The Dung Beetles of Liberia

by Daniel V. Jr. Meier

  The shouts somehow seemed more serious here than in the bleachers at Cornell. Ana and I were both experiencing a heightened sense of excitement. I looked at her and at that moment she looked breathtakingly beautiful.

  “Would you like to try the restaurant at the Ducor Palace Hotel? It has a beautiful view,” she said. “And I’m told the food is exceptional.”

  “Absolutely!” I said.

  The hotel had been finished the year before and it was located on the top of Ducor Hill. It overlooked the Atlantic Ocean and the Saint Paul River. It also had a commanding view of most of Monrovia. It had been built by an Israeli contractor and was the last word in accommodations and luxury. One could easily say that it was the jewel of Africa. I had remembered to bring a tie and blazer, which I had folded in the back seat of my car. My suspicions were correct—they required a tie and jacket. Ana wore a light cotton, sleeveless pale blue dress good for any occasion.

  “We’re here for dinner,” I told the parking attendant dressed in chauffer’s livery, all in white with gold buttons and braid. He regarded the rather faded and battered VW with a tolerant smile. He opened the door for Ana. I handed him the keys wrapped in a dollar bill. He bowed slightly, and we walked into the hotel. Another hotel attendant, immaculately dressed in a tuxedo, very formally pointed the way to the restaurant. Although it was still a little early for dinner, Ana suggested that we find a good table and enjoy a bottle of wine and the splendid view.

  Since it was early, there were empty tables and attentive waiters.

  “I’m in the mood for steak and potatoes,” she said.

  “That sounds great—very American.”

  “Yes, but it’s very German too.”

  A young Liberian waiter, looking rather formal in his white shirt, black bowtie, and black pressed trousers, asked what we would prefer to drink. Ana looked intently at the wine list for a few minutes and recommended the Mosel. I looked up at the waiter, who couldn’t disguise the amusement in his eyes, and said the Mosel would be just fine. He jotted it down, then turned like a soldier doing an about-face and marched toward the kitchen.

  “German wines are not so difficult to get here,” she said, “and Mosel is my favorite. I like to think of it as a real, living touch with history. The vines were brought to Germany by the Romans who needed to supply their troops. It was too expensive and too difficult to transport barrels of wine from Italy, so they grew their own grapes and, in the process, created a huge modern industry. You know, people in those days substituted the stuff for water. It’s a wonder the Roman army won a single battle much less conquered most of the Western world.”

  She chatted for a while longer about the Mosel region and that it was her hope to one day live there and enjoy “real” seasons once again. The waiter brought the wine, showed us the label, and opened it with some ceremony before pouring about an ounce in my glass. I tasted it, not really knowing a good Riesling from a not so good one, but able to determine that it wasn’t yet vinegar. I nodded to him that it was okay and he proceeded, without further ceremony, to pour.

  “I particularly like this northern vintage,” she said, after sipping from her glass. “It’s not too sweet or alcoholic—just right.”

  Our conversation touched on all sorts of things as time floated by. The wine, the view, and the soft evening tropical air enveloped me in a light sense of euphoria. She was mesmerizing, and I couldn’t stop talking. She wanted to know about my work, and what I had seen of the interior. I told her about flying to the missions, the mines, the Peace Corps volunteers. By the second bottle of wine she wanted to know about New York.

  “I always think of New York as the most exciting place in the world. I imagine it’s like what major European cities used to be—alive, vibrant, and untouched by war.”

  I agreed, not knowing what European cities were like before the war. That New York was vibrant and probably the most culturally and intellectually productive place in the US, I was sure, but before I could elaborate on the qualities of New York, the waiter returned for our dinner orders.

  It was getting dark as we finished our meal. We lingered over a cup of coffee, not wanting the evening to end. The soft lights of various parts of the city were beginning to switch on. Maybe it was the effect of the candlelight and the wine, but her blue eyes had taken on an intense shimmer, and she seemed to radiate near lethal levels of warmth and sexuality. I had to shake my head to get over it.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Nothing, just a little overcome by the tropics,” I said.

