Photo journal

This weekend I decided to take a day to walk around town and take some snapshots. My mildly overprotective roommate and colleague Isaac insisted that it was not safe for me to walk around by myself, especially with a camera. While I do walk around every day with my laptop and camera in my bag, I rarely go beyond the 4-block radius of my office and apartment by myself—and certainly never ever at night. Criminality is extremely high in Liberia, as in every postwar country where so many are desperately poor and with no prospects. So when Isaac offered to accompany me for the afternoon, I accepted, and we spent a couple of hours walking and driving around in share taxis all around Monrovia.

Common downtown street scene: women in colorful fabrics, little children running every which way, little shops selling miscellany, a cracked sidewalk…

Young boy selling cold bags of water and bottles of soda.


To dissuade people from urinating on the wall


The little kids from my street who chase after me and call me “Aunty”


A billboard near the Executive Mansion


A share taxi in the Red Light Market