“Everything is Just Spoiled”

A firsthand account of SIM missionaries during the Doe/Taylor conflict

A little rumble up in Nimba

Alvin Toffler called the sense of disorientation that comes with massive and continuing change "Future Shock.'' As we entered 1990, the future had arrived and we were living through a bad case of "Now Shock.''

When you look forward to something as long as we had anticipated arriving in Liberia, realization of the thing often leaves you numb. The twenty-seven hour trip from Chicago to Monrovia may have had something to do with that.

Too cramped, too tired, and too pumped up with adrenaline to sleep, we had eaten a second supper at 2 am, somewhere over the Atlantic. When the dishes were cleared the inscrutable logic of transatlantic flight invited us to further abuse our rapidly reddening eyes with the flickering images of some better-to-be-forgotten movie. Most of the family slept.

The flight ended some three hours later, dumping us unceremoniously, half awake and disoriented, into one of the concourses of the airport in Brussels, Belgium.

We foraged unsuccessfully for something familiar in the airport snack shops, and then settled down, in a twist on an old joke, to spend a week in Brussels that morning. With nowhere safe to stow it, we hauled a ton of carry-on luggage to and fro through the terminal until, finally succumbing to weariness, we retreated to one of the lounges.

Uninviting even by airport standards, the lounges air was chilled, the seating chilled molded metal, and the view of passing airliners silhouetted against leaden skies was depressing. There we endured the hours remaining till takeoff. That came in early afternoon and inaugurated a final leg of the trip only slightly worse than the first.

Arriving after dark at Roberts International Airport (RIA), we lugged our carry-on baggage a few hundred yards across the tarmac and up a flight of stairs into the first of three customs and immigration checks.

We shuffled from desk to desk, waiting for one official or another to question us in the still incomprehensible accents of Liberian English. Officials, semi-officials, and freelance entrepreneurs immediately identified us as neophytes, staggered by the complexities and unknowns of this new world. Their entreaties and bluster aimed to capitalize on our supposed inability to grasp either the market value or effectiveness of an escort through the unnerving ordeal.

Those first hours were overwhelming, with more new information than our senses could process. Two impressions pull rank, demanding attention the minute you pass from the conditioned air of the plane into the free, untamed air of Africa.

First, heat hits you like a physical force, even two hours into the evening. You put it on like a suit, and wear it wet. Sometimes during dry season, in a night breeze off the ocean, your mind can be tricked into believing you're cool, but a quick walk will summon up a sheen of perspiration to unmask the deceit.

Then there's the smell of life, of green things growing out of the rich, red earth, steamed slowly in the living heat, salted by the sea. Even in the city, stifled by exhaust fumes and the smoke of coal pots, that smell reaches out to say this is a land where gardeners cut branches from living foliage and plant them, wilted and dying, expecting them to suck life from the nurturing soil and blossom one day as trees. And they do.

In the parking lot, those sensations are joined by the confusion of men shouting, jostling, hands extended for work, or for "dash,'' each vying with the other for attention, for the small money travelers sometimes bestow unthinkingly.

There is no preparation for the crush of Africa, for never-ending streams of people filling roads everywhere, for layers of Sunday School children filling a room beyond any western imagination, for small taxis with five seats and ten passengers.

And the darkness of jungle roads at night. There is no preparation for that either. We drove the twenty eight miles to ELWA, in deep darkness made more dense with the knowledge that a war had started five nights earlier. We expected trouble, "palaver,'' at the army checkpoint by Camp Schiefflin, but it never materialized.

After the two hour ordeal of customs, we were thrilled to see the welcoming caravan from our new church, and cheered by the joyful reception an hour later in Hazard's living room.

But when we were finally alone in our temporary house on the beach, we all felt the panic that comes when you realize that everything you've ever known is 7,000 miles away, and there is no going back.

We prayed together as a family in the dim light of a house that wasn't home, each of us praying for the power of the Lord's Spirit to lift human spirits overwhelmed by newness. The exhaustion we'd had on hold over the preceding weeks finally claimed us, and we fell into bed, wondering furtively as sleep came how even God could sustain us in this place.

