Friday, June 3, 2005

The only other white face on the plane during our flight from Ghana to Liberia was a very pleasant and helpful gentleman who works with the benevolence services of the Mormon Church. He lives in Ghana and makes the trip to Liberal occasionally. He strongly recommended that we go immediately into Monrovia and find the Bellview Airline office, show them our return tickets, and watch as they wrote our name on their manifest. He insisted that the possession of a ticket had little value and that if the manifest was full when we got ready to return to Ghana and our names were not on it, we would not be allowed on the plane. The airline only goes to Ghana a couple of times a week. After our experience in getting tickets to leave Ghana, we had no reason to doubt him, so we resolved to follow his advice even though it would add more than an hour to our trip to Weala and inconvenience our host.

Our arrival at the Roberts International Airport was without incident. The airport is located about an hour east of Monrovia. We cleared customs and immigration without incident and were met by George Tengbeh, his wife, and several other church members. Transportation was provided by one of George’s brothers who drives a taxi-van for a living.

Since we did not know what kind of transportation might be available, we left our larger suitcases at the Village of Hope in Ghana and transferred the bare minimum supplies into carry-on luggage for the trip to Liberia. For reasons they didn’t choose to explain, the airline wouldn’t let us carry the luggage on even, requiring us to check it, even though the Boeing 737 cabin could have easily accommodated it. Not taking the large luggage turned out to be a good decision since the only way it could have been transported in Liberia would have been to strap it to the top of the van and our welcome to Monrovia was an extreme and prolonged deluge of rain. Our luggage got wet inside the van. Everything would have been soaked if it had been outside.

After convincing George that we needed to go to Monrovia instead of taking the shortcut straight north to Weala, we made our way to the Bellview office and waited in line to watch them write our name on the return flight manifest. It seems that other passengers knew this peculiarity as well. Bellview doesn’t own any computers in Ghana or Liberia and everything is done by hand. As it turned out, the return flight was indeed full and we would not have been on it if our new friend had not educated us in the matter.

George found a man on the street who could exchange some of the limited money we had left into Liberian dollars. One US dollar exchanges for about 57 Liberian dollars. Since the man only had small Liberian bills, the exchange resulted in a very large wad of bills. Liberia doesn’t use any coins at this time.

Our next stop was at a grocery store where I picked up some rice and peanut butter to supplement the meager food supplies we brought with us from the states. We also purchased several liters of bottled water since there would be none available anywhere near Weala.

All of this was accomplished during a heavy torrential downpour, and we were all glad to be on our way toward Weala. Depending on time spent at UN roadblocks, time spent winding through crowded road-side markets, and time spent changing flat tires (we only had one) the trip from Monrovia to Weala can be made in about an hour and a half.

We knew that the list of unavailable things included hotels, air conditioning, plumbing, running water, and electricity. Other than that we didn’t have any idea what kind of living arrangements George had made for us. As it turned out, the brethren there found a house just down the hill from the church property where George and his family live. The house was still under construction. It has a concrete floor and 5 rooms. Three of the rooms were far enough along to be inhabited. A small table and some school desks were moved into one room. The bedroom had two twin size mats on the floor and the third room had two buckets of water for bathing.

Most houses where we visited in Africa have walls constructed from dirt blocks that are made at the site. Some sort of white protective coating is painted on the blocks to give them weather resistance to keep them from melting in the prolonged rainy season. Since our house was new and shiny white, the brethren dubbed it the “White House” and Rudy declared that he would rather be a guest in that “White House” than the one in Washington DC.

Since the building had no screens on the windows, we felt it necessary to close the doors and solid wooden shutters at night for mosquito control. This seemed to work ok but it made a hot environment even hotter. We felt the effects of being spoiled to air conditioning as we lay on a concrete floor in 95 degree / humidity with no air flow. I am thankful that we were able to enjoy the first two nights in blissful ignorance of the other inhabitants of the house, several very large spiders and centipedes. They left equally large reminders on the walls and floor where they were squashed.

