Its been awhile. Summer came and went with what feels like a snap of my fingers. There is no way to recall everything that happened over summer, so an outline of some of the big events is the best I can offer you.
School let out, I turned in my final grades, and unknowingly opened the gates for students to come beg for their grades. I mean kids who never came to school, or who had been failing all year (and knew they were failing), were coming to me begging I pass them, telling me I failed them. Can you believe it, I failed them, as if it’s part of an evil massive plan, as if they weren’t the ones taking their own tests, doing their own homework, not coming to my class/taking advantage of the extra help offered to them. I. Failed. Them. – the idea they failed themselves being absurd. I let the students who missed assignments redo them, which helped some, I even let those who were less than 2 points from passing retake their tests, but there were still 7 kids who failed both of my subjects and in turn had to repeat the grade. What’s sad is, it means those students will just not go to school the next year and when I leave they will try to jump back in, or they will go to a different school and effectively promote themselves, because if you pay the fees a lot of the schools will let you into whatever grade you claim to be in. After I had officially turned my grades I went to the market and saw someone working on their grade sheet, so offered to help them with the yearly averages. They agreed and as I worked on the averages I notice they are imputing grades for the senior high. Now this alone is totally normal, right… well, they are imputing grades for 20+ kids off the top of their head, not looking at any previous work or points, just writing grades for them. Now maybe you’re thinking, sure they remember the grades for 20+ kids, they weren’t just imputing grades for 1 period, they were imputing grades off the top of their head for an entire semester (3 periods), I mean we are talking remembering at least 60 grades. It was a mess.
The majority of my time spent at site was spent sitting with my friends in the market, cooking with the boys, going to Friday markets, and sitting with the Ma who lives behind me. I was supposed to teach summer school for 2 of my students in Physics, but the time in between the end of school, official grades being let out, and my vacation was too sort to hold any sessions.
I spent a few days at PST prepping for the reproductive health days of model school, trying to prepare LR8 to cover topics such as reproductive health, anatomy, consent and GBV. I left PST to meet Jenny, Rachel C, and Rachel T in Monrovia for a girl’s night. We stayed at Eco, went to Royal for good coffee/doughnuts, shopped at Waterside, saw a movie, and got American/Indian food. The next day I went back to PST to help with the official model school’s reproductive health day. All the classes I sat in did a great job, they were well versed on the topics, handled their classes well, and was able to deal with any/all questions thrown at them with grace. After model school that day I left doe and went back to site, I had been gone about a week and was set to leave for my vacation the next day (July 26th).
July 26th is quite the holiday here in Liberia. Its Liberia’s Independence Day! I had previously convinced Rachel C to take her vacation the same day as me, and we had planned to spend most of the day at our site, our flight wasn’t until 3:30 am and we wanted to hang out with our friends at site for the 26th. The issue we ran into was everyone kept saying people would start drinking soon morning, so we would need to leave soon as to avoid any issues. The day of the 26th we were on the road by 8 am, meaning we arrived at the Farmington by 10:30 am, 17 hours before our flight. We got a room for the day, ate free breakfast, worked out at the gym, and sat by the pool to witness the endless amounts of bluffing. Best moment at the pool was- this one guy was bluffing with his phone camera, his friend was taking bluffing pictures of him while he was underwater, you could tell he wanted to take his phone underwater, so with no hesitation he jumps in and starts taking his underwater photos. Rachel and I thought it was strange but just figured he had one of those underwater phones (like we know they have now). He gets out, dries it off, and a few minutes later he is blowing in all the openings, shaking it, and putting it in the sun ha-ha- not an underwater phone. It was great, you could see every thought, like I want underwater photos, submerge phone, cool look at photos, oh shit phone malfunctioning, and panic. While at Farmington I also realized something stupid – our flight was Monrovia-Casablanca- Amsterdam, Rachel was staying in Amsterdam, I booked a separate flight Amsterdam-Dublin. When I booked my flight, I figured everything out and I gave myself 2 hours from landing to my next flight, well, no, I gave myself 1 day and 2 hours until my flight. Somehow, I confused myself and I landed a day earlier than I thought I did, so that night I found a hostel in Amsterdam and Rachel and I decided we would just spend that day touring the city.
Arrived in Casablanca, thrilled to see they had a Starbucks, got a large cappuccino with soymilk.
