 Good evening and welcome to CSIS. The book is The House at Sugar Beach. It's by Helene Cooper who sits here with me. Helene wrote this book and she's also the New York Times correspondent at the White House now. Yes. Has been in the past the State Department correspondent. I urge all of you to buy multiple copies. Multiple copies. They're being sold in the back. This book is fantastic and I hope all of you who haven't read it will take the opportunity to read it. It's Helene's search for her lost African childhood and it's a book that I realized after I read it that she absolutely had to write. It was required. You had to do this. So you're taking away all my talking points. You're supposed to say, why didn't you write the book? And then I'll say, well actually, you know, the issue was why did it take me so long to write the book? Why did it take you so long? You know, I haven't really answered that question satisfactorily for myself. It's this story that I sort of had inside me for 23 years and I think for many of those years I was hiding. I didn't want to deal with Liberia. I didn't want to deal with a lot of what had happened when my family had left. A few years ago, I think it was around two, somewhere in 2000, some friends of mine and I went to Oxford, Maryland to this craft shack over the Bay Bridge and it was a beautiful, beautiful afternoon evening. We had cut out our work early and we're sitting on the water drinking cold beer and eating crap. And I said something about how my ancestors were actually originally from part, some of them were from the eastern shore of Maryland and my friends are all reporters and they're looking at me like we're from Liberia. What do you mean your ancestors are from the eastern shore of Maryland? And I said, well actually I started to tell them about, you know, my great-great-great-great-great grandfather Elijah Johnson who was on the first ship that sailed of freed slaves and freed American blacks who sailed to Liberia in 1820 and I told them about how my father's side. There were four Cooper brothers who sailed from Norfolk to Liberia in 1826. I told them about how these freed blacks founded Liberia, the first independent African country, and I told them a little bit about how, you know, the irony was that these freed blacks set up the same kind of antebellum society that they had fled from in the United States. I told them about how they established themselves as the elite in Liberia and they built this country but at the same time you had so many members of the Liberian population, most of the what they call the native Liberians who were not taking part in this wealth at all. I was born in 1966 into this so-called elite basically with a silver spoon in my mouth and I told them about how all of this sort of came to a head in 1980 when a group of soldiers staged a military coup overthrowing the so-called Congo regime about how my uncle was executed on the beach by firing squad. My family was attacked and we ran away. You saw this execution on TV? I did that night. So I'm sitting in Oxford, Maryland telling my friends this whole sort of Cliff Notes version and they're looking at me and they kept saying why haven't you written this? You're a reporter why haven't you written this? And I said it's complicated which is a really kind of lame answer but at the time I knew that I could never really write this book or write this story until I first reconciled myself with my separation from my sister, my adopted sister who we had left behind Eunice when my family ran away in 1980 and so the house of Sugar Beach couldn't be written until I first went back and found her. And Eunice was the adopted sister who when you moved into Sugar Beach the house that your father built after years of living in Monrovia in the urban areas you moved out to the sort of the country the suburb but you were the your family was the pioneer of the suburbs. Yeah we thought we were urban pioneers we thought that you know development would follow us. I was I hated moving out to Sugar Beach. I was seven years old and it was the back of beyond as far as I was concerned. Eleven miles outside of Monrovia we were way in the bush we didn't have we had electricity but we didn't have a telephone which you can imagine at seven it's like you know my dad just looking and said who do you think you're gonna call? It's like I want to call my friends but we didn't have and I just felt we felt really you know I felt isolated. I was by the time I turned eight you know I was terrified to sleep alone in my room at night I was convinced that Hartman and Niji and which doctors and all the the superstitious stuff that we all grew up with in Liberia and I was convinced they were all gonna come into my bedroom at night and get me. And so after you know months of me climbing into my parents room you know at night and refusing to sleep by myself my parents did what a lot of people in Liberia did and they went out and they put out the word that their now eight-year-old daughter needed a live-in playmate and Eunice's mother Basel woman brought Eunice to live with us. This was one of those things that often happen in Liberia where the native Liberians would bring their kids to live with the so-called Congo people because they knew their kids we get three square meals a day and a chance at education and this was again part of this sort of class structure so Eunice and I from that moment were raised as sisters although the entire time we were raised together we both knew we were different. But you also were incredibly close and unlike some other families Congo families in Liberia your parents really regarded Eunice as another daughter and she was really a sister to you and Marlene so much so that in a 22 bedroom house all three of you most of the time slept in the same room. Well that's because we're all terrified of the Hartman and Nijian Buddus. Yeah we did we all slept in the same room and it's like Eunice had her own room I had my own room Marlene had her own room Marlene was right over there and we would drag our mattresses down the hallway every night into Eunice and I into Marlene's room because we figured if we were together nobody would get us. You have to remember let me back up a second because you guys are gonna think I'm psycho. We our house got burgled every other day. Rogues we call them rogues in