The Airfield

I pass it everyday.  The airfield.  I sit in the slow, jerking, tedious traffic of Monrovia as I travel the short distance from my office in the what passes for swanky portion of Sinkor, beach side  - made up of the towering walls and barbed wire of NGO offices and upper class homes - to my decidedly more humble neighborhood of Old Road made of a combination of middle class Liberian households and slums.  The distance is less then 2 miles but it often takes 15-20 minutes in the car. This leaves a lot of time for observing.  The normal everyday is there: motorbikes stacked with people weaving precariously through traffic, police idling, lazily pointing traffic in more or less the right direction, billboards asking citizens to please, for once, pay their taxes, pedestrians bravely risking life and limb to cross the street or smash themselves into a taxi.  Monrovia is a small city, there is not the crushing smog of Accra or the chaos of Dakar.  Things are quieter, friendlier.  Drivers are religiously stop to allow pedestrians to cross, or other cars to turn.  Street sellers ask if you want to guy something, instead of pushing their goods in your windows.  It's an okay commute.

With all these sites, the one that catches my gaze most consistently is the airfield.  It is a large mass of scrub grass and dirt with homemade football posts marking every square inch into a distinct field.  The airfield sits at the end of an old private airstrip that is no longer in general service, but still gets sparse use from the UN.  No matter what time of day I pass - if the sun is out, football is being played.  I've been told most are organized teams that play inter-league games as they pretend to be their heroes from Man United or Barca.  There are also small boys playing, just for the love of the game.  The Liberian Amputee Football league also plays here - a team that grew out of a reintegration and rehabilitation program for ex-combatants who had lost limbs in the wars.  The national amputee team are world champions - the best at what they do, a source of pride in the lives of ex-combatants that is hard won and rare amidst daily lives that are marked by stigma.   

Every day, early morning, late evening the airfield is crowded with boys passing time the way children do everywhere - with play.  But yesterday, off to the side, I spotted a makeshift football pitch and girls.  Lots of girls, playing a solid game of football as other girls watched and ran through drills on the side.  It was the first time I had seen girls playing football at the airfield.  I smiled inside, happy that these girls were able to find the time (free time is hard to come by for Liberian girls) and the confidence to head out to the field for a game.  They looked quite good as well - smiling and laughing as they tugged on each others shirts and dribbled toward the net.  It made me smile, that awesome kind of happiness that warms you from the inside out.

The airfield.  Not too long ago, in a time and place that seems so distant to the present day Liberia, this field was anything but the happy, carefree mass of football pitches.  It was a notorious killing field, the place of unspeakable atrocities.  Despite this dark past, it has been reclaimed.  Repurposed for a better time.  A brighter future.  A place where children have the time to play, and no longer the pressure to kill.