  She smiled. “I would like to continue our conversation,” she said.

  “So would I.”

  “I don’t have to be at work tomorrow.” She hesitated. “You don’t have to take me to the embassy if you don’t want to.”

  I tried to appear cool and calm, but I was nearly trembling with excitement. “Would it be all right with you if I got a room for us here?” I tried to say without stammering.

  “I think that would be very nice,” she said.

  CHAPTER 9

  BELLE YALLA

  The weather was beginning to improve and, as a result, the company’s business picked up. I had flights scheduled almost every day. I tried to call Ana when I could but did not always have access to a phone. When I did find one it usually didn’t work.

  It was a Friday afternoon when two policemen brought a prisoner, in handcuffs, to the airfield and said we had to fly him to Belle Yalla, a prison in the northeastern part of Liberia maintained by the government. It was a very bad place to go. Mike told them that we couldn’t fly him until Saturday—no airplanes were available. Then he asked what the man was charged with.

  “Na yo binness,” said the policeman with the sergeant’s stripes on his shirt sleeve.

  “Who is he? Where’s he from?” Mike asked.

  “Dat too, na yo binness,” said the policeman.

  More than likely the man had said something against the president or had crossed one of the Big Men, or possibly it was a tribal issue. So, they sent him to Belle Yalla, where there was an excellent chance he would never be heard from again.

  Since we couldn’t transport the prisoner until the next day, the two policemen agreed that as far as they were concerned the prisoner could wait until Doomsday. They proceeded to handcuff him to an old VW engine block that had been placed outside the hangar.

  “Dat be too fine! See ya Sattaday,” the sergeant joked as they drove away.

  It had started to rain so Paterson had some of his boys give the man a piece of thin sheet metal to hold over his head with his free hand. I found a couple of bananas in the office and gave them to him. I got the assignment to fly him out so I was at the airfield around 10:00 a.m. the next morning. When I arrived, I noticed a long, deep groove cut in the dirt leading up to the road. Neither the prisoner nor the engine block was anywhere to be seen. The groove ended abruptly at the road. I suspected that he had dragged the engine block the half mile to the road, gotten on a money bus, and paid his ten cents. Nothing and no one rode for free on the money bus. I’m sure the bus driver charged him another twenty-five cents for the engine block, probably telling him that it was ten cents for him and twenty-five cents for the “jewelry.”

  When Paterson arrived he, of course, found the prisoner missing and followed the telltale groove to the road. Paterson’s rollers and field boys expressed great admiration for the prisoner, commenting excitedly about his strength and determination.

  “My-oh! Da boy ee buku buku strong, oh!”

  I must admit to feeling some admiration for him myself. It took more than I had in me to drag a hunk of metal that distance then take a chance that a bus driver would accept me and an engine. It could have been the bus driver knew something of the legal system in Liberia and decided to give the man a chance.

  The police were very upset when they saw what had happened. I thought they might be angry with us and try to blame Mike or one of the boys, but they ignored the
missing prisoner almost entirely and just shouted at Mike about the handcuffs.

  “Now we mus buy new cuffs, oh! Handcuffs are spensive, you know, mon, vey vey spensive!”

  That evening I managed to reach Ana by phone. She had rented a cottage on the beach for the weekend. Since I had been working steadily for the last two weeks, Mike granted me leave for a couple of days. I grabbed a change of clothes and underwear, jumped into my trusty VW, which I had named Junebug, and struck out for the beach. The wet season had ended and I was looking forward to drying out in the intense sunshine.

  I found the cottage after a few wrong turns. It was about as I had imagined—a minimal living area with an adjacent bedroom, a small bath, and a very small kitchen. But the refrigerator was working and there was a radio in the living area. It was airy and clean. The ocean breeze flowed through the large open windows and doors, keeping the place cool and saturated with the salty, organic smell of the ocean.