Liberia and that's burglars and they would come in the middle of the night when you're asleep and they break into the house and they would take off you know at the business so un-PC but my mom was collecting ivory and they would cart off her ivory and then you know two days later the Madingo men who sold her the ivory would come back with more ivory she would buy it from them put it back up and two days later the rose would come back and take it away and it's like I was convinced that the Madingo men who sold her the ivory you were the one that figured out the plot hello yes but anyway so there was a little bit of method to our madness of being convinced but a lot of this also was we would be in the room at night and just telling scary stories and Eunice would terrify us with stories about the underwater spirits the Niji who come into the lagoon when you're swimming at Sugar Beach and suck you under and take you off to God knows where and we sort of grew up with this was part of the whole African childhood where we grew up with these these stories and I look back at it now with this incredible fondness but at the time I was terrified it was very real to me well you know the book is your search for your lost African childhood but it really traces the history of your family going back to the 1800s which you've mentioned before you know what what which also parallels the history of Liberia what the whole book is intertwined with the history of Liberia and the history of your family you tell us a little bit about that sure my four greats great great great great grandfather was Elijah Johnson he was when he was he was got on that boat in 1820 the Elizabeth he'd been a soldier he had fought in the war of 1812 he was a freed black he'd been born free and I haven't traced his parentage but he was never a slave anyway he was on the first ship this was during the back to Africa movement in the early 1800s where the rationale here was that you couldn't have freed blacks living in the US at the same time that you had enslaved blacks because they were setting the wrong example you don't want all the black people thinking that you could be free so the best way to get to solve that issue was to get rid of the freed blacks and send them back to Africa and my great great great great grandfather volunteered to get on the ship there were 88 of them and they docked at Sierra Leone they were there for two years they sailed around the West African coast looking for land and they finally ended up in Liberia and so they were as they were building their houses and their settlements they were attacked by the native Africans there was a lot of fighting my great Elijah Johnson was a soldier he trained the men he stood up for the you know I was raised to be enormously proud proud of him but at the same time they did these guys these settlers came to Liberia thinking that's because some of them could read and write that they were civilized and that they looked at the native Africans at the time as not civilized and there was this class structure that was set up from the get-go to their you know I don't want to paint them as complete I don't want to paint this is completely black and white because at the time a lot of the native Africans were still engaged in the slave trade and the settlers the first thing they did was to abolish the slave trade in Liberia and that was sort of the economic livelihood and a lot of the tension came from that but so because they got rid of this economic mainstay but they couldn't stand to see people being sold into slavery at the same time that these native Africans a lot of them were still selling their brothers and sisters but from the start there was sort of this this tension between these two groups and Liberia sort of developed from there so it's sort of for a long time as I grew up you know we looked at ourselves as it's so ironic now looking back at it we looked at ourselves as looked at I would look at other African countries and think oh look at the coup and Ghana and the coup this place and you know we're not like that we're you know we thought we were the sort of the ideal in Africa and this is where you know everybody but in reality you know the only the biggest difference between Liberia and the other African countries is that Liberia was colonized by black people whereas every the other African countries were colonized by white people but you had the same type of you know the blacks that colonize Liberia in many ways acted like the Europeans did your ancestor Elijah Johnson was the George Washington of Liberia he was one of the real founders and on the other side of the family your relative the Dennis family was also yeah yeah the Dennis family and the Johnson family on my my mother's side and then on the my father's side the Cooper family where there were four Cooper brothers who got on a ship in 1826 the Harriet that sailed from Norfolk and they they went to Liberia and they were businessmen they set up you know and they went into you know sort of commercial whereas the other side of my family was more into government but so from both both both my mom and my my dad's side is sort of it's all there and as things got bad in Liberia you were there for when it got really bad and you fled in 1980 with your mother and Marlene and you didn't return until 23 years later as we talked about when you'd already made a life for yourself as a reporter in the United States of the college graduate lived in several cities why did you go back what made you go back after all those years when you had seen such terrible things happen to your family and to your home and to your country we came here and I was 14 years old and you know I was in the 10th grade and I went to school American high school it was pretty horrible the first year or so I didn't make friends yeah Knoxville Tennessee and then we moved to Greensboro to live with my dad my parents had divorced by then my mother went back to Liberia and then you know the Liberia sort of descended during the 1980s and in the early 1990s into this ninth circle of hell where you had dough was killed the guy who had instigated the coup Charles Taylor invaded and the country descended into civil war and my mother came back here and sort of the way I dealt with it was to cut it off I um the I got to thinking that Liberia wasn't a place where you lived