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Six Weeks in Liberia 'Would anybody in their right mind be doing this?' I asked myself this question as Hilda and I were driving through rebel-held territory along a deeply rutted road to the Liberian/Ivory Coast border. The road was basically a one-lane road with intermittent mud puddles that reached over our hub caps. This was also a sparsely settled area with very little traffic on the road. In fact, the only people we saw were rebel soldiers manning check-points at infrequent intervals, and several settlements of less than a hundred people. One could be waylaid, robbed and murdered and it would take awhile before anyone knew of it. So why were we risking our lives, enduring physical suffering and expense for people we did not really know? The only answer I have is that we were doing it for the love of God and His creation, the people of Liberia. In the midst of suffering and frustration, when Hilda was in fragile physical health and when no one seemed to be helping us, the answer was the same. When you suffer for doing good can you answer otherwise? Who can understand suffering, anyway? For God's own reason, people whom He loves endure suffering. Faith is all that carries you. You go on. And certainly the people of Liberia are assured of the mercy of God. When small numbers of soldiers, national and rebels, numbering no more than 10,000, devastate and terrorize an entire country, can one not weep for them? Young people shot summarily for not obeying some command from a soldier. The looting and wanton destruction of all of the infrastructure of a society. The helpless civilians exposed to rapine, thievery, brutality and senseless murder. The wars of this present age are madness. And the first world nations which supply weapons, money and political cover are not guiltless. One weeps over the situation but we can't give up hope. God is present in this mess. People cling to hope and rebuild their lives. Perhaps that's why God called us to Liberia. My little poem I wrote in the midst of some dark times our first week in Liberia reflects where I was: 'The world is a messy place, shot through with sin, shot through with grace.' Now the mission to Liberia is accomplished. I try not to judge it as being a success or a failure. We were as faithful as we could humanly be with the mission. At times, I would say to myself, 'Ah, this is the reason why God has called us to Liberia, to help this person, this community, to meet this person.' But I don't really know. We thought we saw God's hand at work when we were so helplessly alone. We prayed and asked for prayers. We endured. The books were distributed much more quickly than anticipated, but we made adjustments, distributing books to schools rather than community libraries which are so few in number. We finished and drove home. On our trip home Hilda's malaria came back. We started a new medical treatment for her and took our time. Now we are home, at rest and in better health. Time to reflect and share some experiences of the journey. Part I: Physical Struggles Part II: Deceived Part III: Free Donation of Books Physical struggles, Hilda's health crisis After a rough rip through rebel controlled territory in Cote d'Ivoire we arrived at the border crossing. The rebels demanded $250 to allow us to cross. It was getting to mid-afternoon and the border closes at 6 PM. We begged the rebel soldiers to reduce their fee considering we were doing humanitarian work. No chance. The man behind the desk remained passive. I bargained for $25, then $35, then $50. No change. If we wanted to cross we had to pay. I looked at Hilda, conferred in a quiet voice and said, 'Last price, $100.' It was rejected. Our budget was tight. We felt annoyed that the rebels were so hard-hearted and greedy, and so we returned to the car determined to wait them out. We got in the car and began to pray. We prayed and waited. About fifteen minutes later one of the rebels came out and told us that they would accept the $100. Relieved we paid it to the man who gave us our passports and went ahead to prepare the way across the border. The countries here are separated by a good-sized river with a strong current. An eight foot wide wooden bridge with no guard rails is the only route into Liberia for at least eighty miles in either direction. We soon discovered that we couldn't leave right away. A truck had lost its load right before descending onto the wooden bridge. About fifteen men were trying to lift a large farm implement back onto the truck's flat bed. The rebel soldier took it upon himself to urge the workers on. The afternoon was dragging on. The light was beginning to fade in this forest area. It was getting close to the closing of the border. The men were unable to get the implement back onto the truck but at the soldiers request, they pushed it to the side so that we could slip our car through. With a steep river bank on one side and a thousand pound piece of metal on the other, our car squeeked through, descended a small hill to the wooden bridge and crept across. We were so happy and relieved to get over to the Liberian side. We zipped up the little hill on the far side of the bridge and there to meet us was a manned UN outpost on the left and a Liberian customs house on the right. We spent the last hour of light going through immigration formalities and then we were shown an inexpensive hotel'no running water, no electricity. Welcome to Liberia. 