Day 104: Monrovia

Ghana Embassy, second attempt: Riding on the motorcycle taxi in heavy morning traffic didn't feel quite as good. We arrived on site just before nine o'clock. After a short conversation with an employee (vice embassador?), our request to get the passports back on the same day if possible was accepted and another employee takes care of us. We can come back at 1:00 p.m. It costs us $70 per person here. As a visa on arrival at the border (Elubo) would have been 150 per person. Actually we saved some money :-)

Meanwhile it's pouring rain. Carl, who is staying in the same compound, sends us a photo of the flooded campsite. It later turns out that the damage is not as bad as feared – the bed did not get wet despite the screens being open.

An early lunch in the same restaurant as yesterday. We talk longer with the operator, a very nice and smart Lebanese man. He offers us to fill the drinking water in our car using his 20 liter water dispenser boxes. Excellent!

The Lebanese people we meet on our trip are all extremely friendly and seem to be enterprising and successful. The hotels, restaurants and supermarkets we used were well run and pleasant and more in keeping with Western standards. It seems as if the Lebanese here in Africa are mediators between Western orientation and African society.

We continually ask ourselves whether education alone will advance African societies. And why do so many people just hang out all day? And why do they develop so little initiative in their activities. Why does an employee still ask his boss after twenty years if he only has a bottle of one type of beer and doesn't automatically offer another? Why does someone collect the garbage, put it in a corner and the animals spread the garbage back around the area at night? Why is a broken shower hose not repaired? Why does the waitress only opens a served bottle of beer, even after weeks, when the guest explicitly asks for it? The anecdotal part of the last question is that the local opens the bottle with his teeth.

We think that perhaps all of these things have to do with the fact that people here live exclusively in the present. Daily survival is crucial. What tomorrow is or was yesterday doesn't matter. Maybe that's how it is...