it was a place where you died my dad had gone back home in 1985 in 1984 he died nine months after he got back to Liberia my uncle died I saw all the killing and you sort of see on the image the images coming out of the TV of Liberia which is my way you know this is sort of it's very much a you know it's a running a I ran away from it and I became much more American I perfected my American accent I got a job after college with first the Providence Journal as a newspaper reporter then the Wall Street Journal and I traveled all over the world writing about you know everything from Cambodia to Haiti to you know everything except Liberia I felt like if I you know I I couldn't deal with Liberia so if I just in my head killed off everybody who was still in Liberia who I loved then it wouldn't hurt me when they got killed which is not a very healthy way to deal with with it and it all sort of came crashing down on me in 2003 in Iraq I was in Iraq for the invasion with the third infantry division and I felt and during the you know I during the war I really felt physically like I was in the wrong place and what this was the wrong war and on one night in Iraq my Humvee got run over by a tank and I was pinned to the wheel there you know the soldiers are there screaming and I still remember I couldn't move and they're screaming medivac medivac she's bleeding out she's bleeding out and I really did think that this was it I was I was dying they finally pulled me out of the Humvee and I'm standing I'm they spared me on the sand and I'm lying on my back and all I could think of is if I'm gonna die in a war I should die in a war in my own country and it was pretty much that was pretty much it for me this I was in Iraq when at the very same time Liberia was seizing up again in another horrible civil war I didn't know where my sister Eunice I hadn't talked to her 15 years didn't know if she was dead or alive all this stuff was happening in my own country and I was in Iraq and it was just it I think it all just sort of boiled over you lost touch with Eunice because not only was Liberia under the power of dictators like Samuel Doe and then subsequently Charles Taylor but the country was virtually destroyed there was no electricity you know there were no telephones you couldn't you know you in order to write somebody Eunice and I wrote very a lot when we first moved here but as it the as the mail system got destroyed it got to the point where in order to contact or reach somebody in Liberia you had to find somebody who was physically going them there and give them a letter and it just got you know from which it sounds so like Lane but it just got too hard you know I couldn't it was so hard to find her and so hard to keep keep in touch but that's not really much of an excuse and I think all of that this whole feeling of abandonment that I had abandoned my sister and here I am gallivanting around the world as this reporter and you know God knows what what has happened to her sort of came down on me as well but before we talk about a little bit about what you found when you did go back you tell me you tapped into some really painful memories to write this book and and and I think it took a lot of courage on your part to do that what were what were the hardest things that you had to revisit including of course leaving Eunice I'm not a really introspective person one of the ways that I've always dealt with things is to just shut it down and keep going something bad happens and you just shut it down and you move on and that was the way sort of I dealt with the coup the way I dealt with my family members being executed on the beach my mother was raped gang raped at the time by soldiers who were trying to get to us she basically traded herself for her daughters and in so many things that have happened in life the way I dealt with it was just to like you know you keep going paper over it and you pretend you don't pretend it doesn't happen but you don't focus on it so when I finally sat down focus on it that was probably my biggest challenge because I found this book took me four years to write and I the first couple of years I was still trying to paper over everything I was trying to write it just the facts man I wrote it you know I wrote the first draft the way I you know as a journalist just this happened and this happened this happened and this happened you know and I almost it's almost I was cheating I felt like I was it was almost as if I was trying to see if I get away without digging because and that was probably one of the hardest things is going back and realizing that it doesn't mean anything if I don't dig and go back and it sort of feels like a scat that you keep you know it heals over and you go back and you dig and know how did you actually feel and why did you do this why did you behave this way and why did you not go back before this to look for your sister why did you let her go why did you you know and that I think was probably the hardest thing for me because it's not that doesn't come naturally to us about when you actually left Liberia and you had to leave units behind your mother and Marlene went to Robertsville Airport and got on a plane or direct flights from Rovia to Pan Am. My mom had just been raped and brutalized. My uncle had been executed. My father had been shot and we were pretty traumatized and this was all this all happened within a one week period of the coup. Two weeks later we left. My mom and my dad my dad is still in the hospital. Decided that they were going to get the kids out and that my dad would come when his wound had healed. They asked units my mom asked units to come with us and she said no or she still kept in touch with her mom. She was never formally adopted by us. She just lived with us and she was about to graduate from high school and she didn't want to leave her mother just then. I think we all thought oh she'll come after she graduates in December it will only be a few months. You know you're going off into the unknown and you don't in my mind I thought she would be following us to go to college in America like yeah yeah but we were we got here and we were basically you know African refugees. We didn't have any money and this is like things sort of get away from you and then my mother went back home and then the whole idea of you is coming to sort of dissipate it. That