Last summer I went with WaterAid to Liberia. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been a hero of mine – with reservations – for a while, most importantly for keeping a country at peace when everyone expected it to go back to war. She’s also a hero of mine – with no reservations – for her support for WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene). She has written an op-ed that includes the word “toilet,” and how many presidents have done that? So when WaterAid asked if I’d like to go to one of the countries they work in, and which one, I picked Liberia. Partly because of Ellen, but also because it is dizzyingly, terrifyingly wrecked and I wanted to know how any leader goes about fixing a country in such a state. I wrote the story in the end for Guardian Weekend magazine, after the magazine that originally commissioned it decided that “Ellen’s moment has passed” (this was just after she won the Nobel Peace Prize); and “we’re having an African charity appeal and we can’t have two African stories). So huge thanks to Guardian Weekend for daring to run something about shit when most magazines wouldn’t touch it. Here is the link to the Weekend piece. Photograph of me and the President below by Aubrey Wade:
hi rose, caught your tweet on shit ‘appens and so decided to follow the yellow brick road to your blog… I arrived as GreenMan-23 but sadly once Mac got a grip of your promotion of Unicef his hair stood up.. useless bunch of.. best not repeat what he said but he thinks the dustbin they gave the school kids in the Neelam vlley of Kashmir sums their attitude right up.. as does their feable and quite frankly useless attempts to provide water facilities.. they don’t need them! glass in the windows would have been nice… we will blog a lot on this because GM Mac and Tariqas have been .. looked and aint very happy with the Useless Nations!
Hi Rose
finally caught up with your blog & you are doing fantastic stuff!