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Spooky

On the last day (Sunday, July 17) of our time in Liberia, our hostess and guide Frances Porte invited us to attend worship with her. Her congregation, the First United Methodist Church of Robertsports, was meeting jointly with St. Peter's United Methodist Church, a congregation whose building is located a two-hour drive outside Monrovia. The combined service was held at United Methodist University in Monrovia.

The story the Rev. Unisah S. Conteh, the pastor of St. Peter's, told me helped me understand better the dislocation the people of Liberia have experienced. He explained to me that most of St. Peter's members had fled from their homes into Monrovia during the civil war. Their belongings had been looted and their homes damaged. Even though the war had ended in August 2003, almost two years earlier, most of St. Peter's members do not have the resources to repair their homes or to reestablish themselves back in their home community. So they have stayed on in Monrovia, hoping someday to move back home.

Once a month, Rev. Conteh told me, church members rent a bus for L$1,050 (US$21) and drive home to worship in their own church building. The other three Sundays each month they worship in Monrovia wherever they can find space, often in joint services with other congregations.

During the service I sat up front with Rev. Conteh. He asked me to write down my name and the name of my church so he could introduce me to the congregation. I wrote down my name and the name of my church: "Foundry UMC." He looked at the paper, then he looked at me, then he looked at the paper again. He got up and walked over to where his choir was sitting and borrowed a hymnal from a choir member. It was one of the old Methodist hymnals that had been replaced in most of our U.S. churches 15 years ago when the new United Methodist Hymnal was published. Stamped in gold on the cover of the hymnal was "Foundry Methodist Church."

Foundry's old hymnals had somehow ended up at St. Peter's Church in Liberia. For more than a decade members of St. Peter's had seen the name "Foundry Methodist Church" on the cover of their hymnals but knew absolutely nothing about Foundry except its name and the name of the person listed inside the front cover in whose memory or honor the book had been donated decades ago.

Without knowing about St. Peter's hymnals, Jane slipped out of her seat to sneak up front to show me the hymnal she was using. Stamped on the cover of her hymnal in gold print was "Arch Street Methodist Church," the name of the church in Philadelphia I had last pastored. First Church of Robertsports in Liberia was using the old hymnals from the last church I had pastored.

So here's the thing: Two congregations happen to worship together in a joint service on the Sunday Jane and I happen to be in Liberia and happen to be invited to worship with them. One of the two congregation happens to use old hymnals from the church I currently serve. The other congregation happens to use hymnals from the last church I served.

What are the odds? What can this mean? Is somebody trying to tell me something?

United Methodist is frontrunner in Liberian presidential race, scholars say

By Dean Snyder and Jane Malone

MONROVIA, Liberia - It is quite likely that a United Methodist will become the first woman to be elected president of Liberia, according to interviews with faculty members and students at Liberia's United Methodist University.

University faculty members and students identified Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, formerly an official with the United Nations, the World Bank, and Liberia's Finance agency, as the frontrunner in Liberia's presidential race during impromptu conversations July 16. The faculty members interviewed included, among others, a political scientist, a theologian, and the university president.

University president J. Oliver Duncan called Johnson Sirleaf a "very strong, very focused leader," and said that many Liberians "are dreaming of bringing forth the first woman president of Liberia."

Johnson Sirleaf, an active member of the First United Methodist Church of Monrovia, is one of more than 50 aspirants who have announced their intention to run for the nation's highest office. Some will run as nominees of Liberia's 30 political parties; others may run as independents. Candidates have until Aug. 6 to fulfill requirements established by Liberia's National Elections Commission to qualify as either party nominees or independent candidates. Campaigning officially begins Aug. 11. The election will be held October 11.