night at Robertsville when we left remember me and Marlene and my mom got on the plane Pan Am. I still remember it's really funny whenever I walk onto a plane now I can smell this is this anti-spec septic sort of air freshener smell that Liberia smells so earthy and raw and it smells like dried fish and it smells like sweat and it smells like burnt coal fires and smells like home it smells like Africa and I remember walking on the plane and that plane smelled like perfume and it smelled like I don't know glade and I still it's really weird that I can I can smell the way the plane smelled versus the way home felt and I you know I remember as the plane took off my mom hadn't cried in the I hadn't seen my mother cry in the entire month what had happened in Liberia and as the plane took off she just started to he you know these these racking socks it's a very you know it's like there's so many things in my life I don't remember that night I remember really sharply this is a tough question to ask but do you do you feel some guilt about the Liberia that your ancestors built yeah I feel a lot of there's a lot of ambivalence I feel pride and I feel guilt and it's this you know that's taken me a long time to sort of work through I'm so incredibly proud of them that they got on that ship and that they you know they if it weren't for them I don't know where I would be right now and I look at what they built and I am you know I remember when I found Elijah Johnson's journal the one that he kept when he was on that ship in 1820 and I was at the I found it through these diary these papers at the Library of Congress and I was shaking as I'm reading it and you can see his handwriting and he's a lot of he's writing as he's at sea and there was this one passage that blew me away said today while we were up on deck John Fisher whipped his wife I think this is a very dull lamp for me to be carrying with me into a dark continent but I've not lost faith in my God and I think he was enormously strong but at the same time I there is a lot of ambivalence because I wish they could have been I wish the system that they set up had not been I wish they had looked at the native Africans as their brothers and sisters and not this you know superior class type structure but at the same time I also know that that's sort of you know we're all human beings and this is one of the things that sort of you know we all can look back at what our ancestors did and not be you know sort of how it's made me a lot more a lot less black and white about racism a lot less black and white about you know a lot of things that have happened you know in the past because I know that it's sort of a part of all of us and we just keep trying to improve upon ourselves as one reviewer called this book it's a masterful memoir I like that review I like this and it was dead on and but incidentally it was written by a woman who two years before she wrote it won the Pulitzer Prize for it wasn't some fluffy review one of the things I think that's so masterful about this book is the rhythms of it the language of it the richness of the family relationships one thing I wanted to ask you on a later note is there's plenty of times in the book which I think any of us who have siblings can really identify Marlene Marlene here now now in this book Marlene Haleen talks about Marlene's yucky room her annoying little sister all these things so this book has these wonderful very personal inner family relationships and you can tell from that this is a really close family tell us about what's happened to all the the relatives now and where is everybody is everybody in the United States or some people that made it over here some people didn't we're pretty much we're scattered all over the place my mom lives in Alexandria Virginia very close to me and very close to Marlene Eunice is in Liberia she made her first visit here last year and it was it was awesome she's a been to now she's a total been to now she thinks she's like this cool my father died in 1985 but my brother is in Atlanta I have a sister in New York and then I have hundreds of cousins the Cooper family is ginormous and I you know when I was doing my book tour in September and October I'm like traveling all over the country and I swear I had their Cooper's coming out of like Seattle Seattle you know it was it's so it's um it's a huge huge huge huge family and it they've been they've been great I was really nervous about how my family was gonna take the book I was nervous about I wanted for my mom and Marlene and Eunice to be okay with it and they they were great I was much more certain that the larger Cooper family would be very skittish why am I writing this why am I dredging all this stuff out and by and large you know they amazed me they've been so awesome they've been so like it's so cool that they've been proud of me I've always felt like I was the one member of the family who's always like messing up and all of that because they're all very you know they can be pretty you know pompous but so it's you know it's the part about actually you know making my family proud that I've like sat down and I've chronicled you know where we camp came from and all that has been really it's been really cool when you return to Liberia for the first time it was as if everybody in Liberia who was still there knew exactly what you were doing that that's what that that was the weirdest thing I mean they were all like they're these people there who are going through a year who've gone through years of civil war and all this stuff and they're like oh my god you were in Iraq we heard you were in a rack how did you manage both like hello this child soldier standing there means you know holding you guys up with an AK-47 you're worried about me in a rack it was very it's like this complete you know no phones no phones no lectures no running water no newspaper no no and they're like yeah yeah yeah yes yes that says something about you and it says something about this is this is a funny perfect coda to end this I got moved to the White House beat for the New York Times when Obama got elected and during his first news conference called on me so is that televised news conference and I was you know I was just completely nervous and all that and I asked my question he completely blew it off and like moved on and after that I walked out