improving: there are schools here now; there are latrines. Nyan’s projects encourage the creation of rice paddies; the men work in them, and women take the rice to market. It is more than the subsistence farming that existed before the war. His dream is to connect all these villages in a trading ring that utilizes Bong’s strategic centrality and sells produce on to Monrovia. Nyan: “You have to understand, in this area, everything was destroyed. The largest displaced camps were here. We helped people go back to where their villages formerly were; we helped them rebuild. All that you see here was done with DFID money-the Department for International Development. They are British. They funded us with £271,000 sterling-they gave us this twice. And I am happy to say we met a hundred percent of our targets. Creating infrastructure and training individuals. The money went a very long way. It helped to train Liberian staff. It helped provide assistance at the county level for the Ministry of Health. It was quite an enormous help.”

“This is the good aid story,” says Lysbeth. “People find that very boring.”

As we leave the village, the gardener in Lysbeth looks around for signs of soil cultivation. Heavy, wet palms cascade over one another, but there are no fields. Nyan prides himself on his frankness: “We can’t blame anyone else. The truth is we don’t have the knowledge and skill about farming. It has always been slash, burn and plant. The only industrial farming our people have known here is the rubber plantations. That is the only major industry our people know. Everything else was not developed.”

There are such things as third-world products. In the market where the women sell their rice, a boy’s T-shirt reads DAVID BECKHAM, but the picture beneath is of Thierry Henry. The plastic buckets the women carry have bad ink jobs-the colors run like tie-dye. The products no one else wants come to Liberia. “And our meat is the same,” explains Nyan, “chicken feet, pig feet. That’s what people are sold. More tendon than flesh. No nutritional value.”

Half a mile down the road, Mrs. Shaw, an eighty-year-old Liberian teacher, sits in front of her small home. She has taught three generations of Liberian children on a wage she describes as “less then the rubber tappers: twenty-five U.S. dollars a month.” She says the children she teaches have changed over the years. Now they are “hot headed.” They are angry about their situation? She frowns: “No, angry at each other.” As we leave, Lysbeth spots three graves in the yard. “My sons-they were poisoned.” Lysbeth assumes this is metaphorical, but Abraham shakes his head. He doesn’t know what the poison is, exactly: maybe some kind of leaf extract. In the vehicle he explains: “Her sons, they were working in government, quite good jobs. It happens that when you’re doing well, sometimes you are poisoned. They put something in your drink. I always watch my glass when I am out.”