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Day’s Journal
It is about midnight your
time as I write this at 6am GMT. My
body is getting more adjusted to the time already. I woke up about 5:30 this morning after
not having gone to sleep until after midnight last night. As previously mentioned, we had a great
dinner with follow up last night to discuss the ways orphanages might
become more self-sufficient. That
meeting didn’t break up until after 9:00pm and several people stayed around
for a while to talk. I went to
Christine’s as soon as possible last night to update the website. I was waiting behind the Deputy Commerce
Minister and the agricultural superintendent for God’s Kids. When it comes to getting information onto
the website I’m not that patient but I tried to wait without fretting. Jackson had trouble getting his computer
to connect so I hooked mine up and let him check and respond to email on it
(still somewhat patiently). While
I’m waiting Christine brings out a wireless router that someone has given
her and asks if I can hook it up.
Now I’m all the way in Africa and
still having to do computer setup (ask Gayla, it’s not my favorite thing).
Finally it’s my turn. I upload the website files. It takes quite a while to upload the
pictures even though they are squeezed down to a very small size. Plus there were 40 of them for
yesterday. They finally loaded and,
at the very end, an error occurred and it broke the connection. So I’m not sure if you were able to see
yesterday’s pictures or not. If not,
I’ll fix them tonight. Next I
checked email. That could be a 2
hour process here as the speed of the connection can’t be more than 28k at
most. Plus there are so many spam
emails that you waste a tremendous amount of time waiting for them. Add to that an email from someone with a
large attachment and you can literally get stopped from using email. Finally it dawned on me that I could
download only the headers and decide on the descriptions which ones to
download, delete, or leave until I return home. Duh!
It still took 20-30 minutes
to work through the emails and I only downloaded the full message for about
7 or 8 emails. After that I took the
Linksys wireless router from its box and began
the setup process. They are really
very easy to setup but there’s always the potential for problems. And computer problems
in Liberia
is not easy thing to solve.
But there really weren’t any issues and within a few minutes
Christine had wireless connectivity throughout her house and, more
importantly for her, on her porch. I
got mine connected first and, when I showed her, you’ve never seen such an
excited person in your life (well, I’ve seen Gayla more excited a few times). Next she brought out her Dell laptop to
see if she could connect. It worked
well and she was doing email on her front porch when I left her just about
midnight. I left mine connected as I
walked towards the guest house and lost the signal just before reaching the
front porch of it. With a longer
Cat5 cable I could likely reposition the router so that we could sit on the
guest house front porch and connect.
That would be cool.
I want to stop for a moment
and tell you something about Christine that was told me by others. Did I mention that her father, William
Tolbert Jr., was the 19th president of Liberia? He was murdered at the start of the civil
war that was just ended in 2003.
Anyway, as you would expect, her family fled the country along with
many, many others during all the fighting.
When she returned years later she found 8 families living in her
house. That was very prevalent as
people were fleeing into Monrovia
during the war and staying in any unoccupied building that could be
found. When Christine returned, they
said that, rather than through the families out, she worked to make sure
that each found a home to live in.
In fact, one of the young men that was
staying there has stayed on with his family and he now works for her full
time and lives here. I’m sure that I
don’t know all of the story but it seems quite a
Christian thing to do in the middle of personal loss.
While I was sitting on the
porch with Christine last night enjoying our wireless success she explained
a little about the property we are going to look at today. It’s not something that we can purchase
is the first thing I need to say. So
maybe it’s not for STS at this point but there are some possibilities that
seem to fit well with our 4 pronged service goals. The property is 50 acres and there are
several structures on it. One is a
conference building. This was a
project of her father’s when he was president many years ago. It is designed to be a place where young
people are trained. Christine has a
great desire to see it become all that her father had envisioned it to
be. She sees a farming operation,
various jobs skills training for older boys and girls and a place where
orphans reaching adult age can be transitioned from life at the orphanage
to life on their own. I think this
would be a huge service for someone to undertake. Our mission is not directly connected
with orphanages but we do have training and education as one of our 4 primary
goals. In addition, it could be the
launching ground for many small businesses that these young people would be
trained in as they transition to independence in the everyday world of Liberia.
The property itself is not
owned by Christine. It has been
offered to her as a land grant from the government (President Sirleaf personally).
Therefore it can never be “owned” by anyone but, as long as the
requirement to use it to help the children of Liberia is maintained, it would
be hers as though she owned it.
There is risk here and, since I’m accountable to the STS board of
directors, I have to keep an independent attitude about this
possibility. It’s also a little ways
out of town so I’m not sure it would be the best place for our home
base. All of these things have to be
considered. I am going into this
with an open mind cognizant of the fact that God could be right in the
middle of this and it would be critical to hear Him if so.