The Rev. Julius Sarwolo Nelson, Jr., dean of the university's Gbarnga School of Theology, said that out of the many contenders only five or six will actually turn out to be viable candidates. He believes that during the final weeks of the campaign, the number of candidates who have a chance of winning will drop to two or three. Johnson Sirleaf will run as "the standard bearer" - a term commonly used in Liberia for presidential candidates nominated by political parties - of the recently formed Unity Party. p>

Johnson Sirleaf's candidacy is currently being ratified at Unity Party conventions -similar to state-level party primaries in the United States - being held county by county throughout the nation. The numbers attending Unity Party conventions have been exceptionally high, and support for Johnson Sirleaf has been enthusiastic, according to observers.

Blessing Harris, a political scientist on the university faculty, agrees that Johnson Sirleaf will likely be the leading candidate when the campaign officially opens. "Ellen is a capable person; she is educated," he said. "She has had experience working in government in Liberia, and she has worked in the U.N. for quite a while."

But Harris warned that the campaign could include some surprises. Because many of Liberia's schools could not function during the country's 14-year civil war that ended in 2003, the literary rate in the nation is low, Harris said. Some studies cited by university faculty suggest that only two out of 10 Liberians are now literate, a drastic drop from pre-civil-war literacy levels. Harris was not sure the same qualities in candidates that are admired by more educated voters will win the votes of less literate Liberians.

Harris also wondered whether Liberia's young adults might be attracted by the candidacy of soccer superstar, George Weah, who recently returned to Liberia to become the nominee of the Congress for Democratic Change Party. Weah recently transferred his membership from the First United Methodist Church of Monrovia to George Patten United Methodist Church, a growing, youth-oriented congregation located in the midst of Monrovia's market area.

Wyeatta Moore, a young adult studying sociology at United Methodist University, agreed that young adults, especially young men, are drawn to Weah because he is a sports hero. But, she said, in a nation where many feel leaders have been self-interested and corrupt, some young adults look to Weah as a possible alternative to "business as usual" in Liberian politics. "They don't see him as a regular politician," Moore said. "He is the one who is the outsider who is not looking for money because he is already rich."

Young adults, aged 18 to 30, make up half of Liberia's 1.3 million registered voters and are expected to have a significant impact on the election. Moore believes, however, that most young women will vote for Johnson Sirleaf. "Everybody is saying it is time for a woman president," she said. Over 50 percent of those registered to vote in the Oct. election are women, she added.

Ambassador T. Ernest Eastman, dean of the university's College of Liberal and Fine Arts, has been impressed by the response so far to Johnson Sirleaf's Unity Party, but was cautious. "No one wants to bet completely on her, but she may emerge as the central candidate," the former Liberian secretary of state said. "We don't know how the election will go until the campaign."

The professors said perceptions about the ethnic and religious affiliations of presidential aspirants, and their vice-presidential candidates yet to be named, will also affect the campaign. Most candidates are Christians from Monrovia, Liberia's largest urban center by far, yet many Liberians in rural counties are suspicious of urban and Christian people. They identify more with tribal affiliations and non-Christian traditions.

Even though she is urban and Christian, Johnson Sirleaf appeals to some rural voters because she is a descendant of a powerful rural tribe and the widow of a Muslim man, the professors said. Eastman and Nelson emphasized that the results of the campaign will be influenced by each aspirant's ability to select vice-presidential candidates able to reach out to rural and tribal voters outside of Monrovia.

During a brief interview July 15, Johnson Sirleaf said she is optimistic. "We do not have as many financial resources as some other parties," she said, "but I am reassuring the people that the money we are spending is money that has been earned honestly. I tell them we have not mortgaged Liberia's future by taking money with strings attached, and people seem to be responding to this message."

