After 24 hours in transit, we arrived in Monrovia. The trip was uneventful, except for having three rolls of gorilla tape confiscated by airport security in Brussels. And one trunk didn’t make it all the way, but we’re hoping it arrives on tomorrow’s plane. We can wrestle with that detail on Monday.

Liberia is warm and humid, in the very early stages of the rainy season. There was a period of heavy showers this afternoon, but that broke the heaviness of the air, which was a relief. We’ve found a local restaurant with wireless access and good food, both of which are welcome right now. Tomorrow should be a quiet day, as most businesses are closed on Sundays. Monday we’ll kick into full gear, picking up the truck, which has been getting necessary repairs. Then we need to purchase a gas generator, pick up the barrels we shipped earlier and meet with USAID. Tuesday we leave for the school.

We’ll post again before then, but know that we’re safe and making progress. We’re anxious to make our way east and meet the students and teachers, but all in good time.

Photos by Alphonso Munah.

Right now, we’re sort of a neighborhood elementary school.  Most of the children are walking to school from the villages of Sayuo and Buway, each about a mile and a half from the classroom buildings that sit on a portion of the 150 acres of land donated by those villages.  A few older, strong kids are walking in from Whybo, about five miles away.

Meanwhile, enthusiasm is growing and we’ve been told that parents in other parts of Twarbo Region are eager to send their children to school.  They’re looking for solutions.  Having someplace for those kids to sleep is one problem, and it’s possible the local population could help us with that.  Having food for those kids is another problem, and the people of Twarbo are already helping with that — they’ve cleared land for a small farm on our campus, which has always been part of the plan and will be a key to sustaining the school.  But there’s no food from that yet.

So we’re again asking people to consider a regular gift that would pay for a student to go to the Dougbe River School.  We calculate that the cost of one student attending the school is $25 per month, and for now, most of that is food.  (It also includes the wages for our teachers.)  We feed the children breakfast when they arrive at school in addition to lunch.

We’re also raising money this year for a cafeteria building, in a drive that has been kicked off by a $7,500 mission partnership grant from the Presbytery of the Western Reserve.  We estimate that’s about a quarter of what the cafeteria will cost.  Currently, the children are eating in classrooms, which is an adequate solution for now but won’t work when we grow and we’re using the classroom buildings at full capacity.

The PayPal buttons on the right of this page are set up for one-time donations or subscription giving, with options on the pull-down menu.  Checks can be made out to Dougbe River Presbyterian School and sent to Noble Road Presbyterian Church, 2780 Noble Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44121.

Thank you for your interest in this vital project, which runs on land and labor from the people of Twarbo Region and money from donors who are mostly in the United States.

Our teaching staff is made up of six young people, all of them Liberians but most of them from more developed parts of the country, who have accepted the challenge of starting the first school in a remote region where there is no running water or electricity (yet). Photos by Alphonso Munah.

Enid Watson is the homeroom teacher for the A-B-C group, which includes a little over half of the children in the school. While we’re operating up to sixth grade, there is only one child each in grades 4-6.

More photos of teachers and students after the jump.

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Our PayPal interface is now more easily found on the home page of our website, drpsl.com, and it includes subscription options. There’s a “subscribe” button with a pull-down menu that will allow you to sponsor one child at $25 per month, or two children at $50, or share a sponsorship at $12.50. To make a one-time donation of any amount, use the “donate” button.

The Dougbe River Presbyterian School was built with small donations, and any amount you can give will be helpful because U.S. dollars go a long way in the Liberian economy. Subscriptions of any amount will help us ensure a steady flow of cash, which wasn’t really necessary when we were raising money for construction, but is crucial now because we have a payroll and students to feed.

If you prefer an offline donation, checks can be made out to Dougbe River Presbyterian School and mailed to Noble Road Presbyterian Church, 2780 Noble Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44121.

We’re grateful for your support, and so are the people of Twarbo Region.

Thanks to the hard work and inspiration of the folks at Tiyatien Health, there is now a useful map of Konobo District.