Earlier I had asked Christine
what land would cost for STS to buy.
(As an NGO incorporated in Liberia we have the right to
purchase land in our name even though only native born Liberian citizens
are otherwise allowed to own land.)
She said that outside of town it was about $800 per acre and that
inside town it was about $2,000 per acre.
Of course that would be without any buildings, walls, etc. Over here you need a block wall around
your place to keep it secure. Even
then you will need a full time security person to walk the property during
the night. The cost per month for a
security person is about what we would pay for the monthly fee on a home security
system.
We’re also supposed to visit
a farm, water business and a printing shop today. Today’s really STS’s
day but the benefit also accrues to God’s Kids because the business ideas
we explore will likely be used to help the group of orphanages they support
here.
We’ll, I should have a lot of
information and pictures when I return tonight. I’ll try to get them and the ones from
yesterday on the website by 5:00pm your time tonight.
Please pray for God’s
guidance as we learn more about this potential property opportunity and the
other businesses that we will visit.
Well, it’s 8:45pm here and I’ve
eaten another great meal and have had another very full day. We started the day out on a 30 mile trip
to Bensonville, also known as Bentol
(the “tol” is for Christine’s father, President
Tolbert). There are many good things
about the property. First, there are
good paved roads all the way to it. Second, it is a beautiful piece of
land. We drove out with very little
traffic and arrived at the property for our review. I’ve posted pictures if I can get them up
on the web. There are 50 acres. About 10 contain the 5 buildings. They are shells of what were once very
nice structures. There are no roofs
as the zinc (we call it tin) was all stripped during the war. The fixtures, cabinets, etc. were all
stolen and even the stone tiles were stripped from the floor. The buildings are all concrete block,
fully plumbed and with conduit in the walls. The 15 or more years they have sat
abandoned has caused them to look bad along with
the grass growing on the floors but structurally they seem to be in great
shape. One of the buildings is about
the size of a gymnasium complete with the 25 feet ceiling. There’s also a cafeteria and some other
offices in it. The 4 other buildings
were essentially homes. There were
acres of palm trees that had been planted for the support of the indigent
orphans. Out on the front part of
the property displaced families have built 20 or so mud brick huts. Christine is always concerned about these
type families and has made no attempt to move them off. Rather than displace them again she has
chosen to build relationships with them with the thought that they may
become the workers that are used to support the facility when it’s rebuilt.
We left the property and
drove down to Christine’s family’s home place. It was a nice community with not too many
houses and beautiful landscaping.
After that we went to May’s
Farm. May is an incredible business
lady. I don’t know how many acres
that she has but it has to be 300 or so.
She has U.S. style chicken houses (meat & eggs), hogs, horses,
turkeys, donkeys, vegetable trucking from the outlying areas, a pineapple
juice packaging machine that also bags the juice and several other business
lines. We got to spend about an hour
with May and she freely shared her ideas with us. What a great opportunity.
We then stopped by to see
Shirley at Hebron Orphanage. Shirley
cares for 15 orphaned children in a fairly small environment and also makes
cold water for sale to provide support. She’s really and interesting lady. Her mother was Indian and her father British.
Their family moved to Monrovia in 1959 for
her father to start a bus line. 47 years later she’s still here. She worked for the U.N. during the war
and started the orphanage in 2002 because she felt God calling her to the
work. For the first years she worked
with the children during the day and went back to her apartment during the
nights. Then she felt God telling
here that the children needed a true home environment and that she should
move into there with them full time. She talked about how she couldn’t believe that
God would ask her to give up the one remaining sanctuary that she had of
normalcy and fought against obeying for a while. Here’s the good part. She said that the day she gave in and
moved into the orphanage was the happiest day of her life. (This is a purpose lesson for those of you
in my Sunday school class.)
Finally, Christine had
scheduled us in to see a large (by Liberian standards) printing press. When 4 white guys and 2 white girls
walked into his (a Lebanese named Robert) office you could see the shields
coming up. We were never able to
break through and convince him that we were not trying to setup shop next
door and put him out of business. He
told us just how bad everything was and that he was in every possible part
of the printing business. If I
mentioned some type of equipment he didn’t have he would say that he was
getting one of those shortly. What a
funny situation. He was really ill
at ease.
On the way back home the
timing belt broke on the van we were in and we had to wait about half and
hour before Laurence rescued us by sending his car to pick us up and take
us home. That’s the easiest car
trouble I’ve ever had in Liberia.
We again had a wonderful meal
(all kinds of great stuff) and retired to the computers to get this stuff
written and uploaded.
I hope to get to bed before
1am tonight.
By the way, these folks that
I’m traveling with are a great group.
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