When we stepped out of the house the following morning, Saturday, December 30th, our prayers had been answered. Liberia was the place Sheryl and I had learned to love during our earlier trip. Hot, yes. Humid, even more so, and a place Sheryl felt needed tidying up, and quickly.

But to us, it was so much more than that. It was a place of divine appointment.

When I'd made my first tentative contact with SIM, it was to find a place to teach in Africa, the culmination of a lifelong pull toward missions for both of us. The letter from Ken Lloyd, SIM's candidate director, listed two seminaries in need of an Old Testament teacher. It was just what I'd hope to hear.

Almost in passing, he mentioned the pastorate of the International Church of Monrovia (ICM). I saved the letter, reading it many times during the arduous months spent getting to the Monrovia. With each reading, I looked for the emphasis that sentence had on first reading.

Like key statements in one of those artfully highlighted fund raising letters, that single sentence, buried in a long paragraph, caught my attention so completely I never seriously considered the seminary openings.

What little talk there was about the "armed incursion'' in Nimba county was positive. The Doe government had averaged one coup attempt a year since 1980 and it seemed this was just another as inept and ill-fated as the rest.

Addressing the nation on December 28, just four days after the incursion, President Doe told his people that increased food production was the answer to their problems. Armed insurgents apparently didn't qualify as a problem. Not yet.

On Saturday, we heard by way of radio ELWA that dissidents had burned the Butuo customs house and replaced the Liberian star and stripes with an unfamiliar flag: a scorpion on a field of red. One soldier was killed and one wounded. The invaders' sole purpose, according to the President, was destabilization of the country during the holiday season.

"Mopping up'' operations were under way, he said. "Mopping up'' would continue through May when NPFL forces moved close to Monrovia and threatened Roberts field. By then the fiction of disorganized, ill-trained, ill-equipped rebel forces had evaporated in the face of repeated NPFL victories.

I preached my first sermons as pastor of the International Church of Monrovia on New Year's Eve. There was no word of rebel incursions in either of them.

Before long, the first euphoria of opening our front door and stepping out into a tropical paradise had vanished. The effects of jet lag wore off and we began to function normally in a day that ran five hours ahead of what we were used to. We settled quickly into our new way of life, adjusting quickly to the idea that Monrovia was our new home..

While there were definite routines involved in living in Liberia, there is no way to fall into a rut there, unless it's one of the rainy season ruts in a dirt road. Life in West Africa is just too unpredictable for that. We were told life would be slower there. What we discovered was a life as full and demanding as any in the west, but everything took longer.

Since our visit in '87, we'd planned to live in town, away from the ELWA campus. When the time came to move into Brannagan's house in Congo Town, it was hard to say goodbye to the friendships and conveniences ELWA could offer. But life off campus offered advantages too significant to pass up.

The house was large, which was nice. More importantly it sat in the middle of a neighborhood that included people with college degrees, missionaries, diplomats, government employees, and average Liberians.

On the corner, a hundred yards away, a tiny market sold baskets and a few peppers. The shade provided by stalls there was apt to shelter children playing, women cooking, or girls engaged in the elaborate plaiting of each others' hair.

The house behind the market was a typical block and zinc boarding house. Long and narrow, the building contained an unlighted hall that ran its full length, numerous doors into single room apartments breaking its inner wall. A few cupboards and a table marked the room inside the entry door as a food preparation area, although rice was washed and cooked over coal pots outside.

Sheryl's friend Marta and her family lived in the first room down the hall. A Christian woman active in the Open Bible Church down the block, she became an instant friend and guide to the neighborhood. Her daughter, Patience, scrubbed and dressed to be company, took our daughter Catie on her first excursion through the back side of the neighborhood to Jo-Bar market for greens and raw peanuts.

More an immense roof than a building, Jo-Bar was a huge, dark labyrinth of high, rough tables covered with smoked fish, pig's feet, peppers, greens, peanuts and other staples sold by market women. On the corner, two stores sold nothing but rice, at about thirty five cents a pound or thirty five dollars for a hundred kilo bag.