Johnson Sirleaf said her party has developed a strong slate of candidates in local races for seats in parliament, and that local support for these candidates will strengthen the national presidential campaign effort. According to university faculty members,

in addition to Johnson Sirleaf and Weah, others expected to be strong presidential candidates include:

* Varney Sherman, nominee of the Liberian Action Party, the party currently in control of Liberia's interim government;

* Togba Nah Tipoteh, an economist and founder of the popular social change organization Justice in Africa who will run as the nominee of the Liberia People's Party (Tipoteh is also a United Methodist);

* Winston Tubman, nominee of the National Democratic Party of Liberia, the party established by former President Samuel Doe, former U.N. secretary general representative to Somalia, and the nephew of the late President William V. S. Tubman (the Tubman family has historically been strongly identified with the United Methodist Church);

* Charles Brumskine, the nominee of the Liberty Party, a lawyer who once was close to exiled President Charles Taylor but who left the Taylor government and fled to the United States due to philosophical differences (he now attends a nondenominational church, although his father was a highly respected district superintendent in the Liberian Annual Conference); and

* Roland Massaquoi, secretary of agriculture in Taylor's administration, the candidate of Taylor's National Patriotic Party.

Faculty and students agreed that, no matter who wins the election, the new president faces a daunting challenge. The war torn country has been without centralized electricity and operable water and sewage systems for the past 15 years. Because highways have not been repaired and are now pitted with potholes, transports that used to take 45 minutes can now take hours. The rural population fled to the city to escape the rebels and lost their farming equipment to looters, so agricultural production is limited and the cities are overcrowded. The unemployment rate is estimated at 95 percent, and no one is paying taxes. U.N. troops are still stationed throughout the country to keep the peace.

Faculty and students agreed that this will be a critical election for Liberia's future. Eastman said that strong presidential leadership is essential to maintain peace in Liberia. "Our soldiers have still not surrendered all their weapons; they are buried," he said. "They [the combatants in Liberia's civil war] are untrained in anything else but fighting; the only thing they know of family life is war." United Methodist University faculty members estimate that 110,000 Liberians or more are ex-combatants.

Ganta Mission persistently rebuilds after 2003 bombings

By Dean Snyder and Jane Malone

GANTA, Liberia -- Sampson Nyanti is on his cell phone trying to get building supplies delivered from Monrovia. Workers are rebuilding Ganta Mission’s elementary school, and he doesn’t want the project stalled or workers idle for lack of materials.

The workers’ salaries are being paid by a grant from USAID for which Nyanti is very grateful --only four Liberian United Methodist schools have received such grants-- but he has to keep the workers supplied with materials. In a nation still disorganized from 14 years of civil war --monster potholes have made long stretches of Liberia’s untended highways barely passable-- getting supplies delivered promptly is demanding work for Nyanti, the associate superintendent of administration for Ganta Mission.

Yet, supervising construction on the elementary school is just a small part of Nyanti’s responsibilities. He is also initiating a poultry project. A thousand chicks are arriving tomorrow from nearby Guinea, and a newly reconstructed chicken shed must be ready for them if they are to survive. A truckload of chicken feed has been delivered but it got soaked by a sudden downpour (it is the rainy season in Liberia) and needs to be spread out to dry.

Passing through the high school’s home economics building to say hello to teachers and students making clothes at pedal-operated sewing machines, Nyanti hurries to see if workers installing a new tin roof on the mission woodshop have everything they need. The multi-room woodshop is one of many buildings at Ganta Mission that lost its roof to missiles shot by rebels from across the Guinea border during the final months of the civil war in 2003.

At the Ganta Mission warehouse, Nyanti checks to see how many bags remain from the last delivery of cement. Bags of cement not immediately needed for reconstruction at Ganta Mission are resold to nearby residents for a small markup. The profits help support the mission.

Then Nyanti stops by the metal workshop to greet welders who are repairing a livestock feeder. He takes a minute to examine charcoal stoves being assembled and welded in the workshop. Charcoal stoves are the primary cooking fixture in most Liberian homes but, since the war, few such consumer goods are produced locally. Almost everything for sale in Liberia is imported from elsewhere and is expensive. Nyanti hopes the sale of the stoves will generate income to help pay mission workers’ salaries.