Then arrived in Amsterdam where we spent several hours trying to find our Hostels, there was a point where we asked someone for help and he looked at us like we were stupid and said, “don’t you have google maps”, well sir, if we did we wouldn’t have asked you for directions ha-ha. The struggle to get around without network was REAL. After our struggle we got Mexican food and rinsed it down with a delicious beer. The next day we shopped, ate a chocolate covered waffle, and I left for the airport to go to Dublin.
Arrived in Dublin and was met with flying Twix bars, I mean sort of, Brian met me at the gate, he brought me several Twix (BTW always a welcomed greeting), he accidentally flung one of them out of his sleeve, and almost took a woman out ha-ha! Dublin was spent hanging out, eating Hilton breakfast (hash browns are the literal best), seeing his family, touring Kilmainham jail, and drinking all the beer. Before I knew it, we were off to Barcelona.
Barcelona didn’t quite hit the expectations I had for it. I expected a vibrant and energetic town and what I found felt like any other city. Maybe we did it wrong, but we saw all the main attractions. We did a free walking tour, which was great and gave us a great overview of the city. We shopped on La Rambla, toured Sagrada Familia/ Park Guell and I tried a seafood paella, which was delicious!
Madrid was way more what I expected of Spain. The city just seemed to be more vibrant and have more culture. The location of our hotel really helped, we were right in city center, walking distance to all the different attractions and close to great bars / restaurants. We hit a ton of attractions while in Madrid, we did a free walking tour, saw plaza mayor, Puerta del sol, Gran Via, Mercado de san Miguel, toured the Royal Palace, and did a day trip to Toledo. There were two things really sold me on Madrid, one- they had Taco Bell, which was just as good as I remembered/ Brian got to try it for the first time, two- Starbucks had a map locating all the Starbucks downtown, I mean how does a girl get so lucky!? Ha.
Next stop was Porto with my parents. Yes, this was Brian’s first time meeting my parents, not only was he meeting them he was hanging out with them for several days ha. Porto was jammed pack with tours/excursions. We did a half day walking tour, food tour, cooking class, bridge climb, and a wine tasting. By the end of each day I was utterly exhausted. My favorite excursion was the cooking class. We booked through cooking with locals and went to this guys house where he taught us to make a traditional Portuguese dinner. The meal was 3 courses all paired with wine, the chief was very nice, and it was fun to be able to be hands on cooking- highly recommended!
After Porto was Lisbon. Lisbon is where Lauren joined us. Lisbon was interesting. I don’t think I realized we were only there for 2 days, I booked us excursions outside the city both days, meaning we never actually got the chance to explore Lisbon. We spent an afternoon doing a sunset boat tour, a day in Sintra and a day touring a winery/doing a tasting. I enjoyed everything we did, I just left Lisbon thinking we used it more as a hub to do different excursions rather then explore what it had to offer. The end of Brian’s and I vacation felt like it snuck up on me, by the end of Lisbon Brian was set to go back to Ireland (so sad), and we were headed to Morocco to meet Haley.
Morocco was hot. So painfully hot. I get that I also live in an African country, but goodness the sun was intense. We hired a tour company (MoroccoTours) to show us all that Morocco had to offer. In Marrakech, we had a local guide show us the historical sites/gardens and stayed at a Riad. Leaving Marrakech, we traveled through the Dades valley, over the High Atlas Mountains, through Berber villages, walked through the largest Kasbah in morocco, drove through rose city, and continued to our hotel in the heart of Dades George. Next day we saw a rock formation called monkey toes, another Kasbah, left Dades valley towards Tinrghir/Todra valley, saw another Gorge and continued to the village of Merzouga where we had a camel waiting for us. We had an experienced camel guide show us the sand sea of the Erg-Chebbi and take us to our desert camp where we stayed for the night. The next morning, we trekked back to Merzouga and got ready to travel to Fes. On the way to Fes we saw Ziz Gorges carved though volcanic rock, stopped in Zaida for BBQ (top meal for sure), continued to Azrou, a Berber village in the middle of the Atlas Mountains, passed though the cedar forest (no monkeys out) and stopped at the French village for pictures/drinks before arriving to Fes. In Fes we toured the city, seeing the Jewish quarter, Mellah, the royal palace, tanneries, and Quaraouine mosque. On the way to Casablanca we traveled to Chefchaouen via Meknes/Volubilis, saw the Bab Mansour gate, Sahrij Souani basin and Mausoleum. Continued to the roman site of Volubilis, had lunch in Meknes and continued to Casablanca. In Casablanca we saw/toured the famous Hassan Mosque and got ready to head to Liberia (minus mom).