More market stalls, where Muslim men sold wash cloths, flashlights, toothpaste, mostly of Chinese manufacture, stretched along Congo Town Old Road. Business here continued far into the night, illuminated by candles or the dirty yellow flames of lamps burning a grade of kerosene more suited to creating clouds of smoke than light. It was a friendly place to be, at least as much a social as a commercial center.

Marta also presided over Sheryl's first taxi ride, flagging down and installing her in a yellow, four passenger Japanese built compact car that seemed, to Sheryl's eyes, more than full already. She rode the six miles to ELWA packed tight against the right rear door, praying it wouldn't fall open and dump any of the five passengers in the back seat out onto Tubman Boulevard.

To the other side of us was a house that looked like it might have been discovered by archaeologists in the jungles of Yucatan. A large concrete block structure, it was one of the many houses left unfinished after the 1980 coup when their builders fled for their lives. A cluster of banana trees grew inside what would have made a fine living room and large, redheaded lizards climbed the walls of the dining room in search of lunch.

The high walls were a favorite perch for the pack of neighborhood boys who liked to throw stones at the green fruit on the mango tree in our yard. One or two nights a week, when some of the better Monrovia football teams drew crowds of hundreds on the other side of its concrete skeleton, the walls became bleacher seats for the dozen or so boys agile enough to climb them.

The house across the street was home to Aunt Dollie's. The carport had been converted long ago to a bakery where hundreds of loaves of bread were turned out hot onto long tables every morning, sliced by hand and squeezed into plastic bags for delivery to Monrovia's "supermarkets.'' Her Liberian variation on Wonder Bread could be bought through her gate at wholesale, fifteen cents below the price on the label. Aunt Dollie was one of the thousands of innocents who died during the war.

We not only inherited a house from Brannagan's. We inherited help as well.

Tim, a man as precise as the graphics on his Macintosh computer, gave me a detailed description of who they were, what they did, and more. As it turned out, the "help'' quickly became friends and consultants on the mysteries of Liberian life.

Sheryl and I each had an employee. For her, it was Johnson Willy, a senior at one of the mission run high schools not far from us.

His dream was to learn to speak English so clearly that anyone in the world could understand him. When he wasn't ironing cotton shirts, he devoured our international editions of Time and Newsweek. He was bright, articulate, and a pleasure to have in our house.

For me, it was Stephen Cheor, our regular watchman. Stephen was tall, with the kind of African face that would disguise his age until time painted his hair the inevitable gray and his name changed, in imperceptible degrees, from Stephen to "Oldman.''

A gentle man, he disliked rogues with a passion, as did most Liberians who were not themselves rogues. Taking his profession seriously, he had arduously crafted a fine slingshot, and kept a pocketful of marbles that, in the event some brash fellow decided to rogue "his'' house, would put a bruise on his back or a knot on his head.

About two months after we moved in, someone stole the slingshot from the locked room where Stephen stored his things.

Mr. Cheor had, as nearly as we could discern, no vices, unless we count very strong coffee turned syrupy with sugar. During the months he worked for Tim, he had become accustomed to conversation and a thermos of coffee every night at ten when he signed on. I continued the conversations, often about the health and achievements of his children, and enjoyed them.

Measuring up to Tim's coffee standards was another matter.

Tim's one extravagance was good coffee, US coffee, purchased at great cost from one of the downtown grocery stores, and carefully conserved from one pot to the next. 100% Colombian coffee.

Some might want to know why Tim didn't use Liberian coffee. Those would be people who don't appreciate good coffee and have never tasted the Liberian variety.

I did use the powdery, bitter stuff myself, and eventually developed a taste for it. It never occurred to me to buy US coffee for Stephen when I was drinking its Liberian facsimile myself. He never complained about the change, as long as the sugar "was plenty.'' That took plenty of sugar.

One night Michael, our then sixteen year old, was up late studying when he heard Stephen call his name from outside.