In a room in back of the metal workshop, he checks in with carpenters using a new band saw and drill press recently shipped from the US. The carpenters are busy making student desks and chairs in a crowded temporary woodshop set up in the back of the metal workshop, one of the buildings that did not lose its roof to the bombing. Germany’s Methodist Church recently gave Ganta Mission a contract to supply new desks to 20 elementary schools that lost furniture and other supplies to looting during the civil war. The carpenters are also building new chairs for high school students. Nyanti will try to figure out how to pay for them later. The carpenters are training ex-combatants -- young men who had been drafted by the rebels, sometimes when they were as young as 12 or 13, to fight in the war. They spent their youth fighting and now are eager to learn a trade so they can make an honest living. A small grant from the United Methodist Church in the United States underwrites the salaries of 10 ex-combatants, who are paid one U.S. dollar a day, to learn carpentry. Nyanti wishes he had funds to train more. Finding useful trades for the thousands of ex-combatants -often still in their 20s and 30s -- is essential to the nation’s future stability.

Enterprises such as raising poultry, sewing, the woodshop, the metal workshop and welding equipment, and the building supply warehouse are projects Nyanti hopes will produce enough income, along with the grants, to pay the salaries of the mission’s 70 employees and to create jobs for others in this region of a nation experiencing a 95 percent unemployment rate. He especially concentrates on the projects that will help the mission become self-sufficient and less dependent on grants. Like most Liberian United Methodist church leaders, he knows what it is like to be in the middle of a project and have funding dry up.

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In the midst of his busy day, Nyanti pauses to tell visitors from the United States, trailing behind him, about George W. Harley, a missionary who came to Liberia from Durham, N.C., in 1926. Speaking with reverence, repeating the missionary’s full name every time he refers to him, Nyanti tells the visitors that George W. Harley cut his way to Ganta through the bush when there were no roads, believing that God was calling him to serve in this remote community. The ministry George W. Harley began in 1926, Nyanti says, grew to become Liberia’s most sophisticated mission, including one of Liberia’s finest hospitals, until it was nearly destroyed by rebel missiles between June and August, 2003, in a final angry rampage just before the war’s end. Nyanti tells his visitors that George W. Harley’s ashes are buried beneath a stone monument outside the church building at Ganta Mission. The monument used to have a marker honoring George W. Harley, he says, but the rebels stole it.

Nyanti hurries his visitors past a section of Ganta Mission’s more than 400 acres that is not available to be visited. Surrounded by razor wire, it is occupied by a Bangladeshi contingent of United Nations troops who have taken over a complex of Ganta Mission buildings as the base for their peacekeeping activities in the region.

Past the U.N. compound is Ganta Hospital with many of its wings and out-buildings in ruins. Having once provided inpatient care to 250 patients a night and outpatient treatment to another 175 patients a day, Ganta Hospital has only recently managed to restore medical care to some of those who make their way to the hospital from throughout northeastern Liberia as well as from nearby regions of Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire.

Williette Bartrea, head nurse of Ganta Hospital, says the hospital, which reopened to just a few patients in April 2004, is now caring for some 60 patients daily. The hospital’s blood testing lab used to be one of the best in Liberia, Bartrea says, but all of the equipment and supplies were stolen by the rebels. Slowly over the past year the lab has been rebuilt and basic blood tests are being performed there again, although the capacity to do the more sophisticated tests Ganta Hospital was once known for awaits the resources to purchase additional equipment.

Bartrea had relocated to Monrovia when the hospital’s nursing school was moved to the crowded United Methodist University campus in the nation’s capital, far from Ganta, for security reasons. After teaching in Monrovia for almost two years, Bartrea recently returned to Ganta because it is her home, and she worries for the welfare of the region’s people with no access to health care. She is praying, Bartrea says, that the nursing school will soon be able to return to Ganta, but many of the school’s buildings will need to be repaired first.

Last February Liberia’s interim government promised Ganta Hospital a grant to help repair the hospital, but so far it has not delivered on its promise, Nyanti says He had hoped the money would help rebuild some of the hospital’s bombed-out wings.

