In January of 2009, I had just arrived in Monrovia and I wrote about three things I didn’t understand. Here’s one of them:

In a vacant lot, a boy, probably about ten years old, sat authoritatively on a the wall that ran the length of one side of the compound. In front of him were about five rows of younger boys, sitting cross legged, attentive, watching and listening to this other boy only slightly older than them.

In the comments, someone wrote that they had probably been child soldiers. I replied that I thought they were too young to have been soldiers in a war that ended five years ago and that I wasn’t ready to jump to any conclusions.

Turns out, they’re the Good Boys Soccer Team. A young adult coaches younger kids.

One of the things I love about my job is a license to answer my own questions.

And so, I find myself starting another year in Liberia. I won’t stay for the whole year, but there’s still so many things I haven’t photographed, and so many questions I haven’t answered. And then, onwards.

What are your plans for 2010?

Deborah Solomon interviews President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in this week’s New York Times Magazine. I took the photo, which involved carrying a whole lot of equipment up six flights of stairs since the elevator was broken.

The President was very cordial, and amused that a working photographer lives in Monrovia rather than zips in to town to take her picture. I told her how I’d met her in Kigali, in 2007, and she smiled, and thanked me for working in Liberia.

These are most of the notebooks I’ve used while I’ve lived in Uganda. There are a few missing. I left one behind at the Nsyambya Youth Center when the power went out in the early evening and I didn’t see it on the dark table when I left. I dropped one in a puddle when I was reporting on floods in eastern Uganda, fall 2007. Another notebook was left behind on a matatu.

I finally put up a website on www.glennagordon.com, with several dozen photos. As I snap images, my camera keeps track of them by number, counting as I click. It starts at zero and goes until 10,000 and then back to zero.

In the past year alone, I’ve gone from zero to 10,000 several times.

I will soon be leaving Uganda. In about two weeks, I’m off to the USA for a month and then I’ll pop up in West Africa in January. I’ll keep blogging here for a bit, and then next year maybe at a new url, but the lion will come with me.

Some people don’t get the lion. When Tumwi saw the lion in person last week, she was surprised. He’s kinda ugly. And scrawny. And hollow. And the paint’s chipping off him.

But I found the discarded toy on a day I was looking for something about two years ago. I didn’t know much about lions or about Uganda, but I knew I liked this guy, and I had a feeling things would work out.

So I went with it. And I documented it on this website. Here, you’ll find where I’ve gone, what I’ve read, what I’ve done, and what I’ve thought. Creating this kind of content has helped me process and understand these things in a way that recording always does.

Creating records is not something I just want to do. There’s a level of compulsion, a level of expression, and a little something, well, feline.

So, thanks for reading here what started as several dozen notebooks, tens of thousands of photos, two websites, and a scarlett lion.