of there and my phone is just like going crazy and it was one after another life period like that part is cool I like to there's some wonderful journalists in this room right now and there's a bunch of colleagues and friends I'd like to open it up for some questions but before I do that I want to welcome our young colleagues here we have a Merritt Morrison my colleague Steve Morrison's daughter and her friends from school and they have a book club and I think this is the next book you guys are gonna read right let's open it up for some questions I think and Guarance here I think and let's ask a question you're gonna put in on the spot yeah this is a perfect answer I'll ask a question that is sort of through me from my mother-in-law who recently read your book after I gave it to her for Christmas and she's very impressed to have a signed copy and she asked her she asked me what you had thought when you were in Iraq about you the war that you weren't in and I know you've talked about this a little bit and you talk about it some in the book but I wondered if you would be willing to talk a little bit about what that at that time you thought before you wrote the book but there's something very there's a lot about Iraq that it reminded me of Liberia and you would see me going in this convoy through these Iraqi villages and towns and people who come to the road and look at us and there were so many times that that happened when I would imagine you know people in Liberia coming up to the road you know and looking at at sort of the soldiers but knowing also that in Liberia it was so much worse than what was happening in Iraq I mean the war in Liberia is like no other you know I can't even begin to describe there you have rebel soldiers who are dressed up in wedding gowns and blonde wigs because they believe that that's sort of magic and that's gonna protect them from bullets and you have you know amphetamine fuel soldiers and you have kids who are kidnapped from their mothers and dragged off to to be soldiers in this war and people are fighting and not knowing what they're fighting fighting for and it's so in so many ways it was so surreal that I it almost felt sometimes like the Iraq war was the organized war and this is how you know this is how white people fight wars and I'm thinking in my mind that you know that's not how we fight wars in Liberia that's not how we fight in Africa you know and this sort of disc is this like disconnect that I just kept thinking you know what am I am I have I become so Americanized that I can't deal with you know with where I come from and so there was a lot of that going on did it feel bittersweet when you got your US citizenship you feel like you were abandoning your country yeah I did but I was also really happy you know at that when I at the point that I got my citizenship was 1997 I was really in complete disconnect mode I was you know Liberia wasn't happening I had just I shut it down I was gonna be American I was gonna have a you know I hated I traveled so much for work at the time and I had to get a visa to cross the street with my Liberian passport people would look at it like you know what is this and I just wanted to be done with it I wanted American passport I wanted to know that you know I was ever anywhere dangerous and they'd evacuate me with the rest of the American citizens like but it was you know but it wasn't until a long time later when I finally went back to Liberia and I went in to the the plane landed and I'm at Robertsfield I'm going through immigration and I give the man my passport it's the American passport and he looks at it and he looks up at me and he was like Cooper and I said yeah he was like you're not no American woman and I just sort of looked at him a smile because it's like you know I've been at United States at that point for 23 years he totally pinned me as Liberian you know one thing I wanted to ask you also is you know well actually before we even get to that tell us what happened when you were covering the State Department and you went on a trip with Madeleine Albright with your librarian passport you just want me to speak you're just trying to get me to speak Liberian English I really have when you read this book you it reminds me of my time in New Orleans where there's the dialects in New Orleans I was like tell us what happened this was there are two stories one I had been I was covering commerce or something for the Wall Street Journal and Ron Brown was going to China and I was going with him and I took my Liberian passport to the Commerce Department and they were gonna so they could get the visas and all of that and they called me the next day and they're like this is a Liberian passport I was like yeah so what and they just like we've just never seen one of these before is it real and I remember coming back from another trip coming back from Singapore and I had gotten my American passport at that point and I went through Hawaii and this again I'm going through passport control and the guy looked at me and said you know welcome home and I started crying and I felt very American and then I remember once without Madeleine Albright I was during the run-up to the Coastal War and she was doing all this flying all over the place and we have this saying in Liberia that we used to have whenever we went to movies and it's called whenever we saw like big action blockbuster movies that showed stuff that you never believed could actually happen and Liberia would say white man can lie oh it means white man can lie and that's because that was that phrase was coined back when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon that's because no Liberian believes that Neil Armstrong yeah no you know what he's like up there walking and all my parents are like hey white man can lie so I'm in the doomsday playing with Madeleine Albright and we were somewhere over Syria or something I don't remember where we're going and the this Marine comes up to me he comes and he taps me on my shoulder in the middle of the night woke me up and he's like we're refueling do you want to come see because I told him earlier that I was like are you really how do you refuel midair and I asked him to come so he takes me up and I'm like and they're attaching this hose to one plane it's under the other plane it's like and I'm looking out the window and I was