Twelve by Twelve (32 page)

I journeyed by rough road into the Nimba Mountains to see what was happening. Schmoozing my way into the mining area and befriending some of the Brazilian mine workers with my awkward Portuguese and love of Brazil, I saw firsthand how Mittal pollutes the water supply, exploits the Brazilians with low wages and few rights, and leaves behind scant technical capacity to prevent Liberians from eventually running their own mines.

Moreover, ArcelorMittal is owned by London-based Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal. At the time, he was considered the world’s
fourth-richest man, and the richest in Europe, with a net worth, according to
Forbes
, of $45 billion, after Americans Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Mexico’s Carlos Slim. Perhaps to compensate for being just fourth on the list, he created new superlatives for himself. He paid $60 million to host his daughter Vanisha Mittal’s wedding at the Palace of Versailles, making it the most expensive wedding ever. And he dished out $128 million for his residence at 18–19 Kensington Palace Gardens in London, the world’s most expensive house. He even decorated it with marble from the same quarry that supplied the Taj Mahal, dubbing his palace the Taj Mittal.

As I watched Lakshmi Mittal’s air-conditioned trucks zoom right through the markets in Monrovia where Liberian schoolgirls were selling their bodies for a dollar a day, I pictured his pillaging of Nimba’s beautiful mountains. As I walked along Poo Poo Beach, I felt uncertain.
Warrior presence?
Was it just a useless concept? I couldn’t hear the murmur of No Name Creek anymore. Liberia’s problems nipped away at my inner reserves, and I spiraled downward. I stopped doing yoga, practically stopped meditating, and had almost no contact with the kind of pristine nature that buoyed my spirit at the 12 × 12. And I began to drink.

There, at the bar at Monrovia’s Royal Hotel, I had plenty of company. A disillusioned and cynical colony of expatriates was ready to receive me into their circle. Along with UN peacekeepers, Western embassy staffers, NGO workers, and businesspeople, I drank one whisky after another and blocked out the hell around me.

Get up in the morning. Drink coffee. Look on the positive side. At least my work was having an effect. Amazingly, half the country is still covered in primary rainforest, and Liberia had canceled without compensation all of the concessions to arms-for-timber lumber companies engaging in uncontrolled logging — including the Oriental Timber Company, which as I documented in
Blue Clay People
, colluded with dictator Charles Taylor to ransack enormous swaths of the Krahn Bassa and Sinoe wildernesses. I spent long days
helping to set up a multimillion-dollar monitoring system to ensure that only “legal timber” could be exported to the European Union; only one of every thirty trees would be cut, leaving the forest intact and bringing cash to local people instead of corrupt politicians. Warrior presence helped there; the reserves of strength I’d built up at Jackie’s helped me focus on the job at hand without being overtaken by cynicism and dread.

Then I noticed a change in the national forest ministry, where my office was housed. Along with the usual crowd of colleagues — Liberian government and NGO officials — were new faces. Asians. Once a week at first, but then at least one group a day — Da Cheng Ltd., China-Liberia Holding, and a dozen other mostly Chinese companies — were arriving or quickly set up to erase Liberia’s virgin forests and thereby supply China’s coastal factories with the wood needed to send cheap furniture to Ikeas in the West. Unfortunately, China was not subject to the supposedly airtight legal timber policies we were putting in place.

I met with the Chinese chancellor — China was at the time busy building its biggest embassy in West Africa in Liberia — to try to persuade them to commit to legal-timber standards, but he used every diplomatic sleight of hand imaginable: deflection, flattery, even feigning ignorance of the presence of Chinese logging companies in Liberia. Flat World economic globalization, it seemed, would in the end be far stronger than any legal-timber shield we might construct.

Physically exhausted one day after banging my head against Chinese diplomatic walls, and then getting sideswiped by a Mittal SUV racing into the interior as I left my office, I beelined to the Royal for a whisky. I sat at a table with some tipsy UN peacekeepers, embassy staffers, and an NGO worker or two and placed my order. One of the UN guys, already fairly loaded, joked about getting some “underage pussy for about a buck,” but he was only half kidding;
another couple of drinks and it would probably tempt him. Just as my drink arrived, my cell phone rang.

It was Toupee, the friend of a Liberian colleague from my civil war work in Liberia. I didn’t know her that well, but that didn’t stop her from asking a big favor. Could I drive a full hour from the Royal into a dangerous neighborhood, at night, to pick her up at a clinic and take her home?

The whisky in my glass was positively glistening in its ice. Despite the sleazy banter, the cozy cynicism at the Royal was better than what lay outside in the Monrovian night.

“Now?” I said, weakly.

“I have plus-two malaria,” Toupee said. Then the phone connection cut.

Plus-two malaria
, I thought, fingering my glass.
So what?
Malaria is as common as a cold in Liberia. I hardly knew this person. I’d already worked a twelve-hour day. I wanted out of the terrible reality around me, not more of it. Did I really want to drive into a neighborhood full of ex–child soldiers, into a rat-infested clinic in miserable Barnersville? I didn’t need more contact with a world where one person hoards $45 billion while kids die of preventable diseases like malaria, where the kids dying are the same ones being exploited to amass more money for those on top.

How can we live together on the same planet and bear the psychological strain of such vast inequality? Through denial, of course, but that’s tough in a place like Liberia, where it’s in your face every day. No, I was allowed a little denial. I’d earned it. I lifted my glass.

