Flomo Garbee is on the move

For some reason probably related to the color of my skin, I was ushered directly to a seat on the stage in the long schoolhouse that serves as a church. After taking the podium to bring greetings from Texas, I settled in for front-row seats to the show. The guest preacher (he prefers "musical evangelist") kicked, jumped, stomped and whirled his way through two hours of energetic singin' and screamin'. The keyboard player sported shades a la Ray Charles -- though I don't think he was blind. And behind the drummer was the most strangely genius schoolboy wall scrawl I've ever seen. There it was, unexplained in chalk: "Flomo Garbee is on the move."

You're supposed to go to the beach to celebrate former President Tubman's birthday. So I did. The grand balcony of this old shell of a beach house served as the stage for a hip-co (Liberian hip-hop) party. Felt like MTV Spring Break does Monrovia.

And in other news...

A throng of angry high school students surrounded a big house as we strolled onto the scene. They were chanting "We want Bopolu! We want Bopolu!" It was a call for the release of a school security guard holed up inside this health clinic, to which he ran for safety after slapping a boy unconscious. Now the kids wanted to avenge their classmate's injury. The crowd roared at the arrival of we, the journalists, and the Red Sea of teenagers parted as we confidently headed to the front porch. That's right, we're all over this story. Just doin' our job. The police demanded the harborers open the door, and we followed them inside, eventually watching them drag the man from a back room and handcuff him. Then came a classic West African police mishap. They had no vehicle. So the two policemen were forced to walk the suspect out the front door, through the student gauntlet, and up the road half a mile to the police station, all the while fending off the still chanting, chasing kids who wanted to beat the man to a pulp.