like and this is in the middle of my complete American you know and I looked at that thing and I was like hey white man can lie oh actually they are actually are doing it maybe Neil Armstrong I actually did walk on the moon well Marlene's here Marlene do you want to ask your sister a question if there are any takers publishers you know I'm happy discussions now tonight somebody take the microphone away from her you I think you had a back there right over it so I'm gonna fumble over this a little bit but it seemed like when you're just grabbing Sugar Beach and Liberia everything was bright and it seemed like there was never a cloudy rainy day when you came to the States and when you're writing about Knoxville and you know Greensboro it seemed like everything was a rainy day kind of dreary and your description of particularly tell I didn't like it so when did when did the United States kind of feel like it was home when did it feel like wow it's sunny here this is my place that's a that's actually a really good question it started in it started in Greensboro not we got to not went to Knoxville for the first year and yeah it was cloudy in Knoxville never just rain no sun in Knoxville as far as I was concerned I was miserable I used to hide in the the bathroom during lunchtime because I didn't have any friends to sit and eat with in the cafeteria at school I know that's finally I connected with you okay were you guys take a lean to school for my fun day in the toilet stall and I would like close the door and we just sit there and it was a way to get through like lunch and then we moved to Greensboro the next year and we're living with my dad then and my mom had gone back home and that was really hard for both me and Marlene just because for the first time now we had you know our mom was not there and that was really difficult but I slowly by then I'm in the 11th grade and I started to make friends this one boy in my chemistry class I still remember it's so clear to me when I walked into chemistry class on the first day of school and he said to me you're following me because he did my algebra class before that and it was like the first really friendly thing somebody had said and I just felt like you know it's it's so important to you at that age to just not be weird and in Knoxville I was the weird African girl and all I wanted in like in Greensboro was to just be like everybody else I just had to have a friend and to have like and that was like a big deal in the sun sort of started to come up for me in Greensboro by the time I graduated from high school I was pretty then if this is part of the you know sort of the weird psychological journey or whatever because I found like and this is part of why I ended up distancing myself so much more from Liberia was that I realized that the more American I acted the less weird I seemed with everybody else and the easier it seemed for me to have friends so in my mind it was this you know if you can just become more American and be more like the other kids you know you you can have friends and you'll be you know and that was part of the whole you know distancing myself from Liberia as I became more American it's like you don't really become you're not really you know complete unless you can be all now that's I'm totally watching that up yes was it hard for you to like make the transition between like the Liberian culture and then coming to America where it's like totally different it was yes and no in Liberia we love Americans and we used to I went to the American school in Liberia so I used to practice before I went to school in the morning I was standing in the mirror and I would practice American accent say hi there how are you what's happening blood as I told I thought I could speak with an American accent by the time I got to what did you all call that speaking a law talking color so when I got to Knoxville it was I could I could I could fake it I just didn't really want to fake it as much at first and then I sort of realized that I needed to fake it in order to to be more accepted by everybody else the cultural thing was really was was hard though there were parts that were easy because I could fake the accent I could do the accent and there were parts that were really hard and I really you know part of it was just mostly like I just really missed I miss my family and I missed home you know and I miss the food and I miss the smells you know but the United States can be very seductive you know it doesn't take that's why people keep coming here it doesn't take that long to sort of learn that it in a lot of ways things in America are just easier you know it's just so much easier than than living in Liberia. When you ended up going to college you went to Chapel Hill, North New York North Carolina and you were by then you were pretty much Americanized. Yeah, yeah, by the time I got basketball and by the time yeah through myself into Carolina Tar Heels and yeah I was I was very very Americanized by then. Dude now I have a question one of you mentioned that in Liberia you had you always had access to American cultural things and your mom would bring videos of Mary Tyler Moore is that why you wanted to become a reporter? No, Mary Tyler Moore. No, I decided I wanted it was Britt Hume, remember? Oh yes, yes, yes. When we first moved to the US I used to watch the ABC World News tonight and I would see Britt Hume in front of the State Department with all the flags behind him I was like ooh I want to be like him and then I read all the president's men in 11th grade and I was hooked after that. I really you know in journalism was you know from that moment on it was I never wanted to do anything else but that. Question? Yes. You mentioned food earlier what was it like for you like when you're like eating the American food because I know like it's really strange. I thought it was bland because I was so used to spicy Liberian food so my mom I remember when we first moved here in Knoxville she would make American style soup out of the can with Campbell's that kind of stuff and I thought you know I'm used to my Liberian pepper soup but you know after a while you start to but Liberian food is so good it's so flavorful and it's got a lot of spice in it and always has a kick and Liberia we don't believe that food is really good unless it hurts while you're eating it hurts