Then, under the din of the bar, beneath the tasteless comments and drone of CNN International, I heard it: the murmur of No Name Creek and Jackie’s voice —
see, be, do
. I visualized Toupee in the clinic, blazing hot with malaria. She was, what, twenty-two? Though Toupee was in college now, how many steps away from prostitution was she? I closed my eyes, and in my mind I beat a narrowing path
into the darkest part of the woods. “The narrow gate that leads to life,” as Jesus beautifully put it. It is narrow indeed, just this: these tiny eyes, ears, and fingers touching the present moment.

I put the glass down, the whisky untouched, and drove into the humid Monrovian night. The slums got progressively dodgier, but I finally found Toupee’s clinic. I helped her sister shoulder Toupee’s feverish body into my car and drove Toupee and her sister back across the city to her room, on my side of town, stopping on the way to buy them groceries. I gave Toupee money for medicine and sat there with them for a long time in her mildew-covered room, a fifteen-dollar-a-month rental. Its dimensions were almost the same as Jackie’s, about 12 × 12. Like 99 percent of Liberians — like Jackie — Toupee had no electricity. We talked for a while but then slipped into silence, the moonlight streaming in through the single window into her tiny square room.

There I rediscovered something I’d lost: warrior presence, a way of being in the world that slices through negative energy. Instead of letting myself drift into cynical disengagement, I allowed the gift of Jackie’s wisdom to lift me to a different frequency where those negative energies passed right through me, like moonlight through a window. Through this, I learned that warrior presence isn’t a shield that repels fear, greed, and other forms of negativity. These emotions entered me, but when I let go of my narrow ego-consciousness, these emotions had nowhere to lodge.

After that night helping Toupee, I resolved, as a kind of mindfulness practice, to perform at least one selfless action a day. One of my organization’s drivers needed a thousand-dollar loan to meet a payment; I had the money and gave it to him. A Liberian friend’s son needed a job and skills; I created a paid internship for him, and in my spare time I taught him how to use the internet and make spreadsheets. Each of these actions flowed naturally from the warrior
presence I’d developed in the 12 × 12, a state in which I felt love for myself, for others, for the world.

The day before I left Liberia, at my going-away party, I was surprised to find the love flowing back in my direction, as those same people I’d helped showered me with beautiful African clothing, long heartfelt speeches, and even an African name. It had been only three months, but what does that matter? I’d spent two full years in Liberia the previous time and did not receive a fraction of that warmth and love at my going-away party.

One more quite remarkable moment occurred before I left Liberia. Toupee sang to me. She’d recovered from her malaria, and we met for lunch at Sam’s Barbeque on 16th Street in Monrovia. She looked so much better. Her hair was tied back in a bunch of thick braids, and her eyes were aglow over our now-finished plates of jollaf rice. I don’t know exactly when she started, but I slowly became conscious that she was humming, something wordless, staring out into the busy street.

A Mittal truck raced by on the road the Chinese were paving into the interior; the rainforest and minerals needed to feed the global economy. Probably one of five people walking by Sam’s Barbeque had AIDS. Toupee herself was a war child, having grown up in refugee camps in Guinea and the Ivory Coast as two hundred thousand people died in her country’s civil war. Something was tipping in me. I balanced between negativity and peace on that humid early afternoon: a full stomach, the walk-and-jive of the passersby, Toupee humming next to me. The details smashed together, and suddenly I was living one of those atmospheric moments in a Geoff Dyer or Murakami novel, where an expansive, breathing setting transports you beyond plot. A hum, now a song, as smooth as the 12 × 12 creek’s flow.

I’ve rarely heard more beautiful sounds, part slightly off-key
African pulse, part North Carolina gospel. Liberia was settled by freed US slaves in the early nineteenth century, and many elements of antebellum plantation culture, including gospel music, mixed with Kpelle, Mano, and Grebo culture; Pine Bridge flowed into her song. The lyrics touched on greed and exploitation — AIDS walks by, ecocide rolls by — but the refrain kept coming back to love. “Praise,” she sang, each time more beautifully. “Praise confuses the enemy.”

A post-malaria war child hummed, but someone else now sang: a third-year sociology student, who went to school in refugee camps and was home again, in a changing Liberia. The international community had just canceled Liberia’s national debt. Many Liberians were coming back from a global exodus to help their country heal. These details, Toupee sang, were the correct objects of our attention. Her song, at a plastic table at Sam’s Barbeque, reinforced the lesson I learned on the banks of No Name Creek. The lesson that kept slipping, that I kept rediscovering, in the most unlikely of places.
Praise confuses the enemy
, Toupee sang. Don’t let the enemy into your glorious inner space.

PRAISE CONFUSES THE ENEMY

“DADDY,
HAY LUZ.
”
— “There’s light.”

It’s a year after my time in the 12 × 12, and I wake up in Bolivia, next to Amaya. She’s become interested in transitions, like the one between night and day. We cuddle for a while, I kiss her cheek, and it’s time to start the day.

I’m living in the village of Samaipata near Santa Cruz, where I’ve been for six months. My mother is here for a two-week visit, and she and Amaya spend the morning together while I finish a freelance essay. They sing and pantomime songs (“The Wheels on the Bus” and “Barnyard Dance”), and then Amaya shows her grandmother, her Mama Anna, the garden she and I have been cultivating together: squash, green onions, and flowers. A Quechua neighbor joins them. He tells them about how his ancestors farmed, suggests some changes, and then reaches into his pocket and passes some seeds into Amaya’s cupped hands.