Author: Liberian Jue

Over the “war years”, I accumulated about 3 physical war related scars.

One is so faint that I can hardly make it out anymore and another is one I see each day when I am undressed. All of them acquired in the course of either running from rebels, jet planes or opposing dissident groups.

Many times months go by and I don’t think on them or how they came to be a part of my body, my life, my story. Sometimes when I do think on them, it’s with a passing memory, a smile, nostalgia or a shiver.

However, my invisible scars of war are a lot more numerous than the physical ones and ironically they are the ones that I “see” almost daily. For example, the “scar” I acquired by learning to eat fast during the war days in order to not be hungry.

During the war food was scarce a lot. Many things that other people took for granted in other parts of the world were a novelty and treat for people in war zones. Like sugar. Milk. Chocolate, Cornflakes. And rice.

Rice is the stable food for Liberia and there are jokes regarding how a Liberian would eat all the food available, spaghetti, potatoes, meat, etc. but if he or she didn’t have rice to eat all day would quickly tell you “ I haven’t eaten all day”

Due to this scarcity of food and many mouths to feed whenever meals were cooked, the food was distributed according age groups and gender. This meant that kids within a certain age brackets/range were grouped together. So for each meal the food for all the female kids within the age range of 10-13 was placed in a big plastic pan and the kids were expected to eat together.

This worked for a lot of the other kids because many of them already knew how to eat with their hand and to eat fast. Unfortunately for me, I was used to eating slowly and with a spoon.

Ask any “native” Liberian child what is a spoon and they will smile or laugh and lift either right or left hand and spell S-P-O-O-N with their five fingers.

For me coming from Monrovia with my “civilized” mannerism, eating with my hand proved difficult. This meant I had to eat with a regular spoon. Now the problem for me stems from the fact that the size of the palm is bigger than that of a regular spoon. So by the time I took one spoon of rice to eat, my “peers” would have in essence taken 2-3 spoons of rice. Of course, the food would quickly disappear (wasn’t all that much in the beginning anyways) and I would be left hungry again.

I quickly had to adapt. No, not to learn to eat with my hand- although it’s a skill I still wish to master one day- but to eat faster. This meant hot or cold food. As soon as that bowl of hot steaming rice was placed in front of us 5-6 hungry kids, I had to be ready to eat fast. The faster I was able to get food into my mouth, the more that entered my belly. The longer I would NOT be hungry. My mouth-tongue, teeth- and throat quickly learned to eat steaming hot food at fast intervals. I survived.

Unfortunately today, 20 years later, I find it difficult to un-learn something I forced myself to learn in order to “survive”. I no longer know how to eat slowly, to savor food. To “play” around with food. I find I cannot tolerate cold food or food that has “settled”. It has to be hot. Preferably steaming hot. Ha! Embarrassing to even write I tell you.

Some family and friends tease me about it and sometimes I catch myself and try to slow down, to savor the food, but after a few bites or swallows, I am back to wolfing it down.

Recently, I was out with some friends from the United States in a fancy restaurant and I had to mentally and physically force myself to count to 20 in between bites and swallows in order to not appear “hungry or country”.

I used to be very ashamed of this until one day it hit me “it’s another scar from the war, live with it. Deal with it”. So that’s what I do.

So whilst I won’t always wolf down my meals, I certainly don’t think I will be a candidate for high tea with the queen of England. By the time she be lifting a pinky to sip her first drop of nice luke-warm tea, I would have probably eaten all the cakes, sandwiches and drunk all the tea and looking at her with raised eyebrows asking “ aren’t you done yet?”

So, I continue to ask myself, what do I do with my scars of war? Especially the “invisible” scars.

There is a song or rhyme Liberian kids sing:

Who stole the cookies from the cookies jar?

Number one stole the cookie from the cookie Jar.

Who me? Yes you! Couldn’t be! Then who?

Number two stole the cookie from the cookie jar….

It goes on and on till the last person is accused of being the cookie thief and all the players in the game are supposed to “beat and punish” the thief.

I often wonder who do I blame for my stolen childhood. The years that I should have been a kid, learning things other kids my age in other countries were learning, do the things they were doing?

Is it number one or number two? Who are number one and number two? Will they accept responsibility or will they shout “who me?! Couldn’t be!”

Who do I blame for my stolen teenage years? I didn’t even have the proper chance to experience teen woes. By my teens I was already an adult mentally and expected to act like one emotionally.

My childhood ended when I was about 9 years old when my country Liberia plunged into a civil crisis that lasted for 14 years. That’s when my life as I knew life to be dramatically changed. That was when I was expected to “act my age” and “be a big girl”. I was expected to act maturely. Know when to be quiet. Very quiet. Not complaining.

My 6 year old son often asks me “mama, why do you love cartoons so much?”

