Monday, November 26, 2018

Lappa Shopping

Clothing here in West Africa is vibrant and colorful in stark contrast to the orange earth tones of the street and buildings. Both men and women have their clothes made out of these colorful fabrics. Blouses, skirts, dresses and even head wraps adorn the women and the men wear shirts and sometimes matching pants out of lappa. I've noticed that you don't mix lappas, you pick one pattern and create an outfit with ruffles and frills all out of the same busy pattern. And it works. It's beautiful and fun. On a given day, driving or walking down the street, I would say about 50% of the people are wearing traditional cloth. 
Lappa is not the name of the fabric, rather it's the name of the measurement. One lappa is 2 meters of the colorful cloth. It's typically sold as 3 lappas for $10 USD. Needless to say, you can see that shopping for lappa is going to be an addiction for me! Shops tend to sell only lappa - no thread or other sewing supplies. I've already had a skirt made and sewed curtains for my kitchen. On one window shopping trip I bought a lappa that I hadn't seen before and really liked. Of course at church on Sunday a little boy was wearing a full shorts outfit out of that exact same fabric!
The patterns on the fabric are interesting as well. Everything from flowers, bird, geometric patterns and swirls to cell phones, usb adapters and cameras are used. I've even seen a fertility pattern with embryos and eggs. I might just have to get some of that one for memories sake!
Lappa will definitely be my excuse to go wander the market on a Sat. morning.





Saturday, November 3, 2018

Shelves Full of American Goodness

Old mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her poor dog a bone.
But when she got there, 
the cupboard was bare...

Well not in the Faber household! Due to limited food choices and high food costs here in Liberia, we are allowed a consumables shipment consisting of 2,500# of stuff. It sounds wonderful and like a little bit of Heaven, but the reality of putting together a consumables shipment was an exhausting challenge.

I began the process on Jan. 1 with sticky notes all over the house. Every time someone changed a roll of toilet paper they put a slash. New bag of flour? Slash. New container of laundry soap? Slash. Do you know how much stuff you go through in two years? I certainly don't and it added a bit of a challenge going from a five person household to just the two of us in a few short years. That change turned all my shopping and cooking expertise upside down. By May I was able to get some scientific estimates on what we used and how much we would need for the two years.
I began my shopping in Taipei. I checked on the weight of our household shipment when we arrived three years earlier, factored in the pieces we had bought and deduced that I had about 1,500# of extra weight that I could use. I made several trips to Costco in Taipei and bought all the toilet paper, laundry soap and other non-food items that I could. My household goods shipment was underweight by 50#. I patted myself on the back for this extreme success. :)

Back home I tried to find a balance between shopping and enjoying the home leave time with my friends and family. Not an easy thing to do when your running to a different store with an extensive list between every visit because you're on the right side of town or only 5 minutes out of the way. Our focus was liquids because we can't have them mailed to us. Some amazing friends let us continually drop loads of food off in their garage for a month. We all watched the pile grow and made bets on what the weight was the day the movers came to pack it all up. Just before we left America our food was loaded on a truck to be shipped to Monrovia.
Our consumables shipment arrived about 6 weeks after I arrived in Africa. Until it came I had moments of complete melt-down where the only solution was to once again go get an overpriced pizza at the hotel down the street. Cooking was a challenge. I won't go into the miserable details, because well, after all, we didn't starve to death. Life is happier now that I can make our comfort foods or at least foods that are familiar to us and that we enjoy!

Friday, November 2, 2018

Plants, Boundaries, and Squatters

I'm trying to wrap my mind around some of the mindsets here in Liberia. Life is looked at differently and what may seem completely non-understandable and outrageous makes perfect sense to people here. One of those issues is boundaries. For example, this morning I was sitting on the back porch at 6:30 a.m. eating breakfast and reading my Bible. I was really enjoying the quiet as the sun was coming up. The dog was wandering around the walled in backyard. I heard a rattle and suddenly some strange man was standing there. There I was, thinking I was in my private space and a random man was there. I was shocked speechless. He started talking about how the plants looked watered and good. I had wondered where those plants had come from and now I knew. I heard there was a gardener who had a side business helping people with plants for their houses. I had made it clear that we didn't want help with the plants because the yard is all torn-up right now for construction, but here he was wandering around my backyard in the early morning. I really don't think that to him there was any boundary he crossed when he opened the gate and walked in without permission. Living seems to be much more community oriented here.
Let me give you a little glimpse about where I live. We're on the Old Embassy Compound which basically means that this is a little American Community with housing and some recreational spaces. There's a big wall around the compound with barbed wire on top. To enter the compound you have to come in through one of the gates where you must show your badge to prove you are an embassy employee. So people can't wander in off the street onto the compound. It's a busy place during the day because there are several major construction projects going on as well as the normal maintenance, so there's always some local staff around.
But this next story is one I still haven't been able to rationalize or wrap my mind around. Because I'm at work all day, I'm not really aware of the business going on at the compound. We get in our 40 hours of work by 1:00 on Friday so we have the afternoon free. I had noticed a lot of people wandering around the side of our house on Friday afternoons, then I was home one day to take care of a few things and was really contentious of all the people lingering around my yard. On my way back to work, I noticed the door to the crawl space under our house was ajar. I cautiously took a peek inside and couldn't believe what I saw. A full break room had been set up, complete with a water cooler and microwave wired into the house's electrical. I was flabbergasted. There's no way to really explain the mental battle of how to grasp and feel comfortable with people hanging out under my living space. That night I noticed lights on under the house. Because I'm an absolute 'fraidy cat, I got a friend to check things out for me the next day. She claimed that there were no squatters living in there. I hope not! A few conversations with the right people at work got the situation quickly under control. By Monday afternoon the crawl space was completely empty and swept out. I've noticed that a table has crept back in but right now I'm turning a blind eye to the squatters. I'll give it a bit of time then we can check it out again.

The entrance to the crawl space
A water cooler for breaks. 
Some chairs to hangout in and look, a microwave that they wired into our house wiring.
An outlet - what a convenient place to charge a cell phone while working.
And why not dry out the clothes overnight?