95% of the population live without these luxuries. The more well-to-do buy generators and have bore holes and pumps. On November 2nd we began our drive from Nimba County in the far northeast down to Monrovia, the capital, on the southwest coast. We passed through impressive virgin forests in the early part of our journey. As on the Cote d'Ivoire side the border area of Liberia was sparsely settled and undeveloped. One rarely sees the trees of the original forests in their majestic splendor soaring up almost a hundred feet and spreading their canopy over the diverse flora and fauna. As we travelled toward Monrovia the roads began to improve. From ungraded and rough timber roads to graded dirt roads, to pot-holed paved roads and finally close to Monrovia, roads with fewer pot-holes. The damage to the roads and bridges during the civil war was extensive and the present budget demands that repairs are prioritized. We finally arrived in Monrovia after a twelve hour drive and were shown the house that we had rented sight unseen from the US. It was a dump. It was dark; it was dirty; it had mosquitoes and big spiders, and there were pock marks on the walls from bullets fired during the civil war. We were to stay there for the next three weeks. It was not just a question of living simply, but of living. It was here that Hilda got deathly ill from malaria. Her malaria started on a Wednesday after two and a half weeks of struggle looking for a better warehouse and trying to straighten out the mess left by the director of our Liberian partner organization. Hilda came down with a fever on a Wednesday. It didn't help that we had been bitten by mosquitoes, were eating less and Hilda had an infection in her gums. We started some anti-biotics for the mouth infections, some mild anti-malaria and had a day of rest. She was feeling better on Friday so she went back out with me to run errands relating to the clearing of the goods from the port and finding a warehouse. This was our big mistake. The malaria came back with a vengeance. One doesn't play with this disease. It is opportunistic. If your immune system is weak, the parasites rapidly multiply and various organs begin to shut down as the oxygen supply to them is reduced. By Tuesday her fever was 101 degrees. We were thinking that the temperature was from the gum infection which we were treating with an anti-biotic; we miscalculated. I left for town to look at a possible warehouse for the books. When I got back to the house I found Hilda in a dazed state. Her temperature was 105! I quickly wiped her down to try to lower the temperature then I bundled her into the car and headed for the emergency room of the nearest hospital. I felt utterly helpless. We prayed through the traffic. I pulled into the hospital and got her into the emergency room. Now it was mostly out of my hands. I prayed and stayed around to be of help. They took a blood sample around 3:30 PM. Hilda's blood pressure was recorded as 80 over 40. This was alarming. The temperature remained at 105 degrees. They immediately started Hilda on an I.V. salt solution to try to bring up the low blood pressure. The charge nurse in the ER was friendly and in view of the shortage of help she gave me the order for the blood sample and asked me to take it to the lab and ask the technician to come. The lab technician came and took the sample around 4 PM and then the shift changed. A male nurse replaced the lady on the first shift. He continued to give Hilda the I.V. solution; she was now on her third litre of solution. He continued to tolerate my presence in the emergency room and willingly answered my questions. I asked if I could go check on the lab report which was late in coming back. When I arrived at the lab I found the door locked and the lights out. I was told that the afternoon shift had not yet reported and that the power was turned off to that wing. It was out of my hands. I prayed. Then I saw some orderlies and made inquiries. I was assured that the power would come back on. The power was on a rotating schedule because the generator couldn't supply the whole hospital. They assured me it would come on soon. The time was 6 PM and it was getting dark. I felt that Hilda's life was in the balance. I hung around the entrance to the lab and prayed. Without a lab report the attending physicians would not start anti-malarial treatment. I had to trust God and the Liberian hospital staff. Finally at 6:30 PM the second shift person came in. She was accompanied by two other people who were anxious for reports. She took them first despite my insistence that Hilda's lab report came from the Emergency Room. My turn came and she told me that it would be ready in forty-five minutes. About five minutes later the technician handed me the results. I had misunderstood her statement of four to five minutes to be forty-five minutes. I rushed the results right back to the charge nurse. He reported that Hilda's bp was still low. She needed more essential salts. He asked would I take the Rx to the Pharmacy to have a cost put on the prescription and then take it to the cashier to pay and authorize the release of the prescription. I gladly ran the errand; it was easier to be working while I was praying. The doctor for the ER on the second shift finally came in to personally examine Hilda and talk with me. He felt she was out of danger. He started her on the anti-malarial treatment and noted that her BP was up to 90/50 with a temperature of 103 degrees. We discussed the possibility of her spending the night in the hospital. It was 9 PM. The doctor ordered three more liters of essential salts. He believed