Because of limited usable space, at times the children’s beds need to be pushed into the hallways, according to the Rev. John T. Togba, Ganta Hospital chaplain. Togba, who stayed behind during the 2003 bombing to rescue a child who was a patient, was the last person to leave the hospital. Bombs were exploding all around him, sometimes in places where he had been standing moments before they hit. He is still amazed that he and the little girl he was trying to rescue survived. “Praise the Lord,” he says, “The little girl God used me to save is doing well today.”

United Methodist schools determined to educate Liberia’s children

By Dean Snyder and Jane Malone

BUCHANAN, Liberia – “Give me pen, not gun” reads a hand-written poster on the cafeteria wall of J.F. Yancy School at Camphor Mission near Buchanan, Liberia. The slogan is not hyperbole.

Beginning in the early 1990’s, boys as young as 12 and 13 were recruited or forcibly drafted into rebel armies, given guns, and deployed to fight and kill other Liberians for more than a decade.

Since Liberia’s former president Charles Taylor finally stepped aside in 2003 and the United Nations has deployed peacekeeper troops, Liberia’s deadly 14-year civil war has largely subsided and order has been restored to much of the nation. Yet, the chaotic war took countless lives and has left the nation’s buildings, roads, schools, businesses, and government in disarray. Liberia has had no centralized systems for providing electricity, sanitary water, safe disposal, or trash collection for a decade-and-a-half now. Unemployment is estimated at 95 percent.

In an election scheduled for October 11, Liberia will select a new president, and hopefully, the nation, once considered the “jewel of West Africa,” will be able to rebuild.

In the meantime, Liberian United Methodists are eager to get the nation’s children back into the classroom. As the 2004-2005 school year drew to a close in July, Richard Clarke, director of the Department of General Education and Ministries for the Liberian Annual Conference, reported that its 120 schools are at least partially back in operation, although some of them are meeting in church buildings because classrooms vandalized during the war are unusable. To recover the scope and quality of education that characterized its pre-war school programs, the Liberian Annual Conference must overcome overwhelming challenges: ruined school buildings; insufficient funds to pay teachers; the need to train new teachers; shortages in basic school supplies and school furniture; and inadequate resources to cover costs for families who cannot afford the modest tuition (the equivalent of U.S.$12-67 per year, depending on the school’s location).

Circumstances at J.F. Yancy School and two other United Methodist schools in the Buchanan vicinity in southeast Liberia illustrate the desperate lack of resources in the nation’s United Methodist schools.

Yancy School is a boarding and day school located on the grounds of Camphor Mission a few miles outside Buchanan. Its faculty and students were forced to flee Camphor when the popular boarding school’s campus was overtaken by rebel soldiers. Since the war’s end, the school has reopened and now serves 184 elementary and junior high students, a fraction of its former enrollment. Only a few students live at the school; the majority live walk to school from villages as far away as two or three miles.

Other programs at Camphor Mission that serve the school's students and families as well as the larger community include a health clinic, a church with a congregation of 300, and a fledgling agricultural project that includes soap-making, vegetable growing, and raising pigs and chickens.

Arthur Jimmy, director of Camphor Mission, is eager to repair Camphor Mission’s schools and other buildings so its educational and other programs can become fully functional again. As Jimmy guided visitors from the United States around the school and mission grounds July 12, he talked about the need for books, salaries for teachers, and repairs to the buildings. Then he added, almost in a whisper, “We have another obstacle, a big one.”

The mission’s only source of water is an untreated shallow stream. As Jimmy led his visitors down a narrow muddy trail through the bush to the stream, he explained that the mission desperately needed a source of clean potable water for the health of the school’s students, but also for the thousand nearby residents who depend on the Camphor clinic for health care and midwifery. Without a well or reservoir, students and mission personnel must carry water from the stream100 yards up a steep hill to the dorms and cafeteria. The stream is so shallow that a bucket can be filled only half-full at a time. Because the water is untreated, students and faculty often suffer from gastrointestinal illnesses and even cholera.

