Nearly 2 Years On, Rubbish Continues To Greet Visitors To Our Grave Yards—Welcome To Duport Road Cemetery
PHOTO: Before (Sept. 25, 2021) and After (April 29, 2023)
A Potshot with Frank Sainworla, Jr., fsainworla@yahoo.com
Well over one year and going into two years now, this is what I wrote introducing a piece on the messy condition of our public cemeteries, many hours after I had visited the Duport Road Cemetery in Monrovia’s Paynesville suburb on September 25, 2021:
A grave yard, where our dead loved ones—relatives and friends—are buried should be a place of serenity and tidiness.
But shamefully in our Liberian setting, the filth and stench in two of our major cemeteries in Monrovia and Paynesville bring tears to one’s eyes when visiting these burial grounds. Is this how their “final resting place” should be desecrated?
Desecration Of Our Cemeteries Continues Unabated! – News Public Trust
And interestingly that piece was published (September 26, 2021) weeks before the damning public criticism by the European Union (EU) Ambassador in Liberia Laurent DELA-HOUSSE about the persistent filthiness of our capital, including public cemeteries: “Monrovia is disgusting and the dirtiest city of the many places I have visited in my work in Africa.” The EU diplomat’s embarrassing comment was even later reechoed by the United States Ambassador to Liberia, Michael McCarthy.
But these disgraceful appraisals of the poor state of sanitation has to date not been able to arouse the consciousness of national and municipal leaderships of Liberia, Africa’s oldest black independent Republic, as things continue to be business as usual. One Liberian Christian cleric was even so frustrated to remark that “our leaders don’t have shame”.
Fast forward, nearly two years on, garbage still litters our streets and public grave yards from central Monrovia to the suburbs. Nothing seem to change here for the better in so far as garbage disposal and collection is concern, with a probable demonstration of complacency on the part of the leaders and a large segment of the population. This messy picture is increasingly become the norm. One cannot even over emphasize the serious health implications caused by the intensity of filth.
For the past three months since I’ve been going to Truth 96.1 FM every weekend to do my live WEEKEND FILE radio magazine show embedded with the half-hour 2023 ELECTIONS UPDATE, I have made it my business to walk pass the Duport Road Cemetery every trip. But sadly, it is the same picture of a dumpsite graveyard–the same state that it was in when the first piece was written back in September 2021.
In the meantime, several other similar situations have been reported about how the drainage in the middle of the Japan Freeway outside Monrovia is being used as garbage bin. That road, costing close to US$100 million and linking the Freeport of Monrovia to the Red-Light commercial hub,Gre was built by the government of Japan and given to Liberia as a gift. The sidewalks along that route is now dumpsite.
What a shame!