In July of 2001, I was renting an apartment in Dakar, Senegal, and rapidly running through my hard earned savings from DJ work and driving a taxicab in Chicago, my hometown. I was having a blast, taking long train rides to Bamako, Mali, learning French with the English majors at Cheikh Anta Diop University, exploring Dakar nightlife, collecting Senegalese Hip-Hop and Mbalax music on cassettes and CDs, visiting the beaches in Casamance, southern Senegal, but I was also going broke.

I realized that I either needed to land a job in West Africa or head back to Chicago, where I had earned my MA degree in African History the year before. Luckily, I landed an interview with the Overseas Processing Entity of the Church World Service, also referred to as OPE.

This NGO was based in New York City, and was in charge of conducting the initial interviews for the US Resettlement Program, also called the Family Reunification Program, because Liberians living in the US would file for their relatives and friends to join them to start a new life in the states.

At this time, the second Liberian Civil War waged by the LURD and MODEL rebel groups to unseat the autocrat and criminal President Charles Taylor was in full swing, and Liberians were once again being displaced from their homes and fleeing for their lives to surrounding countries like Ghana.

I almost did not get the job because I was overqualified, having an MA degree already under my belt. The managers at OPE believed I would eventually leave them to pursue my Ph.D. and so were reluctant to give me the job. This is in fact what did happen, but not before I worked for them, first as a caseworker and later as a field team leader for almost two years (2001-2003).

The one condition of the job was that I had to relocate myself from Dakar to Accra, Ghana, which was where their new offices had opened (in the Roman Ridge residential neighborhood). I was happy to go to Ghana, but since I already had a return ticket to the US, I traveled back to Chicago and worked as a taxi driver in Chicago during the summer of 2001.

This led to many funny conversations about how I, as a white American man, actually lived in Africa, and I was just temporarily working in Chicago driving a taxicab. I also used to confuse the Nigerian taxi drivers in Chicago by taking a ride in their taxis and then attempting to pay them in Naira (the Nigerian currency) at the end of the ride. That was a great joke that usually made their day.

So I returned to Ghana, went through some basic training and started interviewing refugee families. Then the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 happened in the fall of 2001.

This changed everything for OPE, because the US Immigration Service, who were conducting the fourth and final interview which actually determined if the refugee applicants were successful or not, did not leave the US for the next eight months or so.

Before 9/11, Liberian refugees or other West Africans posing as Liberian refugees basically had a free ride to the US. There was very little in the way of background checks. Liberians were selling their places like crazy to Ghanaians and other Liberians for quick cash.

A polygamous husband with four wives would claim that these women were his daughters or sisters. “Refugees” would show up with homemade church ID cards with any sort of name printed on it and no one seemed to care.

Underpopulated states in the US like Minnesota and South Dakota needed workers to do low-paying crappy jobs, and they wanted to expand their tax base. They needed more taxpayers and minimum wage workers and they didn’t care where they came from, whether it was from Somalia, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone or Liberia. Anyway, that is my rather cynical take on the situation.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks changed all that because the US State Department realized that this carefree and sloppy refugee resettlement program was the perfect way for a potential terrorist to enter the US.

They then instituted a new office in Washington, DC called the Refugee Access Verification Unit, which examined the original files of the immigrant “anchor” – the person in the US that was filing for their “relatives.” If these relatives were not claimed on the original paperwork submitted by the anchor, they would be denied access to the US.

At this point, refugees from Buduburam Camp were taking buses to our offices in Roman Ridge, Accra, for their interviews. As caseworkers, we had a quota of six cases to conduct per day. Most of these “refugees” had never sat for a formal interview before, so they were extremely nervous and did not understand our American accents (called “serees” in Liberian Vernacular English).

Because of this, we were assigned interpreters to interpret from Liberian English to American English and vice versa. My favorite interpreter used to joke about coming to work without wearing any panties, which sort of turned me on, and we ended up having this wild affair and taking at least one decadent weekend excursion to Lome, Togo to dance all night in the nightclubs.

Anyway, back to the job.

The refugees hired tutors who coached them about exactly what to say during the interviews. Some of these coaches worked for OPE and were later fired. This was their one chance to go to the US and they didn’t want to blow it.

The advice was basically this: make your story as bloody, as violent, and as gruesome as possible. Lots of rape, lots of decapitations, lots of fleeing in the middle of the night while being shot at by rebels. Some of these stories were actually true, but those were the minority. These stories were what we call “potboilers” and they were instantly recognizable.

In order to get past the potboilers, caseworkers would ask questions to so-called family members on an individual basis.

These interviews contained cross-examination type questions such as “where did you get your water in 1995? Who slept with who in which bed? If you were a family unit back in 1995, where did you go to church? Was the church far? Did you have to travel far to get your water? Was it well water, or from a standpipe? So the rebels attacked you in the middle of the night…How many rebels were there and what were they wearing?”

If the stories taken from individual “family members” radically contradicted each other then it was pretty obvious that someone was lying. But who?? These were the choices we had to make in a scenario where everyone would pretty much say anything to have a chance to travel to the US.

They had already spent lots of money to secure their place at the interview table, so if they were denied then that large monetary investment would all be for nothing.

People would show us scars they got during childhood from falling out of a tree and claim that it was from a rebel attack.

My worst experience was when a refugee woman in Conakry lifted up her shirt and showed me third degree burns all over her torso and chest, claiming that they were from an acid attack. She broke down and cried, “They destroyed my body!”

How is a caseworker supposed to react to that? It was obvious that she had suffered burns from being trapped in a fire somewhere, but if the rebels were responsible was impossible to know for certain. Many times I worried about second degree Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We never really had any counseling for this, and we were mostly college-aged young Americans who had never personally witnessed warfare or carnage. What to do?

During the job we also traveled around West Africa extensively, conducting interviews in larger regional cities such as Banjul (The Gambia), Conakry (Guinea), Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire), Lagos (Nigeria). This was a benefit, being able to travel around West Africa and stay in top notch hotels for free, like the luxurious Hotel Camayene in Conakry. We could have never afforded to stay at these hotels on our own, so that was a definite perk.

Overall, the job was a big learning experience for me and I also met my future Liberian wife during that time. She was living in the Buduburam Camp, having fled Liberia after Charles Taylor ordered the murder of her father, who was a Krahn colonel in the Armed Forces of Liberia back in 1998. She eventually traveled to the US on a fiancée visa, and we got married in Chicago in May of 2004. She never told her friends she was leaving the camp until the final ride to the airport.

Even though we had dated for a year and a half, many of these friends thought she found me on the internet, so they called me her “internet husband.” But that is another story.

Featured photo by Jefferson Krua