Liberia in and around our house

Felicia, the nanny

We present you, dear friends, Felicia. Felicia is our nanny, an ideal homemaker (our main invaders: sand and ants!) and cook. She cooks 3x a week Liberian dishes, always based on rice, onions, garlic, tomato concentrate and fish. The main ingredient will vary: okra, cassava leaves, potato greens, cabbage,…, and the favorite of the boys: the peanut sauce! Felicia almost never eat sweat things, come by foot in around 45min to 1hour, likes to laugh and is very precise "Gabriel slept until 9.53pm and ate at 1.07pm". We all enjoy her very much!

Moses and his fishes!

Here is Moses. Moses lives one day at the time. He goes to the fisherman village, and then comes and sells the fishes on the compound. Happy to have new customers, he was hoping that we would eat 10kg of fish daily! Now, Melvina has to remind him: Moses, small small fish yeah ? His is laughing and answering: "Yeah yeah, No problem, Ma".

Abi soon high school student.

We have to say that our fingers are not much greener in Liberia than in Switzerland ! Luckily, we have Abraham (Abi) which is helping us in our yard. Abraham will start high school next week, but will still come 8 hours a week to help us. Corn, pineapple, basil, cassava, sweet potatoes, watermelon are planted… Apparently with the salty air, everything will not grow! Théotime and Siméon wait patiently, …lose patient! But Abi entertains them by going fishing with them in the swamp or by climbing on the coconut tree to get the coconut and eat them straight away!

Maurice the dad

Maurice, Abi's dad, is one of our security guard, one of the fifty or so security guard employed on the compound. Their monthly salary is around 100 CHF a month. For Maurice and many Liberians, school fees are very expensive, up to 2-3 months of salary per child. Impossible for Maurice to send his son to high school without help. We have therefore decided to help Abraham (as well as the son of Mary, another security guard) so that he can continue to study. Maurice is friendly and very grateful. He likes to help us by doing small services like: fixing the tire of the stroller, building a small shoe rack with left over wood in our garage, taking us to the market, buying a pestle and mortar ("white skin, price goes up"), … He is a precious help and we appreciate each others.

We could also talk about Edwin who is getting vegetables/fruits from the big marker once a week, of Felicia the guard who likes to take Gabriel for short times outside and help us with the laundry or Pene who brings us regularly plants for our garden (we are trying to make them survive! :-D)

As you see, we are well surrounded !

Best wishes to all,

Melvina, Nicolas, Théotime,s Siméon and Gabriel