"Michael, can you fix my coffee?''

Thinking his forgetful father had left Stephen to brave a long dark night without his customary stimulant, Michael trudged to the kitchen door, prepared to brew a pot of coffee. Stephen greeted him with his usual good natured laugh and a request for a few more tablespoons of sugar in his liter of coffee. I'd already put in five.

Over the course of the first three months we lived there, Stephen and I talked often about the situation in the country. We discussed how hard it was to live when rents and rice continued to escalate in price. We discussed, guardedly, the behavior of soldiers who were becoming bolder and bolder in their demands for rides, money, and other favors from an unarmed citizenry. We talked about the cost of educating children and taking them to the doctor.

But we never once talked about the possibility that the fighting in Nimba would ever come to Monrovia. It seemed unthinkable at the time.

We were not alone in that. It is tragically true that familiarity breed’s contempt, and Liberia had learned to treat coup attempts with contempt. Everyone from diplomats to Mandingo taxi drivers was convinced this business in Nimba would go away. Government continued to claim that the AFL was in complete control of the situation.

That's a phrase we heard and read so often that, for some of us who there during those months, it's become a comic line to use whenever everything around us seems about to self-destruct. "No problem. We're in complete control of the situation.''

People who live in a country where freedom of the press is a fragile and tentative thing in the best of times become uncommonly dependent on rumors. ELBC is the government radio station, but most Liberians would rather believe "E - L - They - Say,'' the ubiquitous rumor line. One Liberian told us that if ELBC carries a report and E - L - They - Say contradicts it, believe E - L - They - Say.

Rumors kept filtering out of Nimba county. Every week at prayer meeting we would hear of some family or another that had lost contact with loved ones in Nimba. Occasionally we heard stories of massacres, but no one wanted to believe things were as bad as the stories claimed.

International attention first turned to Liberia's troubles on New Year's Day. BBC's "Focus on Africa'' program carried a piece on President Doe's announcement of the initial attack. As a follow-up, Robin White played a lengthy recorded conversation that might not have been aired if more pressing news had presented itself.

A man identifying himself as the leader of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia claimed credit for the events Doe's notice had mentioned. It was the first of many BBC interviews with Charles Taylor.

The attack on Butuo was, he said, the continuation of the 1985 Quiwonkpa coup attempt It would continue until Doe was removed and a democratically elected government installed. He promised the NPFL would build a "mass struggle, a popular struggle'' that would accomplish the task.

His promise to Doe was as chilling as it was implacable. "This is an all-out struggle. If we fail in the towns, we are going to the bush. Doe will never rest. There will be fire on his feet all over.''

If there was to be fire all over, it was at least in part because the initial sparks burned unnoticed outside Nimba county. In Tahn, in Voinjama, and in Monrovia this seemed to be "just a little rumble up in Nimba County,'' as one missionary described it.

On January third Agence France-Presse reported the ambush of an army truck by the NPFL. Twelve soldiers were killed, and the attackers made off with seventy six M-16 rifles and 12 cases of ammunition. Across the border from Butuo, artillery fire was audible and NPFL forces were said to be pushing toward Saniquellie, capital of Nimba county. Eight to ten thousand people, mostly from the Mano and Gio tribes, had already fled to sanctuary in Cote d'Ivoire.

Official declarations blamed the destruction of Butuo and Karnplay on the dissidents. The president asserted that their purpose had been to find members of his National Democratic Party of Liberia and kill them. Refugees in Cote d'Ivoire told of "rebel'' soldiers tracking down Krahn and Mandingo people in the Nimba bush.

Other refugees reported Armed Forces of Liberia troops burning villages all along the border with Cote d'Ivoire.

Already, in the second week of armed conflict, charges and counter charges had begun to fly. As we would learn later, there was truth and falsehood on both sides.

By the eleventh of January the Washington Post carried an unsigned news article reporting the killing of Mano and Gio residents of Nimba, "even in areas not affected by rebel movements.'' Jenkins Scott, Minister of Justice, confirmed that AFL soldiers had indeed shot civilians, but only in self defense. The picture of Liberian civilians armed, at best, with rusty shotguns or cutlasses attacking AFL troops was ludicrous.

