Karnplay, Liberia A midwife greeted me at the door of the Karnplay clinic.  She had been busy sweeping the steps and put down her broom to perform a welcoming dance.

A clinic is the simple, first-line of basic healthcare the IRC supports in Liberia.  Villagers come to the clinic for prophylactics, medicines for diseases like malaria, and to identify the signs of diseases like TB.  Family planning is done here.  Women who have been raped often come to the clinic first.  An ambulance helps transport at-risk and emergency patients to a more sophisticated health center or hospital.  Otherwise, Liberians would (and will) walk for miles.  The longest distance traveled from an outlying village to this clinic?  A staggering 3-and-a-half hours.

The day I visited, there were several patients being treated:  one man had malaria and another had suffered an accident.  Moaning in a nearby room was a girl being treated for cerebral malaria.  Her cries were harrowing to hear.  The clinic manger assured me that she would recover.The clinic keeps drugs cold in a room with a tiny window that can be opened to let the breeze in or shut to prevent the sun’s sharp rays.  As the clinic does not have the ability to feed patients, family members must travel with and cook for them, too.

There’s a huge outreach component to the Karnplay clinic and other IRC-supported health facilities.  Clinic staff venture into the town and outlying villages to spread messages about the importance of hand-washing, boiling water, and using condoms, and why sexual violence is wrong. 

Painted signs in villages and along the roadside help reinforce these important messages.  Some are serious:  “Real strength is in the mind, not the fist.”  Or, “You cannot get HIV/AIDS from mosquito bites or bathing together.”   Others contain a bit of humor:  “Don’t sleep in the same room as the chickens.”

That afternoon, we changed gears to visit some of the small farms that the IRC is supporting.  Remember how difficult it was to shimmy up the rope in high-school gym class?  Well, you’d never make it on a Liberian palm farm!  I saw men scale palm trees that were easily three stories high in a matter of minutes.  They hacked off huge palm fronds that fell gracefully to the earth. 

How did they do this?  The men used a circular belt to hoist themselves up the trunk, but it was sheer muscle that was powering them.  I asked one young man if I could try on the belt.  He laughed and said yes.  Next, I showed him my bicep and asked if I could cut it as a palm farmer?  He was polite but blunt!

Nearby, the multi-step process of de-seeding, boiling, crushing, sifting, re-boiling and finally extracting palm oil from the palm heads was in full-swing.  Children who go to school during the week were spending their weekends picking palm seeds out with their bare hands.  That’s difficult to see.  These same children spend the majority of the time they’re not in school working hard to help their parents.  I think of the great emphasis we put on childhood—and recreation—in America.  It’s very different in a place like Karnplay, where daily life is about survival.

We wrapped up the day at a local market.  There, I saw the fruits of the palm farmers’ labor on display.  Red oil, extracted from the palm tree and aptly name for its brilliant color, was on sale in reused water bottles and jerry cans.  It’s used to cook just about everything in Liberia.  As to what constitutes Liberian cooking?  I have a rambunctious group of school children who are going to tell me all about that tomorrow…

See more photos in Emily’s Flickr set.