One alley, two lives

Yesterday morning I drove across town to pick up a friend. There are two ways to get to her house and, being earlyish on Saturday morning, I decided to take the more direct route, assuming that the normal weekday traffic wouldn’t be an issue. Cruising past a mostly empty University of Liberia campus, I felt pretty good about my routing decision. A few blocks later, I felt a lot less good about it. While I had correctly remembered that it was Saturday, I had failed to calculate that it was the first Saturday of the month – cleaning day in Monrovia. As the rules were explained to me this summer, cleaning day means that you’re either meant to be off the streets or out cleaning until eleven. I have no idea whether these terms apply to drivers as well, but as I came around the curve on the backside of Capitol Hill, I got stuck in a massive traffic jam. 

There were scads of people wearing Monrovia City Corporation cleaning campaign t-shirts wandering somewhat aimlessly through the streets with brooms in hand. Cars were stopped cold and there wasn’t much to do but wait. After fiddling with the radio a bit and acknowledging that from Monrovia I could not, in fact, solve the BBC News labor unrest to bring the regular correspondents back to work with new content, I began to look around. Despite the clean-or-stay-home edict I’d heard, there were plenty of Monrovians milling about, neither cleaning nor staying home.

For some reason, my eye was caught by a small group of people standing near the mouth of a narrow alley. There were a few steps leading down from the sidewalk into the passage. Some people were gathered at the bottom of the steps, some standing at the top; all were watching the traffic and cleaners. Suddenly, there was movement and yelling. A girl, maybe eight or nine years old, was getting walloped on the backside of her head by a woman, presumably her mother. As the girl ran away, the woman lashed out again, this time kicking her down the two or three stairs into the alley. The girl kept running and the woman moved on.

Not five seconds later, there was a bit more motion in this same spot. Another girl, just the same size and probably the same age as the first, came bounding up to the top of the alley. She catapulted herself over the steps and into the arms of an older man who was waiting there. She wrapped her legs around him and hugged him with great gusto. He returned the hug with a grin nearly as big as hers.

A moment later, traffic began moving again and I moved on into the heart of the city, totally bewildered by coincidence of the contrasts I’d just witnessed.