In the darkly comic double-speak of this war, Jenkins Scott warned that people impersonating military forces to search private homes would be dealt with "drastically.'' We would soon become too familiar with the official, "armed men in military uniforms'' who, according to reports, had already committed several nighttime murders while "searching for rebels.''

As January reached its midpoint, Elizabeth Blunt, BBC's voice of the Liberian conflict, reported that NPFL forces had entered the village of Bewahlay, about 15 miles south of Butuo, along the Ivoirian border. Not only did they attack the AFL garrison and the customs house, but also the civilian population.

Blunt reported, "The villagers thought that they had been attacked because their village was a Krahn village.'' On a later edition of "Focus on Africa'' that day, Charles Taylor confirmed that his forces had been in action in the vicinity of Bewahlay.

On a small scale, the pattern for the war was already set by its third week. It was to be a war of armed soldiers against unarmed civilians. Quasi-military engagements took place, with casualties on both sides, but it was the civilian population of Nimba county, and later of the country at large, that bore the brunt of suffering as the war escalated.

In Monrovia we continued to hear, by way of BBC and Elizabeth Blunt, a bit of what the western press was reporting. It was a welcome corrective to government's repetitive claims of success and denials of atrocities.

Throughout January, fighting raged back and forth across Karnplay and Butuo, with NPFL and government issuing alternating claims of victory over those tragic scraps of real estate.

By month's end, the NPFL seemed to be gathering strength, but the flow of information was so erratic, we couldn't really know if that were true. The one thing that stood out with certainty was the number of refugees from Nimba: 50,000 in Ivory Coast and 12,000 in Guinea, 62,000 people in exile from a county that had, at most, 250,000.

As February began, government claimed the recapture of Karnplay, saying that, once the "rebels'' were tracked down, peace could return to the area. Around Monrovia, we thought that fighting had reached an impasse and would probably end eventually, with only Nimba affected.

Outside of Nimba county, people's attention in February was diverted from the war by celebrations of Namibian independence and changes in the situation of Apartheid in South Africa. Liberia's little war smoldered along, largely unnoticed.

Around February 18th, near Bahn, American missionary Tom Jackson and his British wife June were awakened in the middle of the night by gunfire. Bahn had been abandoned by its residents who feared for their lives. Almost alone in the once lively village, Jackson switched on his short wave radio, attempting to touch the outside world. As he spun through the frequencies he chanced upon a station broadcasting a church service from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The choir was singing, "Keep Me Safe Till the Storm Passes By.'' The familiar song and its message brought peace, and they slept.

By month's end, estimates placed the number of refugees in Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire at 136,000. Mark Huband, correspondent for the Financial Times of London, reported that, from the Ivoirian side of the border, the road to Karnplay seemed firmly in NPFL hands.

Rumors proliferated in March. The "orphan truck'' story made the rounds in a variety of forms, the most benign of which found its way to ELWA. There were, the story went, so many children orphaned in Nimba they were being brought to SOS Children's village for care. But Linda Lorey, who taught a Bible club there confirmed it was only a rumor. No new orphans had appeared at SOS.

A more macabre version had as many as 125 children under the age of seven brought to Monrovia by truck and buried alive. Bill Ardill reported a variant of the story heard on his way out of Liberia in July. It is hard to know the truth, but the story in its most gruesome form is not out of keeping with the pervasive brutality of this war.

How badly the war was going for the AFL began to emerge in spite of the avid denials and cosmetic claims of the government. In fact, the repeated claims of victory in the face of persistent NPFL activity began to erode what little credibility the administration had left.

In the meantime, efforts to expand ELWA transmission facilities were beginning to show promise. For almost a year Jon Shea, West Africa Area Director, and Stan Bruning, SIM radio director, had been trying to arrange a meeting with President Doe. They had developed plans for a hydro powered, up-country transmitter site and needed government approval. The president had not been available for the better part of a year.