We were in Weala four full days in addition to two travel days. George made sure that our time was fully occupied and well spent. Daylight lasts for about 12 to 13 hours year around near the equator. Since there is no electricity, not much happens after dark.

Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday mornings George organized the graduates, some visiting preachers, and Rudy and me into 4 teams and we scattered out through to community going door-to-door announcing the Gospel campaign and conducting Bible studies. Not only were we welcomed and anticipated, but if we inadvertently skipped a house we would likely be challenged as to why we hadn’t stopped there. The afternoons of those three days were spent preaching. I preached Saturday and Rudy and I both preached Monday and Tuesday.

Sunday morning Rudy taught the Bible class and I had the sermon. Sunday afternoon Rudy gave the commencement address for the graduation exercise for the 10 graduates of the Weala School of Evangelism. Since the church building is too small to hold the anticipated graduation crowd, a make-shift shelter was erected of poles and tarps. It worked fine as a shade from the sun and it would have even worked during the torrential rain that occurred during the ceremony if the wind had not come up. Unfortunately, about halfway through Rudy’s commencement address, an unusually strong wind blew through causing the rain-laden tarps to dump their accumulated water directly onto the audience, thus putting a real damper on Rudy’s speech. The storm was short lived, a semblance of order was soon restored, and the program proceeded through to completion.

If you look at the pictures of these meetings, you may wonder about the microphone you see Rudy, George, and me using. Since there is no electricity in Weala, one of the brethren from Monrovia who works with World Bible School brought out a generator and a public address system. We didn’t need the amplification for our own gathering, but George felt obliged to share our preaching with the rest of the community, and as far as I am aware, no one complained.

The tangible result of our preaching and door-to-door evangelism during the four days we were in Weala, Liberia was the baptism of 15 souls into Jesus Christ.

We have also recommended that Sunset International accept Weala School of Evangelism as an applicant school in their ministry training network. Our plans are to provide George with his own generator, television, DVD player, voltage regulator, and a complete set of the Sunset Curriculum on DVD for both the training of himself, his teachers, and future students. This curriculum set is 38 full courses taught by the Sunset instructors in Lubbock.

George’s father, Joseph Tengbeh, somehow managed to acquire 8 ½ acres of prime land right on the highway going through Weala. This is also the main north/south road through Liberia. In 2003 George brought his family back to Liberia from Ghana where he had fled in exile during the prolonged civil war that ravaged the country from 1989 through 2003. In an 18 month period, George has established a church that has grown to about 70 members, started an academic school, and graduated the first class from the Weala school of Evangelism. In addition, he oversees a free clinic that the church runs. The clinic is long on caring but almost devoid of even basic first-aid supplies.

In addition to the church building, school building, and residences that are there new, George plans to use the property to house an orphanage for children whose parents died in the carnage of the last decade, and a dormitory for ministry training students.

Daylight Wednesday morning found us packed and waiting on the side of the road for the taxi-van to arrive to take us back to Roberts International Airport. On our trip back we took the shortcut through the Firestone Rubber Plantation. Firestone began its Liberian operation in 1926. The Company owns over one million acres in Liberia. They shut down operations in 1989 when the war broke out and started back in 1997 and somehow managed to continue through the ensuing years of conflict. They employ about 14,000 Liberians, and, by most accounts, they leave a lot to be desired both in the way they treat their employees and the way they contribute to the country.

Liberia is a beautiful country rich in natural resources. Greed, lust for power, government mismanagement and corruption, illiteracy, and anarchy have raped the land and its people. In spite of that the church is alive and well and growing. As far as I know, there are no foreign missionaries among the churches of Christ in Liberia. There are a few churches and individuals in the USA sending some support to some of the preachers, teachers, and World Bible School workers in Monrovia.

The presence of 15,000 UN peacekeeping troops and the election scheduled for October of 2005 is holding out the hope that the worst may be behind and that there may possibly be a future.

Without exception, the people we interacted with were warm, welcoming, and wonderful. I know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ will go forward regardless of circumstances, but I am praying that this long suffering people will be allowed to enjoy some of the simplest of conveniences and medical advances so much of the modern world takes for granted.