Some pictures: To the left, the picture of club beer and Louis' feet. Taken during a Robertsport excursion (the location of "Sliding Liberia"). The likely apocryphal story is that during the 13-20 or so years of intermittent fighting the Club Beer brewery was the only institution in the country in continual operation. It's nice to find something people can agree on...
The center pic is one of the beach view from the tent we stayed in at Nana's Lodge. In the distance under the tree you can just make out one of the young Liberian fisherman checking out the ocean. Wonderful composition, Andrew. Why yes, it is. Thanks for noticing.
And finally, our Pepsi tends to be from Dubai, and our Coke from Lebanon (pictured) or Algiers...
I'll have to get a picture of it for you, Lee, but if you feel like something is amiss during your time in Liberia, perhaps it's because your chocolate biscuits are being manufactured by... CYLONS!! Yup, the Ceylon distributing company of Singapore-- biscuits so human-like you won't be able to tell the difference.
So I was taken out to my first Liberian night club last night. The other one was closed for renovations, so we went out to Deja vu, which is a music pounding neon-lit bar/dance floor. It was about a $5 cover (which is not a little here) and there was an issue with paying with one of the old 10s. Apparently now they only take “big-head money” (the new bills). I'm assuming this is because they weren't as accustomed to $US prior to the change up? More likely the “new” (it's been what, 10 years?) bills are the standard and the old ones are different, and therefore unacceptable in some ill-defined way. Ie if you're not sure, someone who is doing something different is probably trying to “juke” you in some way...
Anyway, it was nice on the inside-- comparable to a standard American club. Not smoky, not crowded, and packed with provocatively dressed Liberians. A little background-- we'd just gone out to a little bar after a late dinner & were listening to some live music. One of the nurses, myself, one of the other HEARTT docs, & a Liberian friend. Interestingly, we met a guy there who was with the UN Security Sector Reform mission. I think he put it well-- people are nice, but they're still in survival mode. Everything is about what can someone else do for them. In particular, white males. And that's understandable, given recent history. It's all about the hustle. Apparently the “Bath and Leisure Center,” a Chinese-run establishment (and yes, it's what it sounds like) and other NGO-based comfort/service industries just follow the UN wherever it goes. So there's this interesting dynamic between aid groups and this aid and aid-worker based economy in these post-conflict areas. I'm told an interesting book on this kind of thing written by some former Doctors without Borders folks (I think) is titled “Emergency Sex.”
So, we decided to go to this after club. And the nurse decided to go home. Leaving me, Rachel and Ben, a Liberian telecom business man. And it was like I was thrown to the wolves. Wolves who wanted money. About 30 seconds after getting a drink and separating from my friends by ~ 10 yards, I was approached by a girl who started talking to me. She said her name and had a pretty well-thought out/detailed back-story. Living in Europe, back visiting for a few days, first time at the bar, etc... It was kind of an interesting sociological experience.
Throughout the evening, I heard a lot of plausible if improbable back-stories from girls with names of questionable veracity such as “Venus” and “Promise” (though, to be fair, two patients of mine in the ED over the past few weeks have been named “Baby-girl”). Apparently it's pretty common practice for girls, even those with regular jobs or students, to kind of look for foreigners to attach themselves to while they're in-country in the hopes of money for school, some meals/drinks, etc. You get what you can and you don't know what that is until you try, I guess. I think it's an offshoot of the same kind of situation as the “Older-white-male-former-aide-worker/ex-pat-and-the-younger-local-girl” phenomenon that skeeves me out a bit. My brother Lee said it's the same in Thailand. Everything and everyone is for sale, and there are no moral implications to buying a stick of gum, a bottle of water, a mosquito net, a shoe-shine or a “something else shine.”
On the one hand, hey, everybody gets something out of that situation. People are operating at different levels in Maslow's “Hierarchy of Needs,” and will do what they can to satisfy the impulses for food, shelter, security, sex, etc. (I think self-actualization is the last one on the list-- anyone get there yet? Please write back and tell us what it's like). And a girl I dated once worked as an exotic dancer to get through school, so I've heard about this from a few view points. Exploitation and opportunity. The broader implication for women in society versus the very real implications of not having enough to eat. The physician's responsibility to do the most/best for an individual patient versus the public health perspective of what is or is not cost-prohibitive to a society's health care system... There's a well-known tendency is psychology of people to have different interpretations of a given situation depending on which role they play in it. "The Fundamental Attributional Error" is the tendency to assign to someone in a situation ("disorganized patient presentation and late for rounds) personal attributes as the reason for their behavior ("he's lazy and unprepared"), though when in the same situation themselves to assign outside agents ("traffic, alarm clock broke, the patient can't give a good history," etc) as primary.
So certainly it's difficult to judge people for doing what they can to make the best of their situation. But there is a certain amount to be said for recognizing the enormous informal power differential between the two people in that ex-pat/local relationship and acting accordingly, and I think that though morality may be relative, you should stick with the set of morals you've picked for yourself and go with it.
For those interested in the particulars rather than the abstracts of that evening, let's just say that I did not avail myself of the opportunity to support a local business project or pay any school fees or stimulate the informal business sector. Nor did I take advantage of a potential opportunity to reinforce on a micro level the over-arching behavioral change model messages regarding safe-sex practices. The neo-liberal guilt I am currently suffering as a result of these failings is, I assure you, more than punishment enough.
Though there was one very entertaining cat-fight-- “That girl's a prostitute!” “Who are you to say I am a prostitute? You are a prostitute!”
till the next time...
One of the most common things people realize when they spend time overseas (especially if you are in the business of fighting wars or saving lives) is that most of the world deals with problems on a completely different level than we do in the states. We tend to worry about our daily comfort vice our daily survival. It's the same in Africa, Southeast Asia, Iraq, or Afghanistan - you don't always know where your next meal is coming from. When travelling you also see how fast civilization can be stripped away. Iraq used to have the best health care in the middle east. Beriut used to be an ocean resort town. The Olympic Games were once held in Sarajevo. Here in America, I used to be able to carry my pocket knife on an airplane.
ReplyDeleteI often caveat my own moral pontifications in nice cozy conversations with friends with the phrase "but I've never been hungry."
I would like to think that we all have uncompromising moral standards, and so far I've lived up to my own. But I've never been hungry. Travelling overseas I've learned that I must do whatever I have to to ensure that the United States is a place where I never will be.
Thanks for doing your part, Andrew. Not enough people do.