Sometime I tell him “I just want to spend time with you”. Other times, I just smile and don’t give a response. How do I explain to him that by watching cartoons I am able to minutely reclaim some of the years stolen from me as a child when I should have had the time to watch them. That I didn’t have time to be carefree and play hide seek with cute boys and hopscotch with my girlfriends.

The war years robbed me of the chance to learn to fly a kite. I wasn’t allowed to do that, for fear of being accused of sending out “signals” to enemy troops. So today, I cannot even make a kite to fly with my kids because I don’t know how and never learned how. Or go on summer camps like my mother did in her childhood.

I was expected to know things and do things far beyond my years.

Unfortunately, that was robbed from me and hundreds of thousands of other Liberian kids.

Today as an adult I always ask, “who takes responsibility? Who is held accountable? Who faces justice?” Not just for robbing me of my childhood but also taking the lives of many children who do not even have the opportunity today to even talk about stolen childhood.

I always ask “who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?”

But always, I hear a loud silence.

“Brenda, Brenda. Wake up. Wake up!”

I sleepily moan and curl up even tighter, wrapping the cover sheet closer to my body.

“Brenda, wake up. We late! Get up.” I hear the urgency in my mother’s voice and open my eyes.

“Please go use the bathroom and come help me get the children ready to leave. I woke up late and we have to leave here before daylight.”

With that, she turns to leave the room and for a moment, I am tempted to curl back into bed and as if reading my mind, I hear her say “ if you hurry up and finish with the bathroom and changing your clothes in ten minutes, I will let u play in the creek later today”.

My eyes widen in the darkness and all sleep quickly vanishes from my eyes. My mother doesn’t like me playing in the small creek where we hide out and for her to make this promise was reason enough for me to bounce out of bed quickly.

So I hurry to the bathroom and brush my teeth and wash my face. The cold water effectively removes any remaining traces of sleep from my eyes.

I leave the bathroom and hurry to the kitchen where I hear her giving out instructions to the other folks that live with us about food to pack and she hears me entering the kitchen and says “ Brenda, help me get your sister and brother ready. We have to hurry, I woke up late and it’s almost daylight. You know we have to leave here before daylight.”

I hurry to the room and wake my younger siblings. I always sort of envy them because even if they aren’t fully awake each morning, we all take turns carrying them on our backs.

You see, each day for several weeks now, my family and about five other families have been leaving our homes before daylight and hiding out the entire day in a forest close to a town called Suacoco, located in Bong County, central Liberia. We have been hiding in the forest to escape the routine indiscriminate bombings carried out by the jet bombers, or “doodoo birds” as people came to name them. I supposed people called them birds since they all soared in the sky.

My family leaves our home and get on a narrow dirt path and start our walk. We leave BCADP where we live and head for Suacoco. This walk is about 30 minutes and on a very narrow path that is overgrown with trees and grass, etc. very scary for a 13 year old and usually, I don’t say a word, only focusing on where I step. Shortly after getting on the path, we hear the heavy footsteps of the other families up ahead and soon we catch up to them. “good mornings” are thrown around and before long, we all settle back into silence.

Just before dawn, we cross the main street that leads to the town and head up to the large bush behind the Koweh’s farm where we hide out each day. By then, I am almost bursting with joy because I can’t wait to tell all the other kids that my mother has agreed to allow me to play in the creek today.

Each family is approximately 5-6 so this is about close to 30 people in one space and before long, the mothers are preparing breakfast, the older siblings like myself are expected to help bathe the younger ones and change their clothes.

The men have dug two big holes in the ground. They call them trenches. Till today, I cannot confidently say how big the holes were, but it must have been quite big to hold all the people when needed.

The grown-ups have come up with a plan of sort. The men play cards and checkers most of the day, sometimes sipping palm wine, and the women cook and chatter among themselves and play Ludo. The kids, well, we help out, but mostly basically just play. The only standing rule was “no noise”.

About midday, just before we had lunch, I hear a sound. It sounds like a car whose exhaust pipes are damaged. Loud, yet faint. Rumbling and rolling. Fading in and out. This is a sound everyone in the bush clearing knows well. We all individually stop for a few seconds, ears turned towards the sky keenly trying to listen to the sound. We all hear it again at the same time. And with a should, my uncle yells “ Everybody Inside!”

With a rush, panicked as usual, we all ran to our assigned trenches. The last grown up covers the hole with pre-cut tree branches. The hole becomes dark.  Imagine. Fifteen persons crammed into one hole in the ground.

No one is allowed to make a sound. Only sound one hears is the heavy breathing from the run and excitement.

And fear.

We hear the plane flies overhead and goes further down, towards central Gbarnga City. Within a few minutes, we hear the predictable loud BOOM BOOM BOOM.

