Christmas in Nyangbah

The fishing village at the mouth of New Cess River, that’s where we went for Christmas – Grant, Myles & I. I brought “Journey without Maps” by Graham Greene with me, thinking I would have plenty of time to read, sitting on the deserted beach south of Buchanan we had yet to find. It was a good book to have in hand, about Greene’s 1930’s solo trek across Liberia, and I did read, a little bit. But like any successful journey without maps, we ended up finding all sorts of things that precluded the imaged hours of idleness. Like any successful journey, it was way better than anything I might have planned.

You know that feeling, when you’re away from New York for the weekend, and you are out on the open road with the trees and the hills and the Hudson River, and people that you love, and then you come back on Sunday night? You hit the George Washington Bridge, and all your subconscious happy good vibrations start to ebb, and you catch a whiff of exhaust, and a couple people honk at you like you’re a stupid crazy person (just trying not to kill anyone here, folks) and then you come to a standstill in traffic, and you turn to the person you’re with, wide-eyed, and you shake your head in wonder. And you don’t even have to explain why because you both know. And I really truly love/love/love New York… I do. But sometimes it’s a mystery, why one lives in the city.

Advent in Monrovia has been crazy. Everyone asking for “their Christmas,” commercial excess everywhere, a general feeling of complete frenzy, not without its delights and charms, but accompanied by immoderate spending and over consumption and – to me – an underlying, overwhelming sense of need/need/need.

So, come Christmas Eve, Grant, Myles & I drove south. To Grand Bassa County, where we ended up in a little fishing village. Our plan when we set out – and I think this was mostly Myles’ vision, with support from Grant and none from me, who has remained paralyzed by grad school apps – was to drive through Buchanan to the far side beaches and go camping. And find what we find. No maps.

What we found was a dirt road, crashing waves running up and down the coast, palm trees and a smattering of villages, including Nyangbah, where we camped on the beach, in a tent. We made fires in the mornings, fires in the evenings. We had pepper soup and the morning’s catch, at John’s house, who is the chief, and which was prepared by Naomi, who is ethereally beautiful. We shared our fried plantains with the villagers, who sat in a row on the beached canoe next to our tent, to watch us and make friends. We fell for Prince, who is 10 (ish) and who adopted us for the week. Prince and the other boys climbed the palms to knock down fresh coconuts for us, and swam out past the breakers with Myles and Grant. We canoed upriver and into the mangroves, and Solomon, who was rowing Grant, told me stories about Morris, who was rowing me. That he had five women and ten children. At age 22. And I believed him. And Prince sang us one of the Liberian songs we kept hearing on the radio “Oh I can’t understand you oh.” A village of children without a school… We worked on the alphabet with a few of them, with varying degrees of success. Marthaline, who is 7, became my new best friend. And 2-month-old baby Chalinga was constantly handed off to me post-breast-feeding, kept taking these ridiculously adorable little naps in my arms.

And a million other moments, sun shining off of the water to light them up. Idyllic is entirely insufficient for what it was. The irony is, of course, always, how some people are free to be coming and going, and some people are less free, and looking for the opportunity to leave, find work, make money, go to school. Amidst a million gorgeous moments lay a million contradictions.

Something I wrote down earlier this Advent, and stumbled across since returning to Monrovia, and which seems apt:

“If from the culture our temptation is a season of distraction, then from the scriptures our answer is a season of discontent. The hype which masquerades as hope can help us feel our discontent. The disconnect can serve our discontent. We are intended to experience our discontent, not to fear it nor avoid it nor mask it with diversion and distraction, but accept and understand our discontent. And not just with the world, but with ourselves. Our discontent is the awareness that there must be more” (Daniel Meeter's Blog).

The hardest thing was saying goodbye to Prince.