Then, near the end of February, an official communiqué from the Presidential Mansion arrived at ELWA. The president was not responding to the repeated requests for a meeting about radio, but was "inviting'' the ELWA Electrons football team to play his Executive Lions at the soccer field on the mansion grounds.

The Lions were a professional team maintained to allow the aging president the chance to be a leading goal scorer. Referees made certain no one ever played defense against the chief executive, and opposing goalies usually grew a second left foot when he shot on goal. The Lions always won. The Electrons numbered a few missionaries, a few ELWA employees, and men from the neighborhood on their roster.

On paper, it should have been a mismatch, but given all the handicaps of playing the Lions, the score the afternoon of March 3rd was a close 4-1. The President apparently enjoyed playing against the Electrons, because at the end of play he commented to one of the Electrons, "Next time we'll play at your field.''

Hopes were high at ELWA radio that this would be the opportunity they'd been waiting for. They began to plan a short presentation.

On Thursday, March 8th, the call came from the mansion. The Electrons should be ready to play on Saturday. ELWA was instructed to hire the referees.

On Saturday, the convoy started surging onto the ELWA campus in mid afternoon. Military jeeps, troop transport trucks, and limousines roared down the middle of ELWA Road, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Sharply dressed soldiers in the bright red berets of the President's personal guard fanned out around the football field and all motor traffic was diverted to ELWA's back entrance. A police guard questioned us as we drove our Mitsubishi van through the small market and down the road to the beach. Our ELWA ID cards got us through.

We stood with a crowd of missionaries in the afternoon shade of the ELWA studio building, and waited. And waited. The Electrons were there and had warmed up. The Lions were on the field going through an impressive pregame show of fancy ball handling and were ready to play. The President wasn't there yet.

The eastern boundary was lined with people who had come from across the road to watch. A free football game always draws a crowd, but this was more than just a free football game. The Lions didn't usually play away from the mansion and, even though the president was not popular in the neighborhoods around ELWA, the Electrons drew most of their players from there.

A good hour after the game was scheduled to start, a ripple of excitement ran through the crowd. From the area of ELWA junction we could hear the sound of sirens. A line of four or five cars, driving at break neck speed, lights flashing frenetically, drew into sight. They squealed around the corner onto ELWA property and pulled to a stop at the end of north end of the football field.

In the middle of the cluster of vehicles stood a long, black, stretch limo. Four men in business suits stood on running boards and clung to chrome handles on the roof. They dismounted and spread out at that end of the field. We all expected to see the rear door opened and the president emerge.

Nothing happened.

We waited.

Suddenly, a white Honda Civic wheeled around the corner and screeched to halt. The driver's door opened and the president, already dressed in his soccer uniform, alighted.

The game played itself out like a scene in some surreal experimental film. The Executive Lions were good, but needed the frequent assistance of the referees to stave off the scrappy attacks of the Electrons. The crowd stood silent through most of the game, not wanting to cheer the Lions, a little afraid to cheer the Electrons.

Leading by only 3 - 1 at the end of regulation, President Doe insisted on an overtime period to try for the three point victory margin he usually preferred. Hard pressed by the Electrons, he quickly realized the overtime was not to the Lions' advantage, and the game ended with a 3 - 1 victory, with the President held scoreless for the first time in anyone's memory.

Before he could drive off in his Honda, Jon Shea and Stan Bruning had an arm chair and table placed before the President and quickly presented the plans for construction of the new site. He made no promises but we all felt we'd moved closer to realization of this important step in meeting ELWA's commitments to the World By 2000 plan.

On March 13th, Doe, in a speech broadcast live across the nation, gave the nation good news. He said the war with the rebels was over. There were, he said, no more trained rebels in Nimba county.

The speech promptly took on the aspects of a grim, "good news - bad news'' joke as he went with the bad news. Disgruntled local citizens, he said, had taken up the fight. "Those people who think that the government is declaring war on Nimba forced other citizens to go into hiding (in the) bushes of Nimba County and started to use single barrels (shotguns) against the soldiers.''

