Kakata

As promised, here is some stories from the short time I was in Liberia.  This first post is generally about the first few days at the Peace Corps Training Center.

Peace Corps training takes place in Doe Palace, named after Samuel Doe, a previous president of Liberia.  It is located in the town of Kakata.  The first few days of training were spent listening to lectures about health, safety, and culture, as well as exploring the town to start to get a feel for Liberia.    A few PCVs from the groups before us were at training to answer our questions and show us around.  I think the highlight of the first couple days was walking around the Kakata marketplace.

As we walked from Doe Palace to the market area, small children came running out of their houses to greet us.  Some simply stayed on the porch and waved, others came down and wanted fistbumps.  As far as I can tell, only young children use fistbumps as a greeting here.  Between adults, the handshake is a bit more complicated.  While it varies from person to person, the Liberian handshake always begins like an American handshake and ends with a fingersnap.  It can be more complex, but as I found that following the lead of whoever I am shaking with seems to work well. (I probably have the years of social ballroom dance to thank for my physical following skills).  Many of the Peace Corps staff are Liberian, and made sure to practice the handshake with all of us until we knew it.  I think the people in the market were impressed that we had only been in the country for one day and already knew the handshake, even though we were still having trouble speaking Liberian English (more on that later).

The market in Kakata is quite large, with vendors selling everything from food to lappa fabric to cookware to secondhand clothes.  Charlene, one of the current volunteers showed us the best laundry soap to buy, where to get lappa fabric, and which fruits and vegatables were available and how it was generally best to prepare them; as well as a quick crash course in what to expect to pay for things- vendors may increase their prices when they have a white customer, so we should expect to have to barter them down.  (By the way, the Liberian English phrase for ripping someone off is “eating your eyeball”).  I was pleasantly surprised with how friendly and un-pushy the market vendors were.  Many were happy to stop you to say hello and would not push you to buy anything, and when Charlene told them she was just showing us things, they were happy to allow that without making us buy them.  I am not particularly well-travelled, but I realized I must have been subconsciously expecting that sort of marketplace to be like what I had seen other places, where if you let your gaze rest on an item for more than a microsecond, the vendor would shove it into your hands and demand money.  But, that is one of the main goals of Peace Corps: to build an understanding of other cultures on the part of Americans.  I don’t claim to fully understand Liberia, but I at least have a realistic first impression.

We did buy some rambutans, (locally known as Monkey Apples), a spiky fruit related to lychees, from a little girl: 50 Liberian dollars (about 65 cents US) bought almost the entire trayful that she was carrying on her head.  We ate them as we visited the high school in Kakata and met the Peace Corps volunteer who taught there, before returning to the air-conditioned, wifi-enabled Doe Palace for dinner.