Some of the smoked delicacies at Ralleytown Marketplace, Monrovia, Liberia

Well here I am in the most beautiful suite in the Cape Hotel in Liberia which I was moved to after two nights of being in a room with a broken air conditioner with exposed, leaky PVC piping and two hugantical roaches that fly! The humidity is just at about 2700% and sleeping with closed doors and windows hoping for the AC to work resulted in my waking up with water running down my face in thick drops. This water turned out to be my own sweat running in my eyes.

A little girl exhausted from a full day at school with no food, no books, no qualified teacher

This fabulous suite I am in now has one small problem: the springs in the king-sized bed are just about coming through the mattress and my extra-skinny hip bones which I’ve managed to achieve in four days of running around without eating much are literally black and blue from tossing and turning on them. I don’t know how all the presidents who supposedly slept in this same bed did it. Maybe it was the extra FAT padding that seems to be a sign of wealth around here.

It’s not even 5 am and I am STARVING. Remind me to never travel without some nutritious snacks. I’m so hungry that I could eat some of the piles of smoked MONKEY that the ladies in the marketplaces were selling today. I inadvertently consumed only about 500 calories today. My husband, Mike, would be eating the walls right now.

I am just finishing the book, The House at Sugar Beach, which is about a Liberian woman who is the descendant of a rich former slave family and her lost childhood (Helene Cooper). I am just at the point where she’s returning from 25 years in the U.S where she is now a journalist for the Wall Street Journal. She relates the amazing stories of coming home just at the end of 20 years of civil war and the unbelievable devastation of the country where boys were taken as young as six-years-old and tanked up on heroine and amphetamines to blow the faces off their parents and other close relatives.

This after spending the evening watching Pray the Devil Back to Hell (http://praythedevilbacktohell.com/v2/) with the marketplace women who literally started the women’s  peace movement in this country.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf greets a marketplace woman after the showing of Pray the Devil Back to Hell

I’ve attached some pics from the day including some shots of President Ellen about two feet away from me right before I inadvertenly knocked the glasses off her secret service guy who graciously did not pin me down and kill me.

Vivian Glyck

Gini Reticker, Director, Abigail Disney, producer of Pray the Devil Back to Hell and Vivian Glyck. I believe with all my being that this movie is the most important movie of the decade and the whole WORLD MUST SEE it. Please visit http://praythedevilbacktohell.com/v2/