The cost of building a reservoir where water can be collected and purified -- about U.S.$60,000, Jimmy said -- is almost inconceivable in an economy where families can afford to contribute only small tuition payments and where many are not able to pay tuition in full from the small incomes they make selling their meager crops.

Five bumpy miles away --Liberia's roads have had no maintenance forthe past 15 years-- is the Brighter Future Children Rescue Center, a United Methodist school system currently serving more than 500 students from first through twelfth grades. Built with funding from Operation Classroom, a program sponsored by the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries, the W.P.L. Brumskine High School constructed in the early 1990s as the civil war was beginning is already overcrowded.

During the war, the school property was occupied by refugees driven from their homes. About 2,500 refugees were crowded into the school’s buildings, according to Chapman L. Adams, Brumskine’s principal. After the displaced families had been resettled by the United Nations, the school’s teachers returned to repair and repaint the buildings.

As the school year was ending this July, Adams worried about where he would put students in September when classes begin again. The high school has four classrooms. This year the school had one senior class with 50 students, a junior class with 50 students, and two sophomore classes with 50 students each. Next year he will need two sophomore and two junior classrooms, as well as a classroom for seniors. The year after that, he expects to need six classrooms.

The campus includes a large metal frame structure that was once covered with a tent, until refugees tore it apart to make makeshift shelters. The large tent had provided space for three elementary classes. If Adams could erect a new tent on the old frame, he could move elementary classes into the tent and expand the high school classrooms. To do so would cost about $2,000, he said. Barely able to pay teachers’ salaries, he has no idea where he will be able to find the money to rebuild the tent by September.

The third school, the J.C. Early United Methodist School, is located inside the city limits of Buchanan in a neighborhood called Gbehjohn. The school was begun during the war for students who were forced to flee from Camphor Mission into the city. Faculty and parents built a makeshift school out of dried reeds and bamboo in this urban community, less vulnerable to rebels than Camphor Mission because of the city’s population density.

Once Camphor Mission reopened, Buchanan clearly continued to need a school, so the makeshift school has become permanent. It now serves 316 students in elementary and junior high classes. Recently the school administration recognized that the bamboo buildings constructed in haste 11 years earlier would not serve the needs of a permanent school.

With almost no resources, the school is being rebuilt literally one block at a time. Dirt is carried to the school from nearby landfill sources in wheelbarrows, then dampened with water and pounded into an oblong wooden frame template. Each dirt block is then dried in the sun and used to build new walls. It is a slow process, said vice-principal Abraham K. Wilmot, but with no money to buy building materials, it is the only option.

One of the corollary benefits of a United Methodist school continuing in this Buchanan neighborhood after Camphor Mission reopened is the birth of a new congregation. The school buildings are used on Sunday mornings for worship and Sunday School by Gbenjohn United Methodist Church, a congregation begun by the Rev. George Mingle eight years ago. Despite the return of its earliest worshippers to Camphor Mission, the congregation has grown to more than 200 worshippers.

United Methodist schools in other rural communities throughout Liberia are trying to educate students in circumstances even more dire than those faced by the Buchanan area schools, according to Clarke. As the person responsible to oversee and support the United Methodist school system in Liberia, his highest priorities are training enough teachers to keep the school system supplied, finding scholarships to allow poverty-stricken families to send their children to school even when they can not pay full tuition, and getting the school buildings repaired. The difficulty of meeting this last goal especially troubles him. “In the rural communities, especially during the rainy season, it brings tears to your eyes to see where students are sitting,” Clarke said.

Leaving for Liberia

Tomorrow I leave for Liberia with a study team that will meet with workers and leaders of the Liberian labor movement. We will hopefully help to build a stronger relationship between the workers of Liberia and the United States.

Next Sunday Jane will join me and we will spend a week visiting with our United Methodist brothers and sisters in Liberia.

