Arriving in Liberia

Family and Friends!!

I cannot believe it has been a week since I arrived in Liberia. Thank you for your prayers over my travels. They were felt and it is hard to put into words how excited I am to be here! I have spent the first few nights staying with David and Audrey Waines, the couple who started Equip Liberia and whom I am volunteering with for the next three months. The first few days I spent going to the main office in Monrovia to read about projects Equip is running, materials they have used in the past, and listening to the visions of what Equip has for this coming year.

Currently Equip is heading up 11 clinics in the Nimba County and three of them are going through an accreditation process. Right now there are many focus areas that need much improvement in these clinics. The accreditation team will reassess the clinics in December so basically my time in Liberia is perfect to help head up this project and help these three clinics meet the BPH accreditation guidelines to ensure that they receive the proper funding to stay operating. I feel this is totally a God thing to allow me to be able to really pour myself into one project and help Equip work on providing the best care possible to their clinics. I will be living in Ganta for the majority of my time in Liberia to head up this project. Please pray for me and for wisdom to help build up these clinics to meet their accreditation requirements. I know that God will lead and direct me and bless my efforts as long as I am seeking Him first. Pray that I may draw close to the Liberian men and women who are running these clinics and that it would be a sweet time of discipleship and waiting on the Lord for the workers and patients of each of these clinics!

I sleep under a great mosquito net, tucking all the edges into the bed before I go to sleep. I fell like I am sleeping like a princess every night!! I have been swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, in huge waves with strong rip tides that will carry you down the beach or out to sea if you are not careful. Liberia has some of the best surfing waves in the world but you have to be very careful about the strong currents. The Waines live about 100 yards from the beach and I fall asleep to the waves pounding along the sandy shore. I have been eating Liberian style, which consists of rice at every meal and fried fish or chicken with fried potato greens or fried cassava leaves and lots of HOT spices. The first night I met my friend Steve. Steve is an 8 in Spider that I noticed on the dark floor of my room in the Waines home. I thought the rug was moving in the dark but as I watched it closer I saw that it was a SPIDER! I went to bed that night tucking the mosquito net in tighter around my bed. In the morning I was startled to find Steve in the shelves where I store my cloths! He just won’t leave me so I named Him. I left Monrovia for five days and last night when I returned to the Waines' home, Steve was not in my shelves. As I was brushing my teeth, Steve returned this time on my wall. Not sure as to how to address Steve being unwelcomed in my room I asked Audrey how she thought I should go about killing something of this size. She grabbed a shoe of mine, and then asked if I had one a little bigger, and then swung, trapped it, and used two hands to squish it. To say the least, I was not sad to report that Steve died last night and I slept very well.

The people here are beautiful and I want to just hold each little child on my lap with their beautiful braids in multiple patterns all over their head. Orphans are a huge number here from both war and from parents giving their children to the adoption agencies in hope that they will be able to be fed and clothed because the parents can not afford it. Malaria causes the most deaths in Liberia and usually happens before a child is 5 years old. The medical statistics of this country will blow you away. Just a few years ago ever 1 in 3 children would die before the age of 5. Malnutrition and Malaria are the major causes of this high mortality rate. In the areas where Equip has set up clinics the mortality rate has now decreased to 10% among kids under 5 years old. There is much work to be done but the Lord is bringing His love among the people through these health clinics and prayer.

There continues to be much devastation from the Civil War that was said to have ended in 2003 but many Liberians, whom I talk to, say that the war is still going on because life for them has not improved much. Many call Monrovia, "the biggest Village in the World." Monrovia is the capital city and still people are cooking on coal stoves on the mud floor of their wood and grass huts. Roads are still devastated from the war and due to the heavy rainfall June through October the roads are mudded pot-wholes and many are near impossible to pass. There still is no electricity current in the entire country. They live off of rice that they only import. They do not grow their own rice because of the huge push in the past has been for the production of rubber from the large organizations like Firestone. So Liberians work harvesting rubber trees instead of building up agriculture and growing rice and greens which they rely on for food to meet their own needs. The Liberians were told that if they harvest the needed rubber they would be repaid in rice. Now, the price of rice in rising and since Liberian families have no means of producing their own rice, families are struggling to pay for food.

Liberian English is the only language spoken here and it has been fun and challenging to learn. It is difficult to make sense of at first but I am getting the hang of it. You basically put an “o” at the end of the last word in your sentence, “th” is pronounced as “t”, and they usually just pronounce the first few letters of the word which can be tricky at times to figure out what they are saying. People have explained it to me as speaking lazy English. Church sermons are powerful. God has gifted these people with the ability to speak with Power when they call on the name of the Lord! Liberians feel they have to dress nice to go to church that forces many people to not be able to come to worship because they have no money for cloths. I asked two young boys if they went to church on Sunday and they said that they could not because they didn’t have any cloths. They were dressed in old, beaten, tee shirts with wholes in every seam, and underwear that had wholes in the seat part of the underwear and my heart just hurt for them. I asked them if they knew about God and that Jesus loved them so much and they said, “yes”.

I just returned from Greenville, which is in the Sino county of Liberia. I feel very blessed to have had the opportunity to travel there because not many who live or work in Liberia have been there. Greenville is extremely remote, with little to none outside access or communication, huge medical and educational needs, and it was the area where most of the war was fought since it is a port. Buildings are now bombed shells of concrete; families eat only if the fishermen are able to catch fish during the day. Like the rest of Liberia there is no electricity but where many companies in the cities can use generators, people in Greenville do not have enough money to support a generator and getting it there would be difficult. It took us 9 ½ hours to arrive in Greenville from Monrovia, crossing over bridges I was just praying that we would be able to stay on and not fall off or break while we were driving over them, driving through red mud dirt wholes that came close to covering the hood of our car a few times, digging ourselves out of a few mud pits when we got stuck. It took us over 13 hours to drive back. It was as if we were going four wheeling down the Swede-Lake Trail for the Alaskans reading this. Equip has 6 clinics there so I was able to volunteer at the clinics, see some kids, help with organization of one of the new clinics that just started, and see some of the great teaching needs in Liberia of simple water sanitation, malaria prevention, the need to cover your poop when you used the bathroom in the woods, and keeping drinking water covered to prevent flies and other bacteria from contaminating the water. The clinics can do all the vaccines and treatment of malaria to the villages!

I am so excited to be here. I know that I will not have time to write these kinds of emails often but please pray for Liberia when you think about it. Pray for the orphans and that the government would again allow these adoption agencies to open to allow children to be adopted to the US and other countries. They recently closed all adoptions and it has been a huge devastation among many children who were almost through the long process of adoption. Pray for the lies these people believe in terms of traditional medicine that has caused much evil to be practiced among the Liberians. Pray that people in Liberia will worship God in Spirit and Truth and that all the traps they fall into with believing that appearance, money, and status is important or needed to praise the Lord would be removed!

I love you all and am so excited to be in Liberia and see all the ways that God is moving! Pray that I would be expectant for the Power of God to rain down on Liberia!

Sarah Joy