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“Everything is Just Spoiled” A firsthand account of SIM missionaries during the Doe/Taylor conflict |
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The
images that flickered through my mind as I wrote this chapter have been colored
by both pleasure and regrets, but all of them brought tears for their
accompaniment. The
majority of the refugees we worked with were ordinary people whose only crime
was living in Monrovia at the wrong time or having been born to parents from the
wrong ethnic groups. Their lives had
been disrupted for those crimes and, if they survived, would never be the
same again. Yet most of them met the
hardships and danger with good spirits and courage that shamed me. I
remember two women I met the night we built the first plastic lean-to. Friends, they had spread their sleeping
mats together against the wall and settled down for the night, only to be
ousted unceremoniously by the work crew I was with. One was enormously pregnant, a toddler
clinging tightly to her leg, the other, mother to two small children, the
oldest not more than four. I suppose
because I missed my own, I talked briefly with these African babies, though
none of them, mothers or tots, understood much of what I said. Nevertheless, when the transparent roof was
in place over their heads I remained to hold their places under it in the
push and shove of reentry. They
thanked me shyly and quickly settled themselves for the night. In the coming days, I watched for their
faces along the road or in the area behind the school we came to call The
Commons. I would inquire after their
children and how they were doing and always found them ready to smile and
greet me like a friend. Neither one
could have been much over twenty. Elijah
was a grinning eight year old whose family had settled under the window of my
office. Making my rounds one day, I
noticed him standing at a distance and watching so I introduced myself and
learned his name, though my grasp of Liberian English was so limited this was
about the only thing he ever said I understood with certainty. He trailed me like a puppy for days,
winning rides on the back of my motorbike and a bit of candy I'd been
hoarding. Pastor
"Chip" Plank, then pastor of Plain Congregational Church in Bowling
Green, Ohio had given me a sack of stuffed toys to give away in Liberia and
one day I offered a handful for him to give to his younger brothers and
sisters. His eyes lit up at the sight
of them but, much too grown up to show an interest in stuffed toys, he wanted
me to understand they would not be for him.
I have a short video tape of him standing, smiling broadly but too shy
to speak. He wore a T-shirt emblazoned
with the cartoon picture of a dinosaur.
I asked what it was but he had no idea. Another
day I was videotaping the crowds behind the church. By then their numbers approached five
thousand in the five acre parcel we called Hillside Commons. Stan Bruning estimated a population density
of 704,000 per square mile there.
Crowding was already unbelievable, the noise a continual rumble, and
the smoky smell of coal pots clung to everything. I stood in front of Sam and Emma Miller's
house and, for fifteen seconds, pointed my camera at the path between two trees
and photographed the river of humanity that passed constantly. A
woman walked into my viewfinder, dressed in a lappa and a brilliant red knit
top. A small baby was tied to her back
and she walked with a graceful spring in her step that would make you think
she'd just stepped out of a limousine and was off to lunch with her friends
at some exclusive restaurant. Her face
was alive with a smile she shared with anyone fortunate to come within its
range. Walking
or riding slowly through the camps was usually a joy. Occasionally someone was disgruntled about
the quality of housing we could provide, complained about the crowding, or
pointed out some defect in the plastic roof we'd provided. Yet in spite of the handful who expected
better, in that cramped, poor camp spirits were good and people were
congenial. We had appointed
representatives for every few hundred people.
They reported problems, made suggestions, and served as liaison
between refugee and missionary. But
the natural community spirit of the Liberian people created neighborhoods
that in the early weeks were not artificial units created from above. Their communal times around the coal pot in
the evening called up the image of thousands of people from hundreds of
houses in dozens of villages, all packaged in plastic wrap, and more content
than I can imagine. They had a bit of
food, they had minimal shelter, and they had neighbors. Those,
and a handful of other memories of other faces, represent the best and worst
of the month of July. They stand for
the best because they, the people of Liberia, were the only reason any of us
had for being there. Many of our
number had come to work as technicians, electricians, engineers, and
administrators. But
no one should ever misunderstand that, without God's call to minister to
people like those in our refugee camp, we would all have been happy to pursue
those occupations in more stable and lucrative environments. They were why we were content to remain
long after our official purposes for being there had evaporated. I
see the worst when I let myself consider the possibility that many of those
people no longer live. While
missionaries finally fled to safety in the west, they scattered eventually to
uncertain fates: to exile, to hunger,
to possible death. Their new ELWA
neighborhoods dissolved as quickly as they had been formed. Most were only faces to me, without names,
tribes, or villages attached to them.
There is no way to know if they survived Liberia's longest and most
violent "hungry time" or were called out of lines to end their
lives at the hands of men grown drunk on the shedding of blood and rabid on
the poison of racial hatred. Maybe
that is why most of us who remained in Liberia into July want so badly to
return. To seek faces out of the
gathered crowds still refugees in their own capital city, crying to be named
and known. To speak with them as
people who have seen earth's precursor of Hell, and tell them of the great
hope that can be theirs in Christ Jesus.
In a nation destroyed by hatred, to join in a rebirth built on the
shared love of God, on Eternal Love still Winning Africa. |