In which she goes to Africa: Despite my best efforts

[Before I start, I should note here that despite the hard time I’m having on a lot of fronts right now, I’m incredibly grateful for the support and valuable advice of many friends old and new, near and far. I’ve been deeply touched by the amount of time and effort people have invested in making sure that I’m doing alright. Notwithstanding that effort, this is bound to still be difficult, and I’m doing my best to honestly communicate how things are going, even when it doesn’t make for particularly uplifting reading. So please bear with me (or don’t, that’s fine too), and know that I realize how blessed I am in so many ways.]

I had a grand plan yesterday to write a new blog post. It was going to be called something like “Anatomy of a Better Day.” Having crashed somewhat early the night before, I woke up early enough to go for a decent run. I set out at 6:50, headed into the still-rising sun. I ran the mile and change to JFK, the biggest public hospital in the country, just as the the first round of morning commuters began pouring into taxis. By the time I turned back, Tubman Boulevard was its normal weekday morning self, filled with school kids, workers and vendors.

I’d listened to the BBC broadcast the whole run, so already knew the gist of the disappointing though unsurprising elections results by the time I was home. As I turned on the shower, I switched over to the house radio, catching the tail end of the general news broadcast and then Network Africa, my usual shower-time program. Running a few minutes ahead of schedule, I decided to splurge a bit of time and make oatmeal and tea in place of my standard cold cereal and banana breakfast. Warm breakfast on the table, I settled in front of the computer to dig through the more detailed elections returns. As expected, it was mostly good news from California (though I remain remarkably out of sync with even theoretically progressive California on initiatives), mostly bad news from everywhere else. I even got some up-to-the-minute updates on numbers from a California political friend who was still awake and on Facebook.

By 8:40, I was out the door and walking to to Ministry. Despite the heat, I’ve come to really enjoy walking to work, in roughly equal parts because it gives me some time outside, it means I don’t have to cobble together a ride on someone else’s schedule every day, and it gives me more time to listen to the radio and get a little thinking done. Yesterday’s thinking was about committing myself to a better attitude about life and work, to having a better day and then coming home to write about it.

As I was about to cross the street in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (where, with a few waves a day, I’m trying to build a rapport with the small group of female Bangladeshi peacekeepers who guard the President), a co-worker pulled up to the curb and offered me a ride for the second half of the trip. I got in the car, grateful to skip the only part of the pedestrian commute I dislike – slipsliding down a road that’s become more of a rocky hillside to get from the main road to the Ministry.

After about three minutes after settling in at work, someone from the administrative side of the Ministry came to ask for my passport, with a vague explanation about dealing with my visa and residence permit. As I’m not in the habit of carrying my passport around these days, I then had to roust up a car and driver to take me back home, pick up the passport and get it back so it could be taken to the Bureau of Immigration. Half an hour later, I returned to the rowdy conference room I call an office these days, and things started to go south.

I won’t go into all the details here, but the day ended without my passport and with me canceling my holiday plans for today (Liberian Thanksgiving, a national holiday) and required to show up for a meeting from 3-6 on said holiday. Somewhere in the middle there were many emotions, none of which were the uplifting, happy sort I’d aimed for at the beginning of the day.

After my grand start to the morning, the only other highlight was getting to drive a Ministry a car again, this time a massive Landcruiser. Even with traffic tangled in inconceivable knots and driving what handled like an empty milk truck, I felt somewhat liberated again, moving on my own schedule even if not my own pace. I managed at least half an hour of stop and go traffic and hills without stalling once. I suppose that was yesterday’s bit of life progress, though it definitely came at the expense of an already worn clutch.