Fall 2007
Vol. 14/ No. 2

Well we are back home again. As I took a walk this morning I was thinking about what a good storyteller Steve was (and is) and how hard it is for me to put into words what fills my heart from Africa. As I started the slow journey homeward it feels like you are trying to hold the sand of the continent in your hand and it just keeps falling between your fingers. So here are a few thoughts ...

It is after midnight and I am standing in an "airport" hotel in Freetown, Sierra Leone, wondering where the other half of our team has been taken; how to get word out where we are; and glad to have a bed with my new roommates from Ethiopia and the UK ... three days later we find our way to Liberia.

Left: Liberian children outside their home.

The sound of children hammering rocks into gravel becomes a steady pinging sound. For dinner, you sit with a widow and her six kids as they say a prayer of thanksgiving for the rock in their yard that they can hammer into gravel that allows them to buy a little food.

	Left: Liberian child hammering rocks into gravel, which is then sold. Children start hammering rocks as soon as they are old enough. Above: Liberian homes surrounded by the rock piles which supply their income.
One of the Liberian gravel pits.	Liberian children hammering rocks into gravel.
Driving down the highway back to the border of Sierra Leone with your new friends, you realize that many of these children are seeing a white woman for the first time. The village chief and elders are bartering for me (with my colleagues) in cows; my friend is trying to figure out what the bush meat really is in the bush-meat soup (bat or monkey ... I passed on that adventure)l and we walk back across the border to Sierra Leone on a newly built bridge with our friends and a parade of youth celebrating the bridge's opening.

Left: Standing with the UN peacekeepers at the bridge that connects Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Below: The Medical Teams International nurses, the village elders and chief, and Jill's U.S. team after the cow bartering was unsuccessful.

A pastor opens a rural one-room schoolhouse and simply asks if we could get him pictures of the alphabet.

School children sit in an open-air, one-room schoolhouse practicing their math skills.	The school.
Above: The school. Right: Learning the alphabet.

The principal of a school is sharing gifts with you even though they have nothing all the while calling you their Christopher Columbus ... I fight back the tears and struggle to keep smiling.

Right: Younger children go over basic mathmatical information.

We wait for more than one and half hours in London for our luggage after they have to fumigate the carrier for cockroaches.

Right: Street market in Sierra Leone.

This is not ...

We stand in the airport in Minneapolis overwhelmed with a land of plenty with our fruity smell and fatigue. We go from being part of a band of adventuring travelers to three very tired and stinky travelers that just don't fit. I miss Africa ...

It was truly an amazing trip, I have found wonderful friends, family and colleagues in Africa, please pray for them.

	Complete photo albums To view all the photos from Liberia, select a photo album June 12 June 13 June 14 June 15