as you know you should be crying your nose should be running and all that means it's good it's the heart that makes it good. Let's go to Elise. I think what's interesting is all this talk about how Helene embraced the American culture because those of us that are friends with her see her as really still Liberian and a lot of talking Liberian and Liberian food and and things like that so I'm wondering at what point you kind of felt that it was okay to was it after you traveled and saw Eunice and wrote the book that you were able to embrace your kind of Liberian this again and become a whole person because I think that your Liberian's and heritage is still very strong to you and your family here. It never I never really left it and I think I felt it was okay after when I was once I got away from the whole teenage years and college where where you're trying to fit in once I got away from that I could be you know I could be I was all I was never American when I was home you know even in during my teenage years and even when I was going to you know high school and college and faking my accent and all of that when I went home I was talking to my dad and my sister and we're Liberian and so it just it took I think it's all part of the growing up and becoming an adult that you realize you're just going to be who you are and it's totally fine to be to be to be who you are but I never really I just learned how to I guess what I did is I stopped separating the two and it was much more that and letting people realizing that I wasn't being fair to my American friends pretending that I was one thing when I'm actually not letting them into my the Liberian part of my life and and vice versa you know sometimes I used to think that I had to you know I had to have my Liberian friends and I had to have my life American friends I could never like mix the two and it was kind of it took a long time to just realize that this is all you know it's fine to just throw people together question right up here in the front next to a reason. Hi we talked briefly before the session first I want to say thank you for doing the book and for sharing so honestly and as you were talking to my mind is flashing because you really represent you know three traditions you're on firstly you're African-American because that was your heritage here then you're Liberian that's where you grew up but then you're African-American again so you really span these cultures in a very unique way I'm involved as I mentioned to you with the Maryland state Liberian sister state relationship and one of the things we're trying to do is to again make folks aware of the relationship these long historical relationships between the United States and in this case the state of Maryland and Liberia the county in Liberia called Maryland was founded as you know by freed African-Americans from the state of Maryland so my question is given your history and what you've seen I'd be interested in your ideas about how to bridge the gap between African-Americans and Africans in this country that exists right now it's you know I would really like to see African-Americans just pay more attention to Africa in general you go to Liberia and people there know about here it's the other way around that people here don't know about there you know I I grew up completely immersed in American culture and Michael Jackson albums and all of that sort of thing you go to Liberia now you're gonna see you know you go all over the world you know American culture is one of those things that that is very it's very alive is our our biggest export and in Liberia there's no you know there's no you they get they get that you know there they're so excited about Barack Obama there's so you know you see so much of that there I found that the other it doesn't flow the other way so many of my black friends didn't know when I met them here you know my African-American friends could you know had no idea what Liberia was or what you know and and could not have you know it's not there they're just not plugged in so I would like to see you know be my wish to see African-Americans here engage more because it's gonna have to come from here you know there are so many they're so it's like you know these so this is a third-world countries there's just they the engagement has to start over here and it has to start with sort of the interest in these particularly in the West in West Africa but the interest and I think I I think probably I think Obama in his story is gonna go a long way you know towards that I want to follow up on that for a minute before we take a few more from the audience Liberia has really come a long way and I'm told you know Bob Johnson's building a hotel in Liberia and but I'm also told by some of the people who are building that hotel with Bob Johnson that you can't imagine what it's like there when you live in the United States and you go back and it's they still have a long way to go can you talk about the leadership of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and what's happening there now the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf first woman president elected in an African country is huge I can't even begin to just say just how big a deal that is just because in all over the continent women drive back women literally carry Africa on their black back these women are the strongest women you will ever meet they think so much they've been you know raped and they've been you know harassed and they've been you know forced into pregnancy raped and left pregnant in the forest and they have their babies and they put those babies on their back and they keep going their kids are kidnapped from them and taken off to child soldiers and they keep going they take those kids back and they they fight and they're the market women who are sitting out of the side of the road and they're selling oranges and they're the women who like when all the men are going out there and they're fighting and they're doing this they're doing that these women are functional and they're they're they're high-spirited and they're out there and they're still having their kids and they're still raising their families and they're there and for them to after all of these years of being targeted, of being abused, of being to turn around and to see a woman elected president is so huge to actually get