summarize this text: On New Year's Eve, 1989, all of us who belonged to St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Monrovia gathered in the churchyard for the Watch Night Service, when we'd see the old year pass and welcome the new one. Everyone got a piece of white paper. On it, you wrote down whatever you hoped for the coming year, then cast it into a big steel drum in the center of the yard. The pastor said a prayer and touched a lit match to the pile. The smoke would go straight up to God, who would make your wishes come true.
As a child I had often wished for health. I was sick a lot-measles, malaria, cholera. I'd also wished for good grades, and for things to go well for my family. This year, I was seventeen, finishing high school and about to start at the university. I made a teenage good girl's wish: for good grades, interesting professors and the right classes. And I asked that those I loved be kept safe from evil.
When it was my turn, I dropped my paper in with the others. The smoke curled and rose as the congregation broke into songs of praise and thanksgiving, and I tilted my head back to watch it vanish into the warm starry sky. A feeling of safety enveloped me. God was good.
I knew He heard all my prayers.tered. Everywhere I went, guests passed me envelopes with bills in them.
Other presents piled up: clothes, shoes, and best of all, a beautiful pair of Dexter brand boots, made of patterned leather that looked like snakeskin.
"We need the graduates to come forward!" my father called out. The music stopped. Josephine was nowhere to be found, so I stepped up, along with my cousins Fernon and Napah. My father, dressed in his usual weekend wear of jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap, a broad smile on his handsome face, told me how proud he was of me.
"And I thank you for all the love and support you have shown me," I told him and my mother. She looked lovely in a traditional African Lappa suit and gold jewelry, her dark hair up in a French twist. "And thank you all"—I gestured to the crowd "for coming tonight to celebrate our joy!" Everyone applauded, and my parents looked pleased and happy, their own marriage troubles put away for the moment.
They'd both grown up poor and tonight everyone could see how well they'd done-two of their daughters graduating from one of Monrovia's best private schools and heading off to college; a party with such abundant food and drink that it would be the subject of conversation for a long while. For me, the night was the perfect end to one of the happiest times of my life.
Iloved my childhood home. The settlement on Old Road wasn't lux-urious; there were no paved sidewalks or air conditioners to break the constant, muggy heat. But our homes had televisions, bathrooms, modern kitchens; this wasn't a slum like Logan Town or West Point, whose ragged children I had seen begging or pressed against the gates at friends' parties, watching us eat. No one was homeless or hungry here, and our community was built on togetherness and sharing. The five of us girls went back and forth constantly between our house and our grand-mother's; she was actually our great-aunt, but she had raised our mother, and we called her "Ma." Along with other traditional midwives in the neighborhood, Ma delivered babies for women who couldn't afford a doctor.
When the Muslim family I knew broke their fast at Ramadan, I ate with them. When a friend had potato greens for lunch, I traded her some of my cassava leaves. We were surrounded by space and freedom. Anover me would loosen, I'd have an intellectual adventure, and I'd go on to become what I'd dreamed of for years, a doctor.
My life stretched out ahead: I would study, work, marry, have chil-dren, maybe someday live in one of the sprawling brick air-conditioned mansions that lined Payne Avenue. I was seventeen, and I could do any-thing. The world was mine for the taking.
Community. Connections. Confidence. Big plans. Within six months, all of it would be gone.
THE COMFORTABLE LIFE my parents gave my sisters and me was hard earned, a slow crawl upward from almost nothing. The story is impossible to tell without also explaining their history, and Liberia's.
My country was settled as a colony in 1822 by freed and freeborn American blacks and African men and women liberated from slave boats that had been en route to the New World. The connection between us and the United States remained vital, like a blood tie, long after we became a nation in 1842. Our constitution was modeled on America's; our capital was named after President James Monroe. Until the 1980s, our official currency was the US dollar, and even after we had a Liberian dol-lar, US money was both accepted everywhere and desirable. My friends and I grew up on shows like Sanford and Son, Good Times, Dynasty and Dallas. We cheered the LA Lakers. Going to the US for education or to live was many Liberians' dream, and those who emigrated sent back glamorous pictures of themselves standing next to big cars.
Your ancestors' origins determined your place in the social order.
Settlers who came from the slave boats-called "Congo People" —and those from America, many of them of mixed blood and light skinned-called "Americo-Liberians" formed a political and economic elite.
They saw themselves as more "civilized" and worthy than the tribes of Africans who already occupied the land: the Kpelle, Bassa, Gio, Kru, Grebo, Mandingo, Mano, Krahn, Gola, Gbandio, Loma, Kissi, Vai and Bella.
For generations, the elite clustered in and around Monrovia or in suburbs like Virginia and Careysburg, where they built expansive plantationsbrothers. The stares Josephine and I got city girls with shoes! Relatives would laugh. "Joseph has brought his civilized daughters to see us!" I feared his thunderous voice when I was a kid, but I never doubted that my father loved me. I remember being quarantined in the hospital when I was eight and had cholera. They gave me something for the pain and I drifted in and out of sleep, but it seemed like every time I opened my eyes, he was standing at the window outside my room waving at me.
By high school, I would drop in at his office to talk. I knew he expected a
lot from me.
"I don't want you to be like other girls, who don't pay attention to their lessons," he said. "I know one day you'll be great."
Life at home could be hard, but when I think back to the years before the war, more than anything else, I remember being happy. If we had two weeks of icy-cold atmosphere because my parents were fighting, the next week we'd all go to the beach together. When the village girls working in the house yanked my hair as they washed and braided it, Mammie Geneva sent them away. "Let me do it," she'd say, and she had the most gentle fingers. If my mother threw me off her lap after five minutes, there was always Ma next door, whom I could talk to about anything and who was always glad to cuddle. My sisters and I created our own world in the bedroom we shared, and outside was the warmth of Old Road.
During vacation time, sometimes there were power outages in the evenings, and all the children would come outside. The nights were warm, the moon up. My cousins would play drums and other girls would shake the saa-saa and everyone would try their hand at traditional ethnic dances, while the parents sat on their porches, looking on. It was my home.