No one realized how much driving we would be doing. Everything we did was a lot of fun but we either needed to stay at each location longer, or we needed to fly/cut some of the driving time. My favorite thing we did the camel rides. It was funny what little personalities they had, Laurens camel was a bitch, he almost threw her off! The camel was very vocal about life, the guide told us he was still young and didn’t like the harness, hence him being vocal, well, when she was still getting on he decided to stand, but she wasn’t situated, almost throwing her off. He was the only real “problem” camel. Moms camel was fine until I got off mine to help while hers sat down, while I did this he decided, at that very moment, to take a piss and pee on me, not appreciated. I mean like soaked sock/shoe, all up in between my toes and everything ha-ha!
Morocco is where mom dropped off leaving Dad, Haley and I to head off to Liberia. Liberia is lucky in the way that, flights hate you, and most likely you get stuck arriving at all hours into the night. Our flight landed at 3 or so in the morning and we went through security/ the chaos which is baggage claim and headed to our hotel, The Farmington. We got a few hours rest, woke up the next morning for breakfast, and started our journey to Monrovia. We arrived in Monrovia, dropped our bags to Eco hotel, headed to the museum. The museum costs about $5USD and does an overview of Liberin culture/history. It does a pretty good job explaining/ showing different traditional items, if your ever in Liberia I recommend it. Next, we did a relatively fast walk though waterside market and then headed to the Ducor hotel. The Ducor is funny, they have “security” that watches over the place, yet they demand random amount of money for “entrance” and are always crazy shady about it. It’s the worst dealing with them. When we went they were on “shift change” so at first, we couldn’t go up, then I begged them, they agreed, but threw a fit over the price I was calling (150LD each), the same price I had just paid with the other PC when we did the LR8 tours. We called a car once we finished and he took us to the PC office where we bluffed with photos and did a small tour and then it was back to Eco. Once back at Eco we freshened up a little and headed to Fusion for dinner. The next morning, we called a car again (fancy I know) and headed to Kakata to meet my homestay family. I had previously told Princess not to cook for everyone so instead when we arrived they had cucumbers, monkey apples, bananas, and pineapple, all ready for us to eat/carry to site with us (I’m sure we got more than that, I just can’t remember now). We visited for a few hours, then continued to my site. We arrived at my site, said hello to my neighbors (hadn’t seen them for a month) put our stuff down and headed to the market to get stuff for dinner. Having visitors at my site is interesting, its like me myself on a normal day I’m alright, bring a visitor into town and every person must speak to them/ have the opportunity to stare at them, now, bring a new person who is a relative into town and everyone is OBSESSED. No one in the market believed Haley was my sister, but Lauren now, we were twins ha-ha! My friend Musu even grabbed her butt while telling her we resemble ha-ha. My friend Gormu told me that my dad young-oo and that she wanted him, he was fine. The best part of all of this was as they are talking about them, none of the three can understand what they are saying, so I get to translate everything which was just hilarious. We got back to the house where me and my boys started cooking and Lauren, Haley, and Dad took out the bubbles and played with the children who had migrated to stare at the white folk. After diner we went back inside and basically everyone got ready for bed. Spending only 2 days in Liberia is exhausting. We could have done almost nothing, yet the culture shock/being mobbed by people would exhaust you alone. The next day we woke up, fried some plantains (making chips) with the boys, they packed, and we went into the market one last time (picking up lappa we had dropped off yesterday). While in town I found us a driver to take us back to Monrovia, we drove back to the house, loaded up the car and was off. First stop was the PC office (left some of our bags), and then straight to The Farmington. The girls flight wasn’t until 9pm/ Dads was at 3am, but being you don’t travel at night in Liberia, we arrived around 5pm. Everyone repacked, cleaned up, and we all got dinner. Dad and I went with the girls to make sure they got in okay and then went back to the hotel and slept for a bit before dad took off. Dad went to the airport alone making me a party of one once again.
I was/am glad that Lauren, Haley, and Dad got the chance to come to Liberia. Its cool that when I mention someone or a place they can visualize it/them. I also think everyone should meet my boys because they really are the best little gang around. In casual conversation I mentioned to them that the little girls have dolls that are a piece of wood that they have nailed hair on, I can see them walking around backing their babies/ playing with its hair all the time. The idea that they didn’t have a real doll to play with broke everyone’s heart, so we are going to try to put together a sort of baby doll drive, Ill carry them back with me after Christmas and distribute to the little girls in my community. We will also do toy cars or something for the boys. Ill make a baby doll/car post once we have the details hammered out.
