"What do they want with my house?"

AP photo by George Osodi

Rukmini Callimachi has a fantastic nuanced AP report on preparataions for Liberia’s first census since the war. As part of these preparations, census officials have been marking all housing structures with numbers. Callimachi notes that rumors have spread about the intention of the markings; some think it is part of a military recruiotment drive. She also talks about the challenges of gathering data in Liberia:

Many Liberians are illiterate and do not know their age. So, for example, if a woman appears to be in her 60s, a census-taker could ask if she was born before or after President William Tubman took office in 1943.

To determine economic status, census-takers ask villagers if they have a TV — but that could backfire, as a pilot census revealed last year.

“You ask ‘Do you have a TV?’ in order to be able to classify the person’s economic situation, but they think that if they say they don’t have one, you might give them a TV. So they hide the TV and the fridge and the generator and say they don’t have a job and that their kids are not in school, thinking you’ll pay their school fees,” said Rose Gakuba, the U.N. Population Fund’s representative in Liberia and a lead organizer of the census.

Callimachi quotes an old woman, who does not know that the markings are associated with a census, saying:

“Those people who marked the house probably know that I am suffering,” she says balancing a plate of tubers in her lap. “They are going to bring me food because they know I don’t have enough.”