  Ana greeted me at the front door. She was dressed in a thin cotton gown popular with the native women. She usually wore her hair pulled up in a twist, which was expertly done, but on this occasion, she had let it down and it flowed freely and delicately over her shoulders. Her smile was radiant, and seeing her there, she looked like an unnamed beauty from a medieval tale of chivalry. I dropped my small bag and took her in my arms.

  After the lovemaking we lay for a long time enjoying the breeze and listening to the gentle sound of the surf washing up onto the beach. She held up my hand, looked at it, and then kissed it.

  “What have you been doing? This is not the hand of a pilot,” she said.

  “I’ve been doing some maintenance work for the company. Mike lost his head mechanic and asked me to fill in until he can find another. There’s a lot of digging into hard-to-get places and rolling stuff up into neat bundles. It can be rough on the hands.”

  “I like a man with a man’s hands,” she said, placing my hand on her breast. “Use those hands,” she whispered in my ear.

  Ana had hired one of the local women, Tina, as housekeeper and cook. Tina seemed to understand what was expected of her. We only saw her at meal time and for an hour in the morning when she cleaned the cottage. We took our meals under a large umbrella on the beach, then read or slept in the shade. Since we had been warned against swimming in the ocean due to the strong undertow, we played “catch ball” in the surf, or simply let the surf tumble over our bodies. Tina would clear away the plates and utensils after each meal then discreetly disappear. I never knew where she went, but she always left and returned silently.

  During that weekend Ana and I made love in almost every place that we could—on the beach at night and in every room in the cottage except the kitchen. Ana had rented the cottage for two nights and it was then, the last night, while we were enjoying a glass of wine after dinner, that she told me she would be going back to Germany.

  I hesitated. I hesitated a long time. Then asked, “When?”

  “After Christmas; I won’t be here for the new year. I’ve been offered a job with a film production company.”

  “Doing what?”

  “In their accounts department.” She paused. “I know it doesn’t sound very exciting, but it’s a start, and it’s what I want.”

  I had known this would come. It had to come. Ana had a vision of her future that did not include me. And I couldn’t ask her to share what I had, which was an uncertain future at best. She told me what she wanted from the outset and she had not wavered in that.

  “Would you be my guest at the Christmas party?” she asked. “The Embassy always gives an excellent Christmas party.” She paused. “We can say our goodbyes then.”

  I left early the next morning. Ana was still in bed, though awake, and Tina had not arrived. I kissed her and told her that I had an early flight. She smiled and said, “Call me when you can and let’s talk about the party.” I said that I would and left.

  Truth is, I did not have an early flight. I had no idea what was on the schedule for that day. I did know, however, that I needed to leave before I said something foolish, before an unrealized feeling boiled to the surface. I couldn’t deny that I was viscerally hurt, that a part of me screamed for her not to go. The rational side, however, the logical side, said that what I wanted with Ana couldn’t be. It simply wasn’t to be our reality. I would call, of course, but I resolved not to see her until Christmas.

  CHAPTER 10

  SEPTRO

  When I got to Spriggs-Payne, Mike had a surprise for me. He had, without anyone’s knowledge, agreed by contract to train selected Liberian candidates to fly. Since I was the only one of his pilots with a US government-issued flight instructor’s certificate, the task was given to me. The program was funded by USAID, as were a great many programs in Liberia at the time. The Cold War was raging, and both the Mali and Guinea governments were known to have strong communist leanings. Through USAID, the US was able to pour a huge amount of money into Liberia in the belief that it would establish a US democratic stronghold in Africa.

  It was an interesting concept to take someone who had probably grown up with little knowledge of machinery and teach him how to handle something as complex as an airplane. Nevertheless, I assumed the prospective students could drive. They were in the national army, so somebody selected these young men for training. I was given four students, and four weeks to get them soloed and ready for more advanced training.

