Cheers

We were exhausted, stressed, sleep deprived, jet-lagged, and required in the morning to sing the Star Spangled Banner for the president of Liberia and about half her cabinet.   My body cried for sleep, but this was our training group’s last night together and that called for camaraderie.  I donated a bottle of an inexpensive South African Pinotage. Using a Swiss Army Knife, I cut six “glasses” out of plastic water bottles (since our hostel/convent’s kitchen was closed and all wine, however cheap, deserves to have its full bouquet) and emptied the bottle for the remaining night owls.  We raised our “glasses.”

“Cheers,” we toasted, unimaginatively.  Perhaps we were too tired to think of anything better to say, or perhaps there were too many things to say:

“To new friends!”

“To a successful week of training!”

“To the start of a new adventure!”

“To Peace Corps!”

“To inexpensively priced wine!”

The “glasses” thudded instead of clinked and the wine tasted like its four dollars.  It fit in with all the other inconveniences over the previous few days:  living out of suitcases, the constant sputtering of motorcycle noises, the blanket of humidity, the toilets that didn’t usually flush and the showers that had neither heat nor pressure.  But this was Peace Corps and you’d never find one of us complaining.  Wine, and any water pressure at all were about to become luxuries, and the convent even had electricity!  These were Response volunteers, the veterans, the ones who loved their first two years of Peace Corps hardship so much that they signed up again. 

It was this experience that allowed Peace Corps to shorten our training from 3 months (for regular Peace Corps) to just five days.  It wasn’t an easy five days; they were packed with informational sessions and advice sessions from currently service Liberian volunteers that continued informally into the night.  That didn’t leave much time to socialize. 

Our two extra days jaunting around Atlanta meant we sacrificed time seeing Monrovia.  A few of us made a rushed early morning walking tour on which I was not so kindly instructed not to take any photographs anywhere near either of the two American embassy fortresses.  Later that evening we made  a short trip to the beach at sundown that ended abruptly once the Frisbee landed in human feces (they did warn us that the Atlantic Ocean is often used as Monrovia’s toilet). 

The only whole group event outside the convent’s tall, cement, barbed-wire and jagged glass topped walls, was to Tides bar.  Peace Corps told us it had a great view of the beach and city.  From its third floor balcony, I sipped a deceivingly strong cocktail of freshly squeezed oranges  and mystery alcohols and admired the blackness.  Without a national power grid, Monrovia is almost as dark as night as the sea.  Faint shadows of scurrying crabs below me, the drone of conversations and the bar’s generator, and someone’s attempt to cover Bob Marley were the only signs of night life in Liberia’s biggest city.

Split six ways, the bottle didn’t last long and people soon began saying their goodnights.  A month-long close-of-service window and the lack of any group training events meant that tomorrow’s swearing in ceremony would be our last time all together; that our sites were scattered around the country and required whole days of travel between them in overcrowded taxis on dirty or muddy roads discouraged us from contemplating inter-site visits. 

Still, there was too much excitement to be sad.  It had been a great training week, and I think we all excited to accept the challenge of six months at isolated sites in what our Country Director called the toughest post in Peace Corps.