One Year After: The Pictures

Sorry its taken so long, but the network has been taking a beating from West Africa.

We've published hundreds of pictures since we arrived in Liberia, and more than that if you count the months leading up to it. These are our ten best, we think. Look over the archives yourself. What would be your favorite?

Number 10-- Each face tells a different story as Liberians stand in line to vote, October 2005.

Number 9-- Traffic backs up on the way from Rivercess. Big hole in road. Car ahead stuck. Hands in pocket.

Our 8th most fave-- Noah on a Gambia beach at sunset. What else you want?

Lucky 7. Gbanga forest at dawn. Noah and I waiting to see what might emerge from the mist.

Favorite Image 6: Cheryl Brandsen of Calvin College and Enoch on a windy Atlantic beach. Who knows what may come from the meeting of these two minds?

What a beautiful pair. This is number 5.

Number 4 on our hit parade. Apple and Yers Trooly sharing a private moment. Hannah caught us.

Pic 3. An early water fight, with Renita doing some conflict transformation, and a tiny Nikki ready to defend the girls from an-up-to-no-good Lionel.

Photo number 2. Hannah and Betty-- not posed, I just snapped it. Love the hand dangling over Hannahs arm. And of course Betty's piercing eyes.

Still our favorite image, even after a year. Taken a few days after we got here-- Noah joined by new Liberian friends at the beach. Everywhere in the world, kids are kids.

One Year After

As we pass our one year anniversary being here, it is a good time for an update. We are witnessing a nation turning a corner, and we have turned one ourselves. We have seen free and fair elections in a war ravaged land, the first elected female national leader in African history, theft and violent death in our neighborhood, dysentery, malaria, and adjustment to a completely different climate and culture. We now eat torpagee, collard greens, cassava leaf, palm butter, eggplant, potato greens, pumpkin soup, peanut soup, and cabbage as regular entrees on a menu that sees rice or bulgur wheat and lots of pepper every day. We have adjusted to lizards, thumb-sized cockroaches and palm spanning spiders living with us, coal pots, hauling water from a well each day, flushing toilets with a bucket, never feeling very clean, limited electricity in the day, none after bedtime, no TV, and having to travel a half hour for unreliable internet access. We accept as a matter of course that here, if it breaks you don’t “get a new one,” you fix it or live without, and here the climate and country breaks everything faster, from fuel pumps to high tech inverters to mufflers to dishes to shoes.

We live in and among some of the poorest people in the world, who survive day to day on whatever they can find or eek out, who have lived through fifteen years of war, displacement and have seen terror and death close up, who fight hunger and disease, and who still say without hesitation that “God is good all the time.” We have seen two of our neighbors, a husband and a wife, die of different unnamed illnesses three weeks apart, leaving behind four orphans. We have seen another kill three intruders with an AK-47 who were attempting to break in to his home and hurt his family.

On July 24, we celebrated our year anniversary with me being arrested briefly for accidentally driving into a Presidential convoy, the car’s electrical system giving out, my computer screen beginning to fail and Dell telling me I need to take it to the US to get it fixed. But that day we also celebrated LEAD’s second class graduating, me preparing for some exciting training I’ll be doing for about 25 Liberian psychosocial workers, still so thankful for a succesful visit from Calvin and Kuyper Colleges, looking forward for a trip with the family to Mali later in August for the CRWRC West Africa Ministry Team meeting, and eating real chocolate cake baked by Hannah in our new propane stove.

So a year later Liberia is still Liberia, but a little more stable, a little less corrupt. The roads are a little better. Electricity is returning "small small." The rogues are still active, but losing as much as they are winning. Our neighbors are still heroically making life work day to day in the most challenging circumstances. The Reeds in Liberia are stronger, by far, and more adjusted to the “fix it or live without” way of life here. And you are still here—reading this, supporting us, supporting Liberia, and letting us know our journey is shared. We hope our picture of Liberia thus far has been fair and accurate, and we hope this second year will see us all still dancing with the One What Brung Us.

Chokon, Yers Trooly and Trokon afix razor wire to a vulnerable part of our wall while Enoch and Eastman supervise. We started and then the skies opened up, so we finished in the downpour.

Let's Play "Our Home, Vera's Home"

I’d like to tell you about Vera Brown. Vera has lived in our neighbor- hood since the civil wars began, about sixteen years ago. She is not married, late thirties, and has four children, Moriah, Trokon, Gift, and Prince. The children’s fathers are completely out of the picture. We met Vera through Trokon, her 17 year old son, who we had known as a helpful serious teenager. Trokon one day approached us to help him get back to school after being unable to attend for three years. We agreed to pay his tuition for this coming year, and in exchange, he does yard work for us every week. (In addition, Renita tutors him several times a week to get him ready for school-- He will be entering sixth grade.) In gratitude, Vera visited us and after a time we became impressed by her humility, her strength, her perseverance—and her poverty.

For some time before we knew her, she and her children lived on the $20.00 a month she made teaching nursery school to sixty community children. Through a variety of ordained circumstances, we came to ask her if she would like to work with us (and in the process quadruple her salary.) She said yes, and now is part of our world five days a week. She washes our clothes, shops and cooks Liberian dinners for us Monday through Friday, and helps with some light cleaning. A couple weeks ago, I asked her if I could share her story and pictures of her home life with you. She said, “Yes, Unca Bob.”

You know, I tend to complain a bit about our house. At around a thousand square feet, it would pass as a “handyman’s special” summer cottage in Michigan. One toilet does not work; there is limited electricity and no running water. The floor is covered with plastic sheets and it is always dirty. Most Americans I know tell us we are making a big sacrifice to live here. Whenever I find myself whining more than usual, I pull out my Dell laptop computer, look at the pictures I took of her life, and play a little exercise called “Our Home, Vera’s Home.”

Here’s how it goes:

The Reed family home. 1200 square feet of moistness.

The Vera Brown family home, with Vera, Trokon, Gift and Prince. Only about 300 square feet is usable, and some of that is the porch/kitchen.

The Reed family living room. As I say, the decor is "Summer Cottage Tacky."

The big room in the Brown family hous-- uninhabitable, and open to the elements.

The Reed Family sleeping quarters. Four people in three rooms on foam mattresses on beds. Note plenty of stuff.

The Brown family sleeping quarters. Five people in one 12' X 12' room on foam mats.