“Nothing is easy” is a phrase cameraman George Reeves and I are starting to toss around a lot. On our third day in Liberia, we were pretty anxious to start shooting footage, so, as directed by Brussels Airlines, we headed off to the local office as soon as it opened to pick up my luggage and get that out of the way early. It was supposed to open at 9 a.m. At 9:15 a.m. the doors were locked and the mobile phone switched off.

“We’ll come back,” says our ‘fixer,’ Kaipee.

“How can they just not open when it even says the time on the website?” I ask.

“Welcome to Liberia,” he responds.

The next stop is the Ministry of Information to get our press passes. It’s supposed to open at 10 a.m. That door is also locked.

“We’ll come back,” says Kaipee.

Next we visit the Executive Mansion to deliver a letter requesting an interview with Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. George is not allowed in because he’s wearing “short pants.” After explaining that I have no luggage and thus no appropriate clothing, I’m permitted to enter, but our letter is denied because the envelope is not properly labelled!

We walk the equivalent of a few blocks to the university, pay a man to type our addresses, watch as he carefully cuts them out and uses a glue stick to paste the pieces of paper on the envelope. Now the letter is properly labelled. The entire process takes a good 45 minutes -- another 45 minutes we’re not out shooting.

I’ve been working with George for nearly seven years but I’ve never been so happy to see him behind a camera as when he took that first shot today. It’s been a long time coming, and I immediately felt excitement that we were finally doing what I’ve dreamed of doing for many years -- shooting a documentary on the streets of Africa.  

Even after things finally got underway, we waited what seemed like forever to do an interview for which we had previously set an appointment. We paid a security guard 10 USD to let us climb eight storeys, up flight after flight of dilapidated stairs in a hollowed hotel that was abandoned more than a decade ago in the civil war. We’re told it was once the best hotel in Africa, where leaders from all over the continent visited to relax. It is now nothing more than a block of cracking concrete riddled with history, but every breathtaking shot from the top was worth it.

The work is challenging but so rewarding; still, on the way down, dripping in sweat, we looked at each other: “Nothing is easy.”