Comment by jFriedensreich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jFriedensreich | Hacker News Reader

I worked a month in Liberia to try building a disease dashboard for the ministry of health. It was maybe the most surreal place i have been. You could buy strong opiates over the counter at the pharmacy so i was high af all the time, wich helped ease anxiety and boredom from not being able to leave the secured flat i was assigned most of the time, but did not exactly make the experience less surreal. The whole country has like one ambulance and one Hotel for diplomats with a "western" restaurant and coffee place, i was allowed to go there between 1000 and 1700, but only taking the biggest road and if it got close to 17 you could already feel the mood swing and your hair stand up.

The sight of disability due to theoretically curable diseases like polio or forms of blindness was sadly common.

I did not find anyone who admitted to eating a human heart in the civil war, but one guy stoped talking and got a blank stare into the void and huge sweat pearls forming on his forehead, but i was not sure if it was due to war memories or because his friends tried to scam me, i preferred not to inquire further.

There was no real powergrid as the dam was still not repaired after the war so all important places had a diesel generator and usually had one or two power outages a day when there is some switchover or too late refill (i think). Especially funny in the hospital at night, when it gets pitch black and all machines turn off and the eery silence is only filled by the sound of vomiting and sounds of people in serious pain.

My Boss was an alcoholic and kind of comic savage who after a certain level of drunkenness would start hitting random guys on the ass and pointing to me when they turned around because he found it hilarious you can go to jail for being gay.

When was this?

From mid-2016 to mid-2019 I drove through 35 countries in Africa. I spent a month in Congo (both), Angola, Mali, Sudan, Burundi, Nigeria, etc. etc. [1] I skipped SL and Liberia due to the relentless rain, though I bumped into plenty of other people driving around that went to both.

While it's obviously a stark contrast to Silicon Valley, from what I saw and heard, these days it's not nearly what you're describing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX...

It's not at all what he's describing.

I arrived 4 weeks after the last case of the ebola epidemic so probably around May 2016. Liberia is (as far as i heard) not really comparable to SL, Nigeria or most other "more civilised" african countries. Even black colleagues from Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenia who were deployed at the same time experienced a culture shock (though not quite as extreme), so neither "africa in general" nor the racial background can explain the experience, i think it was really a uniquely weird place on earth. But the country life is probably quite different to Monrovia so there may be a huge gap in experience of people you met that just drove through some nature and village. As i had to work all the time anyways i did not mind the rain too much and it was usually on time like a clockwork and maybe one or 2 hours a day max. As far as my understanding goes, there was no such thing as real tourism, you could not just book a flight to Liberia without family ties or an invitation by an NGO or Government with a reason, but that may have been due to lockdown from ebola.

The malaria medication was also really weird and drove some of us totally nuts because it induced the most horrific and lucid nightmares imaginable. Imagine dreaming to drown/ being chased/ killed or falling down holes every night until waking up in sweat without orientation. My boss welcomed me from the airport by telling me he was just that day released from hospital after having malaria because he could not take the nightmares anymore and stopped taking the meds. They did not tell me so I would not worry during my preparations... Apparently the hospital refused to release him at first and wanted to evacuate him because his liver was so fucked up they thought it was destroyed by malaria. He then said no thats because he is an alcoholic and its his normal fucked up liver so they let him go and he started working immediately and still somehow had more energy than me.

When working for NGOs the put you in really weird situations that don't allow you close to people and make lots of money for their security arms.

I backpacked for a month through Liberia. It is a really interesting country. From Monrovia, one of the sleepier capitals in Western Africa, to Harbel some would call it an exploitative plantation for Firestone rubber, to Harper a former capital that is still hard to reach from the capital. Just getting to Harper took one day of shared taxi, one day of hitch-hiking with a UN guy, and a long day of mudding through logging roads in a hired truck. But we made it. I even saw the new soccer star president when he visited Buchannan.

You can feel that it is less developed than the surrounding countries and the war has ripped apart a lot of the inter community trust. Americans have been sucking resources out, and now Chinese businessmen are doing the same.

How did you come across the opportunity to spend a month in Liberia? Were you there through a volunteer organization?

I worked for an NGO at the time. The main work started remotely during the ebola epidemic and focused on building anything that helped getting it under control. Funding came mainly from CDC and bill and melinda gates foundation. After the epidemic was under control the Idea was to take as much of the momentum from the ebola response and channel it into a) polio eradication, b) malaria control/outbreak insights and c) preparing for the next ebola or ebola like epidemic that would surely come. It became apparent that remote work would not work out without more hands on experience, we also wanted to train local developers to be on the project and also it was impossible to really understand the mixture of local politics and frontline situation of the endusers in hospitals/villages and the ministry. I was asked to go to help get a health dashboard project on track and show our commitment to build a local team. It was also a matter of team dynamics as the Lead Dev there was slowly loosing his mind (after 2 years there) feeling rather isolated and overwhelmed with all the work. As the situation in north Africa was really worrying me after around 12 or so of our frontline workers were killed by boko haram, i was really happy to be asked to Liberia instead, where i could show commitment but also be free from that form of terrorism.

Did you see any evidence of slavery, as some documentaries mention or seem to show?

Obviously not directly, the matters developed quite complex. The early forms of slavery and "freed slave ruling class" co-evolved and mixed with existing clan systems into a system of so called "secret societies" that are active until today. There is still a strong correlation of some of these societies with access to wealth and power (I guess this is what your question pointed to...). However the civil war with its war lord groups and the main political fighting fronts stirred this up further and created new inter-twined power-structures. Things are further complicated by a general fear to talk about them or investigate the exact situation (hence the name "secret" society). It was not uncommon to find someone who investigated and asked too many questions without a head in front of a government building. If I remember correctly, I even had to sign a contract before being deployed to never mention secret societies or ask or talk to anyone about them. The main criticism apart from inequality to access of opportunity and intransparency were that some groups still practice genital mutilation of girls and enforce strong extremely conservative initiation and gender roles as well as problematic medical practices and superstition.

this is like something out of a Hunter S. Thompson book

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