Most people knew that "those people,'' in thinly veiled language, were the Gio and Mano population.

In the question and answer session following the speech, the president invited people to make recommendations for dealing with the situation. An unidentified woman rose to ask why her sister-in-law and niece had been killed by a soldier. The president responded impatiently that he didn't want to hear what was happening, he only wanted recommendations. He told her she had nothing to say and ordered her to sit down.

Krahn soldiers, assigned to Nimba in the early weeks of the war, had been replaced when complaints about their atrocities grew too frequent and too abundant to ignore. By March 17th, with the situation deteriorating rapidly, those same troops were back at their grim business. It became increasingly obvious that this was a war against the Gios and Manos, carried out by Krahn soldiers and a Krahn president.

That same day, the offices of the Monrovia Daily Observer burned to the ground. All the production equipment and a valuable archive covering substantial stretches of Liberian history were also burned. Eye witnesses reported seeing the now familiar "armed men in military uniforms'' leaving the scene, but the head of Liberia's Criminal Investigation Department declared it was too early to say what caused the fire.

NPFL activity had pressed slowly outward from the first battle sites at Butuo and Karnplay. By the 19th, the US embassy net was warning that the road from Ganta, on the western edge of Nimba county, to Tapeta was blocked by fighting. This is the only link between Nimba county and the southern third of Liberia.

A battle took place on March 24th that brought the world's attention into focus on Liberia. Outside Bahn, forces of the AFL and NPFL had clashed and Tom and June Jackson had been killed somehow in the fighting. Like the story of the orphan truck, the story of their deaths has been told in so many different ways the exact sequence of events probably will never know.

One fact is certain. A man and woman who gave a lifetime to Liberia and its people had now given their lives as well. Tom Jackson's 40 years, interrupted only by an unsuccessful flirtation with retirement, had been spent among the Gio people of Nimba County. June, almost twenty years his junior, was a well known linguist who had translated the New Testament into both Bassa and Mano, and at her death was working with Tom on the Gio New Testament.

Having left the area once, they returned to care for elderly people left behind when the village was evacuated. There was no one else who would do it. Like missionaries during most of the war, they thought their presence would shield their Gio friends from the soldiers' brutality.

Once Jacksons stayed in an apartment at one end of Befus' house while Tom recuperated from a fall. Sue remembers them this way. "I had great respect for them. I guess you have certain role models as a younger missionary, people who have spent their whole lives with the people, and they had. He was so in tune with the people and the language.''

"One time he killed a snake right there on the porch by our house and I asked him what kind it was. He said, 'I don't know the English name, I only know the Gio name.' They were so loved. He was the father of the Gio church.''

Sue could understand why they stayed in Bahn. "I was sorry to think of them being gone, but I know that's the way they probably wanted to go. They loved the people. Serving the people was really what their lives were about.''

Those two deaths caught the attention of the international media, but had little affect on the plans of SIM missionaries. We still accepted as truth the idea that none of the combatants were interested in missionaries or other expatriates. We all thought you might be killed in Liberia if you ventured into the wrong place at the wrong time, but then that could be said of life almost anywhere.

March ended with a personal, public apology from Charles Taylor for the Jacksons' deaths. To demonstrate his sincerity, he ordered all flags in NPFL territory flown at half staff during a twenty four hour cease fire called to honor their memory.

President Doe insisted the seventy two year old missionary and his wife had been killed by rebels who thought they were "Americans fighting alongside Liberian Government forces.''

The war's intensity increased with the beginning of April. Rumors said Charles Taylor wanted it over before the rains came in earnest with June.

In Nimba, roads were considered impassable because of NPFL activity, and the rail link between Yekepa and Buchanan was shut down. The situation there had become so dangerous that the Red Cross cancelled desperately needed shipments of relief supplies to displaced people in the county.

Conditions had grown worrisome for government by this time, and the already restricted flow of information was cut to a trickle on the 5th when the Ministry of Information instructed all journalists that their stories had to be cleared before publication to avoid "fear and anxiety among citizens . . . of the country.''