that if her BP could be brought to 100 or 110 over 60 she could be sent home. Hilda was given an additional three liters of the salts intravenously and her temperature finally dropped to 99 and her BP rose to 100/60. They released her at midnight and I took her home. At home we had a mosquito net which she wouldn't have had in the hospital and I could nurse her at home as long as her temperature remained down. Within four days she was up and moving around slowly. The biggest boost for her was when we moved out of the battered house and into a brighter, brand new house by the sea shore. This also solved our warehouse problem. Deceived We had physical challenges to be sure, Hilda's malaria case was life-threatening and over all, the physical and emotional burden of doing most of the work ourselves took a toll on us. Upon arriving back in Ghana we weighed ourselves. Hilda had lost ten pounds and I lost five pounds during our six week stay in Liberia. It wasn't supposed to be that way. Hilda and I were very hopeful after we signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with a well-known Liberian non-governmental organization called Foundation for International Dignity (FIND). They had built a good reputation over the past six years working with displaced persons in the war-torn areas of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. For the most part they did advocacy work, and coordinated services for the stressed population of the rural areas affected by the civil wars in the above nations. The Memorandum which we signed pledged FIND to help us process the container full of books, locate a warehouse and personal house for us during our stay in Liberia, and help locate community libraries eligible to receive our books. Our part was to pay them $50/month and donate 20 boxes of clothing, books and computers to FIND. We did our part. We sent $300 to the Director of FIND in April to cover April through September. We also sent him $900 to rent us a warehouse, $750 to rent a house and $1100 to begin the process of clearing the container from the port. Everything seemed to be going fine as we communicated with the Director via e-mail and telephone. When an exorbitant invoice came back from the clearing agent the Director was using, we complained and asked him to go to government officials and beg for a reduction of duty. He seemed reluctant to do so and since Hilda and I had a few connections with government officials, we sent them an e-mail with a copy to the Director's second in command. This e-mail started to uncover the subterfuge. The reply we had back from the second in command of FIND shocked us. He informed us that the Director had been suspended from day to day duties because of financial irregularities since June. Unfortunately, this information was given us in September. The container had already been shipped and the Director's name was on the Bill of Lading. We had sent the Director all of this money in August and early September, and our freight forwarder in the USA had sent him all of the relevant documents for clearing the container. Hilda and I didn't know what to think. We informed the second in command and the government official of the situation and hoped for the best. We couldn't do anything until we arrived in Liberia. So driving south from the border after four days on the road, we did not know what to expect. Had the Director actually rented us a house? We did meet him at the close of that fourth day and at 8:30 PM moved into the dingy house described above. Since he had the documents for clearing the container, we had to proceed carefully. It took us some time to sort things out, but the situation was troubling. Apparently he had personally kept the $50/month we had sent him. The house that we were staying in was leased by him for probably $150/month, and he was subletting it to us for $250. We were shown the warehouse that he rented for us and it turned out totally unacceptable. It had dirt floors and no glass on the windows. We found out later it was actually a building that he himself was building, although he always referred to the owner as another Liberian. We asked for our money back and he told us the owner refused to give it back to us. Of the total of $1350 we had given him to begin the clearing process, only $600 could be accounted for. He had engaged a clearing agent who had begun the process, but Hilda and I did not trust the agent. Unfortunately, once the clearing process is begun, it is usually unwise to change agents. Hilda and I began our work in Liberia climbing out of a hole. Apparently, the second in command at FIND had already filed legal charges against the former Director, and he extended some hope to us that we could get our money back after the case moved through the courts. We did not want to get involved in a court case. We didn't have the time and we didn't come to Liberia to fight a battle in the courts. Why hadn't FIND informed us in a timely fashion about the financial malfeasance of their director? Why couldn't they put some pressure on the man to get the money back without going through the courts? One of the most important things for Hilda and me to do before the container arrived was to find a suitable warehouse. We asked everyone we met if they knew of a place. A number of people said they would help including the president of the bank where we deposited our living expenses. Nothing came of it. I asked many friends in the USA for prayers. Every time we met someone who encouraged us, my hopes would rise and I would expect