Living with Liberians

This week was pretty cool for a few reasons. I spent it with a Liberian woman, Rosana, who is doing great things here and making many waves of change. She runs an organization called THINK (Touching Humanity in Need of Kindness). They have a girls empowerment program that goes for 9 months and works with 25 girls (10 of which are teenage mothers) who all have been taken advantage of sexually, have poor home lives, or face other various obstacles. They run a clinic and safe house for survivors of rape. The organization also works with both boys and girls on doing reproductive health education and programming.

I spent the week shadowing her life, basically. I learned a lot and was able to ask many questions. I got to go on grounds at the Executive Mansion (where the President's offices are). I got to attend an awesome program (which I will devote its own post to here soon). I also stayed at her home, ate lots of Liberian food (chicken feet often showed up in the dish but those I did not try!), and became friends with her kids. When I say kids I mean granddaughter, foster children, niece, friends. There were usually 6-8 people in the house aside from the two of us and none were her biological children (she has 3 grown children). She cares for everyone and clearly shows that in her homelife. We had no running water (oh back to bucket bathing that I became so accustomed to in Kenya) and no electricity. But have no fear, they charged laptops during the day at work so we could watch bootleg TV programs at night, haha.

One of the awesome things this family does is nightly devotions. The first night I was a part of this I was so moved. As we were all in the living room and had just finished watching a program, the 9 year girl old said "this is the day that they Lord has made" and everyone began singing a song based off that verse. After many minutes of singing (ah I love that most Africans I have met can bust out into song with no music and sing so beautifully) the 19 year old boy read a passage from 1 John about being a light in the world and then spoke about it. Everyone then took turns saying their prayer for the day as well as a bible verse. One of the daughters concluded in prayer for all of us and everyone followed with the Lords prayer. The time ended with a song about sharing love and everyone moved around the room shaking each others hands (hand shaking happens so often here). Ah, it was beautiful. There was also morning devotion similar to this at work. What a great environment to be in!

Rosana and I

Rosana had me posing on the lawn in front of the Executive Mansion.