It was not a press discovery that made the expatriate populace fearful and anxious the next day. A government release announced the wounding of an American businessman. Returning home late at night, he had driven through a checkpoint on Tubman Boulevard, just southeast of the Presidential Mansion, and was shot by one of the soldiers manning the post. He died following surgery.

Later reports hinted that the wound in Martin Millay's leg had not been serious enough to kill him, but the surgery may have been. The soldier responsible was court martialed.

Also Friday, April 6th, we learned in Monrovia that a train had been ambushed while attempting the trip from Yekepa to Buchanan and a British journalist had been taken prisoner. The attack was particularly bold because it was staged within five miles of the main army headquarters for Nimba County. By the tenth, journalist Mark Huband had been released and turned his captivity into the first published report of life in NPFL territory.

Still, for most of our missionaries in the north in Lofa county, or at Tahn in Grand Cape Mount to the east, everything remained normal. Even in Monrovia, we continued as always but had begun to abide by an unofficial late night curfew.

Late night. That's pretty open ended.

Following a late night elders' meeting at ICM, my son Michael and I set out to drive home around midnight. When we arrived at the ELWA junction, where the road to ELWA intersects with Tubman, we found the stop lights out, as usual. An almost invisible palm log had been rolled across the road and two beefy policemen presided.

"What do you have for me,'' the larger of the two breathed boozily through the small opening at the top of the driver's side window.

"I can offer you the joy of the Lord, if you'll take it,'' I replied.

The policemen laughed heartily. "I was thinking of money.''

"The joy of the Lord will last longer,'' was my reply.

Both men, in a jovial mood, laughed again and waved us through. It would not be too many weeks before Matt Carr, in a similar encounter would have reason to fear for his life and the lives of his family. But we felt no menace that night in April.

Sanniquellie fell on Wednesday of Easter week. It seemed the NPFL was now in complete control of Nimba County. Good Friday was Liberia's national day of fasting and prayer and SIM's April Day of Prayer. It came at a good time. On Good Friday word reached Monrovia that Africa Bible College in Yekepa was closed. The last remaining expatriate staff at the college had left, reluctantly.

With its promise of resurrection power and new life, Easter played a bright counterpoint to the intensifying darkness of the war. Morning's first light reached across the horizon around 5:15. As we left the house a little after six for a sunrise service on the beach, the sky was already a clear, light blue, unbroken by clouds.

We arrived at 6:15, watching the blue of the sky deepen and intensify in anticipation of the moment of true sunrise. The flat surface between the guest house and the ocean was alive with a flurry of last minute activity as the deacons placed the last of dozens of benches.

By 6:30, all the available seating was taken, but latecomers flowed in for the next half hour to stand at the perimeter. As our service began, the rising sun finally made its appearance, framed by the long ranks of majestic palms along the road. The roar of surf a scant hundred yards away rumbled its bass harmony beneath our hymns of praise. The morning seemed to throb with the power of God in nature, while we sang of the greater power of the resurrection.

I preached that morning about the power God displayed in Jesus' resurrection - how it is unlike the power of nature, or the power of man, the only power that can bring a life that overcomes the power of death.

At the 10:30 service, ICM overflowed. Our seating capacity that morning was 360, but people lined the back of the building three deep, filled the entry and spilled out onto the covered walkway. The sermon at that service walked the Emmaus road with Cleopas and his friend. I talked about encountering Christ and his power in unexpected places, and in troubled times.

In a nation split by ethnic hatred, where the power of death was becoming more mercilessly real with each passing day, that morning the power of the gospel and our risen Lord crackled through us like a charge of energized hope.

For the O'Briens, it was one of the most memorable Easters of our lives. We were reminded intensely of the power of Christ during perilous times. Our Sunday evening cantata ended with an animated arrangement of "Because He Lives I Can Face Tomorrow.'' Dorothy McGinley, Bob Hoffman, Sheryl and I had picked the music two months earlier, without dreaming how badly the message of that song would be needed.