an imminent answer to prayer. It didn't come that way: 'Vain is the help of man.' That was how I felt. When I made calls to those who promised to help, they would have nothing. Although the container arrived a month late, thanks be to God that the Director didn't clear it before we arrived, the process with the untrustworthy clearing agent was making headway, the clearing was immanent and we did not have a warehouse. The Friday before the container was cleared Hilda and I went driving around Monrovia looking for a potential site to store the books. Monrovia is big. It has over a million people scattered through many suburbs which are separated by lagoons and marshes. One man took us over a terrible road, almost two miles back into the bush, to a house which was barely finished. We had to go through mud puddles which pitched our car back and forth, and I was imagining what would happen if the container was rocked off the flatbed and overturned on the side of the road in a remote place. Needless to say, we did not delay in declining that site. We continued our drive, praying while we went. We went out to the east side of Monrovia which was drier and sparsely populated. I was hoping to spot a house big enough to contain us and the books or an empty store. We drove down the highway leading to Roberts Field International Airport. It was a nice area in that the beach was just four hundred yards off the highway. We didn't see anything. We passed a sign for a beach and on impulse I said to Hilda 'Let's drive down to the beach and see the ocean.' As we drove down the sandy road toward the beach we noticed a newly constructed house on the right hand side. It was big and didn't look lived-in. We continued to the beach, got out of the car and enjoyed the sea breeze. It had been a long day. In fact, Hilda was out of the hospital only three days previously. We couldn't push it much more for her health sake. On the way back up to the highway we looked again at the new house. 'It really is big enough for us and the books,' we said. 'Let's stop and inquire.' We found some workmen who led us to the foremen of the work crew and it was he who gave us the phone number of the owner of the house. We called him right away. We told him that we wanted to rent the house for us and the books. He suggested that we come in and talk to him Saturday morning at the bank where he works. He was a Nigerian working for a Liberian bank. Ghanaians and Nigerians are like brothers, they each have the same legacy of British colonialism, and this seems to be a bond when they meet abroad. The next morning we laid it on the line, our mission work, our budget, our intentions to rent for two months. Everything was going fine until he mentioned the monthly rent, $2000. We begged him. We were an NGO on a limited budget. We had already paid three months rent in advance but we could no longer live there, and it meant that we would be taking the second rent from our own pocket. He reduced it to $1000 a month. He couldn't go lower. We thanked him for his time and left, another seemly dead end. Hilda and I could not let it go though. Hilda did not like the house where we were staying. Besides being dingy, full of mosquitoes, big spiders and bullet holes, the Director of FIND had left his nephew in the house to be a kind of 'houseboy' to fetch water from the well and keep things clean. We did not trust him. He seemed to go back to his uncle and report our latest doings every few days. We even considered the possibility that he could do us harm if things weren't going well for the Director. We needed a new place to live that was safe. We decided to rent the house for $1000 a month but cut short our stay by a month. We would go home at the end of December. So we called the Nigerian back and offered him $1000 if he would let us stay in the house from that day, November 21st until the end of December. He agreed. We moved in the next day and collected the books from the port the following Thursday. What a God send! The prayers were answered in time, and in a way we couldn't have foreseen. I was three hundred yards from the beach. After a hard day I would go down and take a short swim, go back to the house, pray and we would have a quiet time being watchman over the books that night. We filled six five-gallon containers of water every other day and that is what we used to bath, flush the toilet and run the kitchen in this fancy house. For an hour and a half at night and an hour in the morning I would run the generator which would recharge my flashlight batteries, cell phones and keep our apartment-sized refrigerator a little cool. We were happy. The towns and schools which picked up the books from us were also pleased. I made a sign for Books For Africa Library Project which I put out on the Roberts Field Highway and they located our house without much trouble. And the amount of floor space inside the house enabled Hilda and I to organize the 36,000 books by Dewey Decimal category, Fiction, children's books and youth books. God had an answer for our problem and it was good. "Donation of free books" So ran the advertisement we put in one of Liberia's newspapers, The Daily Observer. We went to the office of the paper on a Tuesday. It was an unassuming place. They sold ice out of a freezer behind the counter of the receptionist. Imagine that'a newspaper doubling as a sidewalk vendor. The lady who handles the classifieds was called in, we gave her $125 for a quarter page ad and asked that it appear in Friday's paper. That was it. We picked up the