School let out, I turned in my final grades, and unknowingly opened the gates for students to come beg for their grades. I mean kids who never came to school, or who had been failing all year (and knew they were failing), were coming to me begging I pass them, telling me I failed them. Can you believe it, I failed them, as if it’s part of an evil massive plan, as if they weren’t the ones taking their own tests, doing their own homework, not coming to my class/taking advantage of the extra help offered to them. I. Failed. Them. – the idea they failed themselves being absurd. I let the students who missed assignments redo them, which helped some, I even let those who were less than 2 points from passing retake their tests, but there were still 7 kids who failed both of my subjects and in turn had to repeat the grade. What’s sad is, it means those students will just not go to school the next year and when I leave they will try to jump back in, or they will go to a different school and effectively promote themselves, because if you pay the fees a lot of the schools will let you into whatever grade you claim to be in. After I had officially turned my grades I went to the market and saw someone working on their grade sheet, so offered to help them with the yearly averages. They agreed and as I worked on the averages I notice they are imputing grades for the senior high. Now this alone is totally normal, right… well, they are imputing grades for 20+ kids off the top of their head, not looking at any previous work or points, just writing grades for them. Now maybe you’re thinking, sure they remember the grades for 20+ kids, they weren’t just imputing grades for 1 period, they were imputing grades off the top of their head for an entire semester (3 periods), I mean we are talking remembering at least 60 grades. It was a mess.
The majority of my time spent at site was spent sitting with my friends in the market, cooking with the boys, going to Friday markets, and sitting with the Ma who lives behind me. I was supposed to teach summer school for 2 of my students in Physics, but the time in between the end of school, official grades being let out, and my vacation was too sort to hold any sessions.
I spent a few days at PST prepping for the reproductive health days of model school, trying to prepare LR8 to cover topics such as reproductive health, anatomy, consent and GBV. I left PST to meet Jenny, Rachel C, and Rachel T in Monrovia for a girl’s night. We stayed at Eco, went to Royal for good coffee/doughnuts, shopped at Waterside, saw a movie, and got American/Indian food. The next day I went back to PST to help with the official model school’s reproductive health day. All the classes I sat in did a great job, they were well versed on the topics, handled their classes well, and was able to deal with any/all questions thrown at them with grace. After model school that day I left doe and went back to site, I had been gone about a week and was set to leave for my vacation the next day (July 26th).
July 26th is quite the holiday here in Liberia. Its Liberia’s Independence Day! I had previously convinced Rachel C to take her vacation the same day as me, and we had planned to spend most of the day at our site, our flight wasn’t until 3:30 am and we wanted to hang out with our friends at site for the 26th. The issue we ran into was everyone kept saying people would start drinking soon morning, so we would need to leave soon as to avoid any issues. The day of the 26th we were on the road by 8 am, meaning we arrived at the Farmington by 10:30 am, 17 hours before our flight. We got a room for the day, ate free breakfast, worked out at the gym, and sat by the pool to witness the endless amounts of bluffing. Best moment at the pool was- this one guy was bluffing with his phone camera, his friend was taking bluffing pictures of him while he was underwater, you could tell he wanted to take his phone underwater, so with no hesitation he jumps in and starts taking his underwater photos. Rachel and I thought it was strange but just figured he had one of those underwater phones (like we know they have now). He gets out, dries it off, and a few minutes later he is blowing in all the openings, shaking it, and putting it in the sun ha-ha- not an underwater phone. It was great, you could see every thought, like I want underwater photos, submerge phone, cool look at photos, oh shit phone malfunctioning, and panic. While at Farmington I also realized something stupid – our flight was Monrovia-Casablanca- Amsterdam, Rachel was staying in Amsterdam, I booked a separate flight Amsterdam-Dublin. When I booked my flight, I figured everything out and I gave myself 2 hours from landing to my next flight, well, no, I gave myself 1 day and 2 hours until my flight. Somehow, I confused myself and I landed a day earlier than I thought I did, so that night I found a hostel in Amsterdam and Rachel and I decided we would just spend that day touring the city.
Arrived in Casablanca, thrilled to see they had a Starbucks, got a large cappuccino with soymilk.
Then arrived in Amsterdam where we spent several hours trying to find our Hostels, there was a point where we asked someone for help and he looked at us like we were stupid and said, “don’t you have google maps”, well sir, if we did we wouldn’t have asked you for directions ha-ha. The struggle to get around without network was REAL. After our struggle we got Mexican food and rinsed it down with a delicious beer. The next day we shopped, ate a chocolate covered waffle, and I left for the airport to go to Dublin.