something back like this. Those women that elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and it's such a huge, it's such a huge thing and for it to happen in my country, you know, I think it's such a shining example all over Africa where, which is still so paternalistic and it's so male dominated. So I think just for that, even if she was the worst president ever, she's not by far because that's not, you know, it's so huge, but she has a huge hole to dig out of. This country is coming out of 23 years of completely pointless, pointless wars. It's got such a hole to dig out of, it's still no electricity, there's still no running water. It's like the reconstruction effort in Liberia is going to take years and years and so anybody who starts to measure it in months or, you know, is not. So I think I'm glad to see it in her hands because I think she's going to smoke any of the people, her predecessors, so that's not that hard to do. But I also hope people are realistic about just how quickly this can come back. It's starting to come back, but it's going to be hard. It's going to be an amazing experience for you when one day you land in Liberia with the White House Press Corps and go into Liberia and the President of the United States meets with the President of Liberia. Last time this happened, you were seven. I was, no, I was 12, I was on the side of the road with Jimmy Carter and we wanted to see Amy. Yeah. And she drove by really fast. I never even saw her, but we pretended we did. But you and you just got there. Yeah, we pretended we were very excited. And where was Marlene when that was happening? Who knows? We have time for a couple more. I know that a lot of you want to say hello to the whole person, so let's take a couple more. We have one in the back there, Monica. You spoke about when you were younger, having this kind of embarrassment about wanting to fit in and being embarrassed about being from Liberia when you were a kid. But then when you talked about the press conference, which I saw you ask your question, you talked about the pride. It seems like you have a lot of pride about being from Liberia and obviously Liberians are proud to see you so successful. But my question is, is it hard for you that you speak now as such an American accent? And when I look at you, I had no idea that you were a Liberian until I heard about this book. How do you feel about when the ordinary American looks at you that they don't know this rich history that you have? And do you feel like you've lost something by not having an accent? So I'm just curious for a thought. I think I probably, I do have an accent. My accent is still there when I'm speaking with my family and when I'm speaking with Liberians. It would seem forced if I tried to do it on a daily basis with Americans because I've read somewhere that at the age of, if you move before the age of 15, you lose your accent and if you move after, you don't. My mom sounds completely Liberian. I have older cousins who moved here after 15 and they sound completely Liberian whereas Marlene and I sound American. My brother, who was 18 when he moved here, can, he can kind of do the American but he sounds, he has a slight accent when you talk to him. Now if I were talking to my family people, I would be talking with Liberian accent and not at all for me to do. And I still don't have a dream with my Liberian accent when I'm dreaming. But it's completely, it would be forced for me to do it if I'm in a press conference because I, you know, from the time I was, I should try that though, next time. Yeah, no, that I don't feel. A lot of people think, I mean I'm not in any, I don't look at myself in any way as a role model for anybody. I'm just, you know, I wouldn't even begin to want to be. So no, I- I mean it's the person who made us bring the alcohol up here. You were the one who was like serving past Blue Ribbon beer here. So no, I've never, and that's partly, you know, it sounds a little bit like I'm, you know, I don't think a lot of reporters look at themselves as, you know, standing as examples for anything. We're much more, we want a chronicle life and we want to write about life the way it is. And this is basically the way I am. And I don't feel, I've never felt, that's probably why I'm not in politics and you'll never see me in politics, but I've never felt like I have a responsibility to serve as a role model or to carry my country. What I want to do is I want to be able to tell the story of my country and I want to be able to tell the story of, you know, of other people and people, you know, I want to be able to tell this story, but I don't feel like I'm an example for anybody. Let's take one more over here. I'm John and Case Volt here at CSIS. I've got a brother-in-law from Tennessee and I'm surprised you stayed in America. Yeah, he's from Eastern Tennessee, real close to Knoxville. I'm not even touching that one. But I lost my mother when I was 11 and my half-brother and I were separated so I can understand your, you know, relationship with Eunice. After 25 years, I've got one friend from high school that he and I are still really close and keep in touch with and I was wondering if you were able to find a friend like you came to America. I do. I found I have one of my best friends is one who in Greensboro, North Carolina, we were in the same drama class together, Allison Young and we went to Chapel Hill together, University of North Carolina and she's still to this day probably my best friend. That's a great way to end. We want to thank Colleen. Can we get one more from just because she's a Liberian? Can you do it with a Liberian accent? Okay. I'll answer you with a Liberian accent too. That's alright. But if someone asks you, I read about your first heartbreak. Eh man, I feel a bother. You got me doorbell? I don't know. I want to know. What do you want to know? We're both safe, huh? She doesn't get a question. We can go now. I am so the last person anybody should come to for dating advice because I have the worst, worst, worst record ever. So I think you should just be who you are, you know? And if you end up with an American guy, so what? Your parents will deal with it. You can come home with an Nigerian and they'll deal with it. And that's saying something. I think we have to end now. Alright, okay. Ladies and gentlemen, holding through for us.