  I started out with five days of ground school. We met in the hangar and, using a blackboard and chalk, I drew and explained the theory of flight, aerodynamics, vectors, weather, and load factor. The next week, we got into the airplane. That was when I was able to see how much of my instruction had failed. Three of the students had no understanding as to how a compass worked or, more importantly, what its significance was. What does the polar magnetic field mean to someone who has grown up in the tropics, lived within a ten-mile radius of his remote village and, if lucky, taught the rudiments of reading and writing?

  I worked with these young men for two weeks every day, all day, but out of the four candidates I was only able to solo one. I later discovered that these men had not been specially selected at all; they had been picked completely at random. None had ever expressed any interest in becoming a pilot. Their officers worked on the military principle that when a subordinate is ordered to do something, that person will do it.

  My one success, Septro, turned out to be a reasonably decent pilot with a lot of natural talent. After his solo flight, the army then sent him to the US for additional training. He was supposed to come back at the conclusion of his flight training and be what they referred to as the presidential flight pilot.

  The president had an airplane, but he never used it. It was a Cherokee 180, a single engine, low wing, light airplane manufactured by Piper. He was afraid of flying. A local witch doctor had told him that he would die in the airplane.

  When Septro returned a year later from the States, he strutted around with a new sense of importance because he had a US commercial pilot’s certificate. He was the first Liberian charter pilot. We were all very proud of him as he passed his new certificate around for everyone to see. It was marked “not valid within the continental United States of America.”

  He found that his duties were limited to flying the president’s girlfriends around and the occasional official visitor. I was happy for him since I knew that these trips were well within his capability. Septro’s aviation career was short, however. He was told to take a couple of government officials down the coast to the town of Harper on Cape Palmas. The passengers were Americo-Liberians and fairly high ranking in the government. To go down the coast you keep your left wing over the land and your right wing over the water—pretty simple. On the way back, apparently he forgot which way he was going and continued heading south. He ended up in the Ivory Coast. When they landed at the airport, he realized his mistake—all the signs were in French. So he took off and went back the other direction. He managed to
get back from where he started, but by then it was starting to get dark. It began to rain. The visibility dropped, and his passengers were getting nervous. According to Septro, one of the passengers tried to take the controls away from him, but he yelled and fought back, eventually regaining control of the airplane. He tried to keep going up the coast but soon lost sight of the coast altogether. The airplane finally crashed, ending upside down in the jungle.

  Miraculously, everyone lived and walked to the nearest village on the coast. During the post-accident investigation, the passengers swore that Septro had gone insane and foamed at the mouth. They said they had told him, “De watta ee ova dere!” and he’d said, “No, no, no, das no right!” Given the military’s intolerance of mistakes or embarrassments, this abruptly ended Septro’s aviation career. In addition, the army decided they didn’t need to train anymore pilots.

  Since all of my company time up until Christmas was involved in training these young men, I had weekends free. So I threw my resolution out of the window and spent every weekend with Ana. We took advantage of every minute we had together. I simply tried not to think of her leaving and focused only on the moment. I savored it like one would good food or a favorite drink after a long abstinence.

  She wanted to see Monrovia from the air, so I rented a Cessna 180 from Mike, packed a picnic lunch, did a preflight inspection of the airplane, and waited. She arrived exactly on time. It turned out to be a beautiful day, no rain showers, and hardly a cloud.

  I flew her over Monrovia. She was thrilled to see the embassy from the air. I circled it a couple of times, then flew out around West Point and back over the city, passing over the football stadium. I then turned to fly over the beach. Ana was transfixed with the sight of the surf rolling up onto the beach as we flew along it. After about ten minutes we were at a relatively empty stretch of the beach. I did a quick scan for obstructions, turned, slowed to flap speed, put the flaps down and landed the airplane on the hard sand. It was a little nerve-wracking at first since the beach had a little slope to it, but it was controllable. The thought flicked through my mind of just how quickly Mike was going to fire me if I damaged the airplane.