Arrived in Dublin and was met with flying Twix bars, I mean sort of, Brian met me at the gate, he brought me several Twix (BTW always a welcomed greeting), he accidentally flung one of them out of his sleeve, and almost took a woman out ha-ha! Dublin was spent hanging out, eating Hilton breakfast (hash browns are the literal best), seeing his family, touring Kilmainham jail, and drinking all the beer. Before I knew it, we were off to Barcelona.
Barcelona didn’t quite hit the expectations I had for it. I expected a vibrant and energetic town and what I found felt like any other city. Maybe we did it wrong, but we saw all the main attractions. We did a free walking tour, which was great and gave us a great overview of the city. We shopped on La Rambla, toured Sagrada Familia/ Park Guell and I tried a seafood paella, which was delicious!
Madrid was way more what I expected of Spain. The city just seemed to be more vibrant and have more culture. The location of our hotel really helped, we were right in city center, walking distance to all the different attractions and close to great bars / restaurants. We hit a ton of attractions while in Madrid, we did a free walking tour, saw plaza mayor, Puerta del sol, Gran Via, Mercado de san Miguel, toured the Royal Palace, and did a day trip to Toledo. There were two things really sold me on Madrid, one- they had Taco Bell, which was just as good as I remembered/ Brian got to try it for the first time, two- Starbucks had a map locating all the Starbucks downtown, I mean how does a girl get so lucky!? Ha.
Next stop was Porto with my parents. Yes, this was Brian’s first time meeting my parents, not only was he meeting them he was hanging out with them for several days ha. Porto was jammed pack with tours/excursions. We did a half day walking tour, food tour, cooking class, bridge climb, and a wine tasting. By the end of each day I was utterly exhausted. My favorite excursion was the cooking class. We booked through cooking with locals and went to this guys house where he taught us to make a traditional Portuguese dinner. The meal was 3 courses all paired with wine, the chief was very nice, and it was fun to be able to be hands on cooking- highly recommended!
After Porto was Lisbon. Lisbon is where Lauren joined us. Lisbon was interesting. I don’t think I realized we were only there for 2 days, I booked us excursions outside the city both days, meaning we never actually got the chance to explore Lisbon. We spent an afternoon doing a sunset boat tour, a day in Sintra and a day touring a winery/doing a tasting. I enjoyed everything we did, I just left Lisbon thinking we used it more as a hub to do different excursions rather then explore what it had to offer. The end of Brian’s and I vacation felt like it snuck up on me, by the end of Lisbon Brian was set to go back to Ireland (so sad), and we were headed to Morocco to meet Haley.
Morocco was hot. So painfully hot. I get that I also live in an African country, but goodness the sun was intense. We hired a tour company (MoroccoTours) to show us all that Morocco had to offer. In Marrakech, we had a local guide show us the historical sites/gardens and stayed at a Riad. Leaving Marrakech, we traveled through the Dades valley, over the High Atlas Mountains, through Berber villages, walked through the largest Kasbah in morocco, drove through rose city, and continued to our hotel in the heart of Dades George. Next day we saw a rock formation called monkey toes, another Kasbah, left Dades valley towards Tinrghir/Todra valley, saw another Gorge and continued to the village of Merzouga where we had a camel waiting for us. We had an experienced camel guide show us the sand sea of the Erg-Chebbi and take us to our desert camp where we stayed for the night. The next morning, we trekked back to Merzouga and got ready to travel to Fes. On the way to Fes we saw Ziz Gorges carved though volcanic rock, stopped in Zaida for BBQ (top meal for sure), continued to Azrou, a Berber village in the middle of the Atlas Mountains, passed though the cedar forest (no monkeys out) and stopped at the French village for pictures/drinks before arriving to Fes. In Fes we toured the city, seeing the Jewish quarter, Mellah, the royal palace, tanneries, and Quaraouine mosque. On the way to Casablanca we traveled to Chefchaouen via Meknes/Volubilis, saw the Bab Mansour gate, Sahrij Souani basin and Mausoleum. Continued to the roman site of Volubilis, had lunch in Meknes and continued to Casablanca. In Casablanca we saw/toured the famous Hassan Mosque and got ready to head to Liberia (minus mom).