container of books that Thursday and the following day the ad appeared. We didn't even have time to buy a paper for we arranged all 1400 boxes of books around the living area of the new house that we had rented. It didn't take long for the calls to come. The paper has national circulation and we wanted to hear from the rural areas. We were not disappointed. The calls began to come in, and we gave out our requirements to the potential recipients: they had to have sufficient shelves to store the minimum donation which was 2,000 books; they had to have a full time librarian, and they had to open up the library to the public and keep public hours. Late in the day on Friday we had a call from a newscaster at the United Nations radio station in Liberia. They do public service announcements and the young lady who called was intrigued by our ad and wanted to interview Hilda on her radio show the next Monday. This public exposure brought more phone calls from all over Liberia. We were moving. In five days, Monday through Friday of the first week after collecting the books from the port, we had given out 31,000 books. The list of the recipients was amazing. I often found myself wondering, 'Is this the reason God brought us to Liberia?' I will never know exactly, but I get a very strong feeling of hope and joy when I think of the deprived citizens of the remote areas having new access to the wonderful books which we shipped. For instance, there is the town of Grand Cess in Grand Kru County, located far down the coast towards Cote d'Ivoire. They collected 3,000 books that week. A citizen of the town who works in Monrovia picked up the books for two of the schools, a junior high and high school. He stored the books for several days and then arranged the transportation down the coast. There is no coastal road to this rural county and the cheapest and safest way to transport the books was to send them by a traditional fishing boat down the coast. Hilda balked at making the journey, but I was ready for it. I love the ocean. The traditional fishing boat is made from a single tall tree, dug out with adzes and shaped bow and stern. The sides are extended higher with planks and then a 100 horsepower Yamaha or similar outboard engine is mounted and the craft is ready for the high seas. They are unsinkable and handle remarkably well. There were four libraries in Lofa County in the far northwest of Liberia. This was the center of a lot of fighting during the civil wars raging across the border areas of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. The people were often caught in the crossfire. They fled to the forests when soldiers came to town and stayed there until the coast was clear. Much of the infrastructure was decimated. We gave books to Zorzor Rural teacher Training College, two schools in Voinjuma, a school in Foya and one in Kolahun. I shake my head in wonder. We didn't plan this. Many of you readers contributed to this effort, but we didn't know where the books would wind up. Someone Else's hand was in this. We finished distributing the last of the books during the second week after receiving them. We waited patiently for Wilmot from Greenville in Sinoe County. His town is also way down the coast. He was one of the first to call us and in his enthusiasm he used his own money to build sufficient shelves for his town library to qualify. Unfortunately, after he had been approved to receive the books, he waited a week to arrange transportation to bring the books to his town. It was too long. A bridge along the road he planned to take collapsed during that time and his plans to pick up the books were delayed. He explained that for him to take the only other open road out of his town would add over a thousand dollars to the cost of the trip. 'We can't afford to wait,' we explained, 'The books are almost gone, and we will not be staying much longer in Liberia.' We gave him a cut-off date and we encouraged him not to make it a one man project, but rather involve other people from the town who could help bear the cost. He took our advice and contacted his representative in the legislature. This man then contacted us and arranged a place to store the books in Monrovia until the bridge could be repaired and Wilmot could then pick them up. A similar thing happened in the historic town of Saniquellie in remote Nimba County. A local citizen natmed Martin called me on behalf of his church school asking for books. They only had 36 feet of shelf space, however, and to receive 2,000 books they needed 200 feet of free shelf space. I urged him to contact other town members and try to come up with a solution that would create a true community library. He called back two days later explaining that the Ministry of Education had a library in their district office in town and that the large library was almost empty of books. I spoke personally with the District Education Officer who assured me that he was overjoyed to have their library become the public library for the community. A few days later and a truck was sent out to pick up the last of the 36,000 books we had shipped. Saniquellie was the town where Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure and William Tubman met in 1957 to create the important Organization of African Unity, now known as The African Union. They received over 2,000 books which will be shared with some other district education offices in Nimba County. The following is a table listing the recipients of materials from our shipment:
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