Silence. And again, BOOM BOOM BOOM.

I hear my mother not far from me whispering Psalm 23. I always wondered why she would do that. Say the 23 psalm whenever the planes came. “ the Lord is my Shepard, I shall not want…”.

You see, we hid out in the bushes daily because whoever the pilots of the planes were, they didn’t discriminate when it came to bombing raids. Apparently they were told that anyone seen in that territory was considered a “freedom fighter” as we were told to call the rebels. And so the pilots would target crowded places, or anywhere they saw a gathering of people and just let lose their “eggs” as we came to call the bombs.

My family and the other families that hid out in the bushes avoided crowded places and left our homes before dawn daily and only returned after dark. Luckily for us, the area where we would hide was never bombed but where we lived was bombed many times over the next few weeks. Luckily also, the jet bombers didn’t fly at night, so we were given a few hours of reprieve.

They didn’t come daily so there were days when we were allowed to go father out from our hideouts and allowed to make a bit more noise. But always, with an ear cocked listrenign for that rumbling sound.

Suffice it to say that on that day, my mother wasn’t going to allow me anywhere near no creek to play. I was pissed. Not only would we kids now not be allowed to play our other games we could play away from the grownups, but now playing in the creek was out of the discussion. I knew better than to ask mama.

For a 13 year old, sometimes, all this seemed like one big adventure and opportunity to play with my cousins daily and escape housework. But I always dreaded the times we had to get into the trench.

Trench.

Such a nice sounding word for such a difficult place to describe. A small space, a hole dug in the ground. Dark. I can still remember the smell. The smell of earth mixed with sweat and fear. Trench. Our safe place during bomb raids.

Many stories were told of the plane pilots and how they would fly over market places and suspend the planes in the air and open fire. Some say they saw them laughing. Some say they saw white people flying the planes, others said the planes came in from towards the Guinean border. Fly in, bomb, terrify and fly out. Leaving behind many dead and wounded.

The Phebe hospital folks will tell you that most of the wounded that came in were civilians. Women and children. I often wonder if any was true. And if the pilots later had regrets. I also wondered if these are people who would even be made to answer to murder. Or perhaps, all is fair in love and war, and it was war.

About 15 years after the bomb raids, I told my husband, I have to go back to see revisit some of my war years places. Bury some of my past. And although I drove to Gbarnga and visited many of the other places like Cuttington campus, BCADP, Phebe hospital, Suacoco, I couldn’t draw myself to go and see the spot where we used to hide. To see if after all this time traces of the trenches still remain. I am not sure. Call it cowardice. But I just couldn’t.

There are days I still have flashbacks and for people who never experienced those raids, you might think “oh, its just airplanes”. As anyone who lived “behind the lines” as Charles Taylor’s territory was called about their experience and nine out of ten first response would be “huhm!” and knock their thigh or chest.

It took me a very long time to hear the sound of a plane and not instinctively duck and take cover or feel that deep fear and that “dropping of my heart”. Now I can even fly on a plane!

We are told to forgive and move on. Talk and let go. Yet, in as much as I am grateful I didn’t lose any love one during those raids, I know people who did. Have they forgiven and move on? Should people be responsible be held accountable for their crimes?

Or as we Liberians do, forgive and forget. Forget the doodoo birds.

Tv Tv, rogue rogue!

Tv Tv, rogue rogue!

This is a common song sung around many neighborhoods in Liberia.

Thieves are called rogues in Liberia and it’s common to hear shouts of “rogue rogue rogue” at night in many communities in Liberia. Once someone is pointed out as a rogue, everyone in the neighborhood starts to chase that person until caught. Back before “the war”, once a rogue was caught by the neighbors, they were beaten a bit and then turned over to the police. These days, post war Liberia reacts differently. We have “mob justice”, so once caught, immediate action or justice is meted out to the alleged “rogue”. Death on the spot by beating of the crowd.

My first encounter with a rogue was probably in 1987 and I was probably around eight years old.

At the time, my step father’s sister had come to live with us along with her 3 kids. She had a baby and two other kids about my age.

In the beginning, I was happy to have other kids my age to talk and play with in the house, but after a very short time, I got frustrated because her daughter thought it was within her rights to take my clothes and shoes and wear them without asking. Imagine, even my nice church clothes! I resented this and when I told my ma, she smiled and said “learn to share I will buy you a new one”. I didn’t want to share so I got a tiny lock and place it on my valise.

I also didn’t like all three of them sleeping in my room because I had to give up my bed to my aunt and sleep on a flat mattress on the floor with her two older kids while she slept on the bed with her baby. Plus, my aunt liked taking many sips of “cane juice”, a very potent alcohol made from the fermented wine of sugar cane and afterwards fall into a very deep sleep, often snoring very loudly.

