It would have been better off if we could have made it to
the Cote. But that was not an option at
all. Some four hundred miles and some
change to Cote d’Ivoire was not going to work, on foot. Even if we would have had a vehicle to drive
to that country’s border, taking the roads was a death sentence to the men and
most assuredly rape, torture, indoctrinated into the sex trade and, after all
of that, a death sentence to the women as well.
No, we had to go north and get the fuck out of Dodge, tout de suite.
Ten miles north to Sierra Leone’s border or over four
hundred miles east to Cote d’Ivoire’s border?
One can do the math very quickly.
Going south toward Hell, Monrovia, a definite no-no. And to the west of us, well one might as well
say nothing, a no-no aussi, the vast unmerciful Atlantic Ocean and we in no way
had a seafaring boat or a water vessel at all.
My whole family are farmers by trade, mostly growing rice that kept our
family comfortably living. But since the
first Breakthrough cout d’etat in 1989, comfortable living was a thing of the
past.
Robertsport, Liberia, located fifty kilometers north of Monrovia, we
still lived the way we did before the war.
But in 1998 that all changed. For
some reason some of the rebels left Monrovia and started making paths in every
direction from the center of the madness, Monrovia, and of course one of their
paths was headed our way, north to
Robertsport. And that is when our quasi-safe environment
changed into a nightmarish, crimson filled reality. My disbelief of the wicked, barbaric actions
by our fellow countrymen upon us will never be forgotten while awake nor while
asleep.
Tres, tres mal, to say the
least.
(to be continued)
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