United Methodism, like the United States, has a special relationship with Liberia. Most of the freed slaves, sponsored by the American Colonization Society, who migrated to establish the Republic of Liberia were Methodists. One of the first things they did upon arriving in Liberia was to build Methodist churches.

You can find a report of our last trip to Liberia in February here and a very helpful and touching interview with the Rev. Sabah T. Dweh-Chenneh, a pastor who works with youth and young adults in Liberia, here. More information about United Methodism in Liberia is available from the General Board of Global Ministries.

Jane and I are grateful to Bishop John Innis for facilitating our visit. He is a friend of Foundry Church, and our friend. I hope to post from Liberia, but you can never be sure. Liberia depends on gasoline-fueled generators for electricity.

We appreciate your prayers. We expect to return July 19. Also, please keep Foundry's Volunteers In Mission who leave tomorrow morning for Zimbabwe in your thought and prayers.

An e-mail from Liberia

John Juech has gracious given me permission to post portions of an e-mail he wrote me from Liberia. John is a Foundry person currently working with the UN in Liberia. He was responding to an essay found here.

Rev. Snyder, I just finished reading the article about Liberia that you wrote for the United Methodist News Service. (I found it at http://www.umc.org/interior.asp?mid=7268) Thank you so much for providing witness about your trip! And, especially for showing people the positive side of this troubled land, the real "story", as you put it.

I feel great gratitude toward anyone that helps raise awareness about the plight of America's forgotten ex-colony in West Africa. It is tragic how few Americans know about our long and often damaging relationship with this country.

The last few days, I have been hosting a journalist from the New York Times Magazine who is writing a story on Liberia and the elections. His article should be published in the NYT magazine sometime this summer. So, look out for that and, whatever else you can do to raise awareness about the importance of the upcoming elections would b! e tremendously appreciated.

We are right in the middle of the voter registration period at the moment here in Liberia. It has been a truly Sisyphean task to set up centers throughout the country for Liberians to register to vote at and then getting the word out, but it seems to be paying dividends so far. Watching ordinary citizens wait in long lines in the hot sun to dip their fingers in indelible ink and register to vote has been one of the most joyous and rewarding experiences of my life. We are expecting that nearly 1.5 million Liberians will register, which represents fully 50% of the population, an amazing figure in a country almost bereft of paved roads and other types of infrastructure.

It is difficult to know what the outcome of the elections in October will be, and a bit scary as well, for the future of the country very much rides on the outcome. ... Many days I am hopeful about an outcome that would help ordinary Liberians; other days, I fear that the influence of money and corruption will be too much to overcome. Certainly, I constantly pray that things work out in a way that the country's fragile peace process can be maintained and built upon.

Although living and working in this country taxes every aspect of my being, it also brings great joy to have the opportunity to assist Liberians to pick up the pieces and try and build a better future. Not a day goes by where I am not inspired by the courage and resilience of ordinary Liberians to make the most out of very difficult circumstances. It is so humbling as a privileged American to see this day in and day out and learn from Liberians and the way that they go about their lives. I feel so lucky to have this opportunity to be working for the United Nations and contributing to the peace process here.

I am sorry that we were not able to get together while you were here in Monrovia. That was a very hectic time for me, but I would have loved to see you and other representatives of the Methodist Church here, so I regret that it didn't work out. I always appreciated the messages that you delivered during my days at Foundry and the progressive leadership that you provided for the church.

Thanks so much, John Juech

Amid sad context, Liberia’s story inspires

A UMNS Commentary By Dean Snyder and Jane Malone

The danger of visiting Liberia, as we did in February during the 2005 Liberia Annual Conference, is that a visitor might easily confuse the context with the story.

The context is a nation that has experienced more than two decades of violence and years of political and economic devastation. It has been 14 years since Liberia, once the jewel of West Africa, has had centralized electricity, water or sewage systems. Buildings have either been destroyed in fighting between government troops and rebels or have deteriorated without occupants, repairs or maintenance.

(Continued here.)