We lived in a community that was sort of congested and the end of one house was the beginning of another. The concrete fence surrounding our yard served as the back wall to the family that lived next door to us and many times it was easy to overhear conversations taking place in their yard. In fact, my bedroom window was directly facing their back door so I heard lots from them all day when I was in my room.

So this was probably the reason why I was able to hear the sounds from next door and then the shout “ rogue rogue rogue!!”

I opened my eyes in the darkness but didn’t get up from the mattress on the floor. I wasn’t sure if I had heard right. After a few seconds or minutes, I heard a sound in the room.

At first I thought it was one of my aunt Lawoe’s kids moving around the room so I didn’t call out.

Again I heard a sound in the room and this time, it sounded like the zipper on the valise so I assumed it was aunty Lawoe’s daughter once again going into my things while we slept, so I got up slowly and moved towards the room’s light switch to catch her “red handed”.

So imagine my surprise when I turned the light on and saw a man sitting on the bed, sweating profusely and going through my suitcase!

Somehow I knew instinctively not to yell or cause noise and surprisingly, didn’t feel any fear.

The man turned to me, eyes wide and without a word placed his hands to his lips signaling not to say anything. “shhh!!”

He was sitting at the edge of the bed right next to my aunt’s leg and gestured me to come closer to him. I hesitated for a second and then moved towards him and sat close to where my aunt’s leg was. I noticed he was not very dark skinned and of light skinned complexion, kind of fat and sweating a lot. He wore no shirt. I wondered how he could sweat so much when it was raining and cold outside.

In a hushed voice He asked “where your ma keeps her money?”

I paused for a second and said “I don’t know oh”

“Where she got her handbag?”

“Her handbag?”

“Yes.”

All this time, I am seated next to my aunt’s leg and slyly pinching her hard so she could wake up. She didn’t budge.

“I don’t know where she keeps her handbag, she ain’t got no money.” Another harder pinch,  on her thigh this time. Still, not a twitch from her.

He turns back to the valise and starts throwing clothes all out frantically. I don’t want him taking any of my nice clothes so I tell him “ That’s my valise there oh, no money inside, her clothes bag on that side” and pointed to my aunt’s shabby looking bag on the other side of the room.

He looks at me briefly and gets up to go to her bag. While his back is turned, I make my hand into a fist and knock my aunt hard on her leg. She doesn’t move.

By now, the man is bending over her bag going through her things, throwing her clothes on the floor.

I hear another loud shout from next door “Rogue! Rogue! Rogue!” and then I noticed that the man stopped and looked towards the window and the house next door. I hear more noise from the house like they are coming outside into their yard and more noise from other neighbors also who are also sounding the Rogue! Rogue alarm.

He looks at the bag he is rumbling through and back at the window. Then he looks at me with a slight frown on his face and again asks “Where your ma handbag?”

For the first time since I woke and saw this strange man in my room, I felt a chill creep up my spine and regretted not initially raising alarm.

I draw even closer to my aunt who seems to be dead to this world and back at him and say “I don’t know”.

I hear my mother’s room door opening down the hall and hear her call out to my aunt “Lawoe?”

The man takes another look at me and leaps out through the window which he had apparently entered through. I noticed that he had twisted the protective steel bars, thus making space to enter and depart.

Soon as he leaves, I give a hard slap to my aunt’s leg. So hard that I feel a sharp sting in my palm and then run to the room door and call out to my ma.

“Mama! Rogue Rogue was in my room!”

She enters the room takes a sweeping look at the scatters clothes, bent steel bars and yells “Rogue Rogue Rogue”.

Aunty Lawoe finally stirs from her sleep and her two older kids jump up, sleepily rubbing their eyes.

My ma goes to the window and looks out and looks back at me.

“Did he hurt you? Did he touch you?”

“No mama. He only asked me for aunty lawoe’s bag and I told him I didn’t know where it was.”

“You sure??”

“Yes mama. He didn’t hurt me.”

She hugs me to herself and I feel her body shaking. Mine starts to shake too. My step father enters the room and takes in the scene. He looks disgustedly at his sister who is still struggling to wake up and pats me on the head.

“Nu ma Brenda. Nu ma.” Sorry Brenda. Sorry.

For days after the rogue incident, I was treated with extra care and given extra treats. New clothes were bought, new shoes too. My ma told all of our family members how brave I had been to try to wake my aunt after I saw the rogue in the room and how I reacted to the whole situation. I was a hero!

I have always wondered what ever became of that rogue and what kind of person he was. He obviously wasn’t a bad man since he didn’t harm me or anyone in the room that night.

He only wanted my auntie’s purse.

I also often wondered if the situation would have turned out differently had I shouted “rogue rogue rogue!” would I be telling this tale twenty plus odd  years later?