A Wallet Full of Cash

Every time we move to a new country we have to get used to new money and new exchange rates. It's a bit of a challenge at first, but after awhile you sort of know that something priced 30NT in Taiwan is only $1.00. Liberia has simplified things and made them more complicated all at once.

Where to begin... One US dollar is equal to about 150 Liberian dollars. That's a crazy big multiplication problem every time I want to buy something! I exchanged a $20 bill and got the wad of cash above. I tried to shove it in my purse and not make a display out of counting the money. I then stopped at a table to buy a head of garlic and had to rummage through my money to find a 10. It was a lot to manage!

Here's where things get sort of crazy. Liberia uses two currencies: The US Dollar and the Liberian Dollar. I'm starting to get the hang of where I use what. If I go to an actual grocery store the prices will be in US dollars and I pay in US dollars. If I go to the street market the prices will be in Liberian dollars and I pay in Liberian dollars. But they don't use any coins here so if I go to the grocery store and my bill comes to $50.75 and I give them $60 US dollars then they will give me $8.00 US and 38 Taiwan dollars in change.

This brought up the question of where do the US dollars come from? Does Liberia buy them from the US Treasury? I asked around a bit and from what I gather from the people who should know is that they   rely on money being brought into the country. I came off the plane with a suitcase full of dollars so now they have come into circulation here. From the looks of the money, none ever get taken out of circulation. There's no way they could do that because there's nothing backing that money. So I use my overly worn, dirty, floppy dollars here that would never be used back home. I might begin looking at dates on the money and see what the oldest one I can find is.

The New Joy of Cooking

The other day I decided to make some poppyseed bread, my first baking attempt here in Monrovia. I started sending the kids pictures of the things I was running into but it became beyond comical by the time the bread was in the oven. All's well that ends well and we enjoyed some amazing bread!

Little Adjustments to be Made

The conveniences in life have pretty much remained the same for me most places I go. I may have dealt with one or two of these things before but never all at once. We don't think about all the little things that we have in America that make life just a touch easier.

 

No dishwasher. This completely threw me for a loop. I honestly had expected to have a dishwasher (besides my own two hands). No one mentioned to me that there wouldn't be one so don't buy dishwasher soap for your consumables shipment. Yeah, I have two years worth coming with me. What else can you do with it?

While we're looking at the sink I'll mention that no one else in the world has a garbage disposal. They are the most convenient thing but only found in America (maybe Canada??). It is gross trying to catch all the food stuff in a strainer or mesh basket but I was a bit pampered with always having water just simply whisk food scraps away with the flip of a switch. In Taipei they had even invented disposable plastic netted baggie things to put in your drain so you could just throw the whole thing out. 

Monrovia does not have city water. The women go daily to a place (I'll learn more about this later and pass it on.), collect water for the day and carry it on their heads to their homes. I've learned that buildings like ours have a tank that is filled regularly from a large truck that comes by. Although they keep the tank and lines clean, we aren't supposed to drink the water from the tap. 

For our clean water supply we have a water distiller on the counter that continually fills up with water (and leaks on the counter) and somehow takes the bad stuff out. We drink it, clean fruits and veggies with it and cook with it. I suppose if I boiled the tap water long enough I could cook with it, but it's easier to just get it from the distiller.

While we're talking about not drinking the water, that means we can't brush our teeth with the water either. So we have a bottle of the distilled water by the sink along with a cup. When our stuff comes I have some great little pitchers that will be perfect for this use! It's hard to change habits at this point in life. I've caught myself several times bending over to rinse my mouth from the tap. 

We have 220v here so we use have to have a transformer to plug our electrical items into. We had them in Moscow as well. I found it surprising that Bogota and Taipei used the same standard electrical outlets that we have in America. It made life so much easier to not have wires and electrical strips running everywhere. Things that turn often don't do too well on transformers. Fingers crossed that we don't loose too many appliances this tour!

It's been a long time since I had the luxury of reaching into my freezer and grabbing a handful of ice without having to crack a tray and refill. An ice cube maker seems to be the norm at home but it's one of those things we've gotten used to doing without. 

Due to the high humidity in Monrovia we've been issued 4 dehumidifiers. We had them in Taipei as well, but our apartment must have been well built because I gave up using them all together. They didn't collect enough water to justify the electrical usage. On the other hand, we are emptying these buckets every single day.

Most electricity here is run from generators. There is some sort of city electricity that powers the street lamps, but I'm not sure if it's consistent or why we aren't tied into it. Each large building has a large generator (think semi truck container size) that powers it. As far as I can tell one week in, the electricity is consistent. There are many problems with this type of system including the cost to run them and the noise they produce. When I go out on the balcony all I can hear is the generators running. I'm sure it will turn into background noise at some point in time, but right now they are overwhelmingly loud. Another issue is at around 5:00 pm and sometime in the morning they switch from one generator to another so the power goes off for a minute. It doesn't affect most things that are plugged in because they just pop back on. Clocks on appliances are useless unless you want to reset them two times every day. I learned all this the hard way. I put a roast in the oven, went to exercise and do a few things expecting the house to smell delicious when I walked in. I was surprised to see the oven off and the roast not cooked at all. So much for dinner that night!

After a week of living here these things are becoming normal. In a month I won't even think about them, but at first it's a bit overwhelming to realize that all of these conveniences and more are things that I don't realize how easy I've had it.