No one realized how much driving we would be doing. Everything we did was a lot of fun but we either needed to stay at each location longer, or we needed to fly/cut some of the driving time. My favorite thing we did the camel rides. It was funny what little personalities they had, Laurens camel was a bitch, he almost threw her off! The camel was very vocal about life, the guide told us he was still young and didn’t like the harness, hence him being vocal, well, when she was still getting on he decided to stand, but she wasn’t situated, almost throwing her off. He was the only real “problem” camel. Moms camel was fine until I got off mine to help while hers sat down, while I did this he decided, at that very moment, to take a piss and pee on me, not appreciated. I mean like soaked sock/shoe, all up in between my toes and everything ha-ha!
Morocco is where mom dropped off leaving Dad, Haley and I to head off to Liberia. Liberia is lucky in the way that, flights hate you, and most likely you get stuck arriving at all hours into the night. Our flight landed at 3 or so in the morning and we went through security/ the chaos which is baggage claim and headed to our hotel, The Farmington. We got a few hours rest, woke up the next morning for breakfast, and started our journey to Monrovia. We arrived in Monrovia, dropped our bags to Eco hotel, headed to the museum. The museum costs about $5USD and does an overview of Liberin culture/history. It does a pretty good job explaining/ showing different traditional items, if your ever in Liberia I recommend it. Next, we did a relatively fast walk though waterside market and then headed to the Ducor hotel. The Ducor is funny, they have “security” that watches over the place, yet they demand random amount of money for “entrance” and are always crazy shady about it. It’s the worst dealing with them. When we went they were on “shift change” so at first, we couldn’t go up, then I begged them, they agreed, but threw a fit over the price I was calling (150LD each), the same price I had just paid with the other PC when we did the LR8 tours. We called a car once we finished and he took us to the PC office where we bluffed with photos and did a small tour and then it was back to Eco. Once back at Eco we freshened up a little and headed to Fusion for dinner. The next morning, we called a car again (fancy I know) and headed to Kakata to meet my homestay family. I had previously told Princess not to cook for everyone so instead when we arrived they had cucumbers, monkey apples, bananas, and pineapple, all ready for us to eat/carry to site with us (I’m sure we got more than that, I just can’t remember now). We visited for a few hours, then continued to my site. We arrived at my site, said hello to my neighbors (hadn’t seen them for a month) put our stuff down and headed to the market to get stuff for dinner. Having visitors at my site is interesting, its like me myself on a normal day I’m alright, bring a visitor into town and every person must speak to them/ have the opportunity to stare at them, now, bring a new person who is a relative into town and everyone is OBSESSED. No one in the market believed Haley was my sister, but Lauren now, we were twins ha-ha! My friend Musu even grabbed her butt while telling her we resemble ha-ha. My friend Gormu told me that my dad young-oo and that she wanted him, he was fine. The best part of all of this was as they are talking about them, none of the three can understand what they are saying, so I get to translate everything which was just hilarious. We got back to the house where me and my boys started cooking and Lauren, Haley, and Dad took out the bubbles and played with the children who had migrated to stare at the white folk. After diner we went back inside and basically everyone got ready for bed. Spending only 2 days in Liberia is exhausting. We could have done almost nothing, yet the culture shock/being mobbed by people would exhaust you alone. The next day we woke up, fried some plantains (making chips) with the boys, they packed, and we went into the market one last time (picking up lappa we had dropped off yesterday). While in town I found us a driver to take us back to Monrovia, we drove back to the house, loaded up the car and was off. First stop was the PC office (left some of our bags), and then straight to The Farmington. The girls flight wasn’t until 9pm/ Dads was at 3am, but being you don’t travel at night in Liberia, we arrived around 5pm. Everyone repacked, cleaned up, and we all got dinner. Dad and I went with the girls to make sure they got in okay and then went back to the hotel and slept for a bit before dad took off. Dad went to the airport alone making me a party of one once again.
I was/am glad that Lauren, Haley, and Dad got the chance to come to Liberia. Its cool that when I mention someone or a place they can visualize it/them. I also think everyone should meet my boys because they really are the best little gang around. In casual conversation I mentioned to them that the little girls have dolls that are a piece of wood that they have nailed hair on, I can see them walking around backing their babies/ playing with its hair all the time. The idea that they didn’t have a real doll to play with broke everyone’s heart, so we are going to try to put together a sort of baby doll drive, Ill carry them back with me after Christmas and distribute to the little girls in my community. We will also do toy cars or something for the boys. Ill make a baby doll/car post once we have the details hammered out.