Grocery shopping in Monrovia is going to be different.

Scarlett Lion | Amputees, Fear, and Grocery Shopping:

"...I’ve spent a lot of time with the amputee football team while working on a couple of different projects. I know most of them by name, all of them by face, and they certainly all know me. Regardless of what they did or didn’t do during the war, now, most of them just want to get on with it...

The story of the team can’t be told without mentioning that almost all of them are unemployed and beg outside of the nicer grocery stores on Randall Street in Monrovia.

This morning I went to take photos. That made me nervous. I shop in those stores too. I’m not sure how I would feel about not only being asked for money by a group of pretty aggressive amputees begging for their small-small, but also being photographed. Either giving or not giving money, when all you want to do is buy a carton of juice.

Some expats ignored me. Some Liberian NGO workers scoffed at me. Most of the Lebanese handed over cash. The Lebanese, the amputees told me, give them the most money, the most regularly. And many people made jokes about not accidentally hitting the amputees with their car..."