Ziah Town, where the big dot is, is the hub of the district. (We usually spell it Zieh. There are alternate spellings for many places in rural Liberia.) Follow the green-line road east of Zieh, turn right on the blue-line road, and our school is between Buway and Sayuo #2 (called that on maps because there’s another Sayuo in Grand Gedeh County). Dejilah, south of the blue line, is school founder Isaac Monah’s home village. This stuff can be confusing because definitions are in the eye of the beholder. When we say that we’ve planned and promised to serve 12 villages with the completed boarding-school campus, those are represented by more than 12 dots on the map, because there are some small settlements that are marked here as separate villages that we think of as parts of larger villages. And some of the eastern part of the map is cropped out of this view; to see the whole map, click on it. But this will give you the general idea.

It will also show you why building dormitories is so crucial to the full development of our mission. As you can see from the numbers between the dots, the area we’re trying to serve now — Whybo, Buway and Sayuo — is almost 11 kilometers long. The school is roughly equidistant between Buway and Sayuo, so children who are walking to school from Whybo are walking about 17 kilometers a day, round trip. You can understand why young children from Whybo haven’t been able to get to school.

Thanks to Tiyatien chief operating officer Peter Luckow for sending us a copy.

Parma-South Presbyterian Church pastor Mark Juengel and Isaac Monah present the Presbytery with a school flag.

We had a special event tonight (Monday, January 28) in a major, historic Cleveland house of worship.  The Presbytery of the Western Reserve, which has adopted the Dougbe River School as one of its missions, approved a $7,500 grant toward construction of our cafeteria.

Also at the Presbytery meeting — at Church of the Covenant in Cleveland’s University Circle neighborhood — current and former members of the Dougbe River board made a presentation that included a flag identical to the one that flies over the campus in Twarbo Region. It’s intended to be a “walking” flag that travels from church to church in the Presbytery.

The presentation also included a message from Tawoh Nuyahan, the head tribal elder of Twarbo Region.   Isaac Monah read the message in Krahn, the indigenous language in the region, and it was also read in English, which is widely spoken in the area but not as widely read or written.

Isaac Monah and John Luttermoser read the message to the Presbytery from elder Tawoh Nuyahan. Photos by Rev. Meredith White.

We got a donation last week that came with a note addressed to Isaac Monah. It was two dollar bills, a quarter and a dime. The note said this:

Elder/sir:

Sincerely,
(a first name)

Wow.

This made some of us reflect about how relative poverty in one part of the world can be relative wealth in another, and also about the differences between the economy of Liberia and the economy of the United States. This gift might do more than the donor realizes, because the cost of a thing here doesn’t always have any relationship to the cost of the same thing there. A Liberian dollar (“LD,” as it’s called) is worth a little less than 1.4 U.S. cents. In Zwedru, the equivalent of hailing a taxi is making a noise with your mouth that summons a motorcycle that will take you where you want to go, usually for about 50 LD. The donor’s $2.35 is worth 173 LD. Last August, the school truck overheated in the Liberian town of Gbarnga, where mechanics tightened a fan, poured water in the radiator and did some work on the clutch for 1,000 LD, or $13.54 U.S.

So thank you, sir.

There is a working PayPal link behind the “Ways to Support The School” tab on the right of the grey bar up there.

Now that the school is finally open, we rejoice in the knowledge that 104 children in three villages in a remote part of Liberia are able to go to school.

We rejoice in the support of a vast network of people that made this difficult endeavor possible, even as we dream of expanding it to serve more children in more villages.

We rejoice in the enthusiasm of the people of Twarbo Region. Principal Bob Nueita has reported that parental involvement is high and that in the first month of the school’s operation, there is already a parent-teacher organization and there has been a student-parent volleyball game.

2013 will be a balancing act, as we need to ensure that our feet are planted firmly while we also accelerate toward new goals. A steady flow of money for wages and other operating costs will be crucial, but we also need to raise money that we can set aside to build a cafeteria and dormitories. The need for dormitories weighs on us because the patience of the people in nine other villages of Twarbo Region, too far away for students to commute, has yet to be rewarded.

But right now, we rejoice and we say thank you to everyone who helped make this possible. We wish you a joyful holiday season and a spectacular New Year.

A collection of photos from that first batch showing the school in session.