Election Day

10.11.05

Election day is finally here and it is going how I sort of predicted it would. A very quiet day at the polls so far…11:57am. It’s a national holiday today so nobody is work yet here I am reconciling bank accounts at the office. Last night was my second night babysitting Ryan and Gareth’s house and I didn’t sleep well at all. I ended up climbing into bed after watching the first disc of Hotel Rwanda. It was about midnight. I didn’t end up falling asleep until at least 2am. With no walls or razor wire protecting the house I’m leery of rogues coming and attacking me. I find the security guards kind of useless but I guess I can only paint a true picture when they are put to the test. I did have to bang on the window once last night so that he’d wake up! With today being a national holiday I was going to sleep in and see if I could combat this sickness I’ve picked up…hopefully not malaria again. Tita, the fun Liberian girl, who cleans for us woke me up at 6:50am. She wanted me to drive her 10 min down the road to her polling station so she could get a good spot in line to cast her vote. I agreed and we headed off. I’m sort of glad I went because I got some pictures of the madness that they call the polling station. I should have signed up to work at one of the polling stations counting the votes and whatnot. I think it would have been a cool experience. There were international reporters, photographers, and cameramen everywhere. These two cameramen climbed this rusty frame-like object to get a better view of the occasion and the joints ended up breaking and they almost bailed with their $15,000 cameras. It was rather comical. The, I would estimate, 1,000 people at the polling station got a good chuckle out of it.

The only action I’ve seen so far has been sitting at the office here reconciling bank accounts and watching two UN tanks roll past the office. You can hear the beasts coming from a couple blocks away, tearing up the road as they drive.

Well I’ll leave it at that. Its been a pretty relaxed day so far and it shouldn’t get out of control until the results are released. Preliminary results should leak out tonight and tomorrow but nothing official until October 25. By the looks at the one polling station I went to there didn’t look like many ex-combatants at the polls so its going to be interesting to see who George Weah does. I know one polling station isn’t the best representative sample but if its any indication I think some people could be in for a surprise.

6:48pm….

Well, the day is almost over now and there was word of a little violence at one of the polling stations. Apparently, but not confirmed, there was some violence at a polling station at Duport Road and they had to shut it down. Besides that I haven’t heard much of anything. On the way home from the office there were four large APCs in the soccer field, a block away from the office, making their presence known. I went for a little scouting mission in Sinkor and found a ton of Swedish troops patrolling the streets with their machine guns in hands. Can you say crowd control?

K.