wfn.org | [UMNS-ALL-NEWS] UMNS# 442-Ganta Mission re-emerges after Liberia's

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

Ganta Mission re-emerges after Liberia's civil war

Aug. 9, 2005

NOTE: Photographs are available at http://umns.umc.org.

By Dean Snyder and Jane Malone*

GANTA, Liberia (UMNS) - Sampson Nyanti is on his cell phone trying to
get building supplies delivered from Monrovia. Workers are repairing
Ganta Mission's elementary school, and he doesn't want the project
stalled or workers idle for lack of materials.

The workers' salaries are being paid by a grant from the United States
Agency for International Development, for which Nyanti is grateful -
only four Liberian United Methodist schools have received such grants -
but he has to keep the workers supplied with materials.

In a nation still disorganized from 14 years of civil war, where monster
potholes have made long stretches of highways barely passable, getting
supplies delivered promptly is demanding work for Nyanti, the associate
superintendent of administration for Ganta Mission.

"They pay for the work, but they don't want to have to worry about the
materials," Nyanti says, with a shake of his head. "We have to get
everything up from Monrovia somehow."

The United Methodist mission serves a range of needs in the region,
including providing education and health care.

Supervising construction on the elementary school is just a small part
of Nyanti's responsibilities. He is also initiating a poultry project. A
thousand chicks are being delivered from nearby Guinea, and a newly
reconstructed chicken shed must be ready for them if they are to
survive. A truckload of chicken feed has been delivered, but it got
soaked by a sudden downpour and needs to be spread out to dry.

Nyanti is proud of the chicken shed. "We need to become
self-sufficient," he says.

With U.S. visitors trailing him, he passes through the high school's
home economics building to say hello to teachers and students making
clothes at pedal-operated sewing machines. He hurries to see if workers
installing a new tin roof on the mission woodshop have all they need.
The multi-room woodshop is one of many buildings at Ganta Mission that
lost its roof to missiles shot by rebels from across the Guinea border
during the final months of Liberia's civil war in 2003.

At the Ganta Mission warehouse, Nyanti checks to see how many bags
remain from the last delivery of cement. Bags of cement not immediately
needed for reconstruction at Ganta Mission are resold to nearby
residents for a small markup. The profits help support the mission, he
says.

Then Nyanti stops by the metal workshop to greet welders who are
repairing a livestock feeder. He takes a minute to examine charcoal
stoves being assembled and welded in the workshop. Nyanti hopes the sale
of the stoves will generate income to help pay mission workers'
salaries.

In a room in back of the metal workshop, he checks in with carpenters
using a new band saw and drill press recently shipped from the US. The
carpenters are busy making student desks and chairs.

United Methodists in Germany recently gave Ganta Mission a contract to
supply new desks to 20 elementary schools that lost furniture and other
supplies to looting during the civil war. The carpenters are also
building chairs for high school students. Nyanti will figure out how to
pay for them later.

The carpenters are training ex-combatants - young men who had been
drafted by the rebels, sometimes when they were as young as 12 or 13, to
fight in the war. They spent their youth fighting and now are eager to
learn a trade so they can make an honest living. A small grant from the
United Methodist Church underwrites the salaries of 10 ex-combatants,
who are paid one U.S. dollar a day, to learn carpentry.

"I wish we had funds to train more," Nyanti says.

Finding useful trades for the thousands of ex-combatants - often still
in their 20s and 30s - is essential to the nation's future stability.

Enterprises such as raising poultry, sewing, the woodshop, the metal
workshop and welding equipment, and the building supply warehouse are
projects Nyanti hopes will produce enough income, along with the grants,
to pay the salaries of the mission's 70 employees (not counting
administrative and hospital staff), and to create jobs. This region of
Liberia has a 95 percent unemployment rate.

He especially concentrates on the projects that will help the mission
become self-sufficient and less dependent on grants. Like most Liberian
United Methodist church leaders, he knows what it is like to be in the
middle of a project and have funding dry up.

During his busy day, Nyanti pauses to tell his U.S. visitors about
George W. Harley, a missionary who came to Liberia from Durham, N.C., in
1926. Speaking with reverence, repeating the missionary's full name
every time he refers to him, Nyanti tells the visitors that George W.
Harley cut his way to Ganta through the bush when there were no roads,
believing that God was calling him to serve in this remote community.
The ministry George W. Harley began in 1926, Nyanti says, grew to become
Liberia's most sophisticated mission, including one of Liberia's finest
hospitals, until it was nearly destroyed by rebel missiles between June
and August 2003. Nyanti tells his visitors that George W. Harley's ashes
are buried beneath a stone monument outside the church building at Ganta
Mission. The monument used to have a marker honoring George W. Harley,
he says, but the rebels stole it.

Nyanti hurries his visitors past a section of Ganta Mission's more than
400 acres that is not available to be visited. Surrounded by razor wire,
it is occupied by a Bangladeshi contingent of United Nations troops who
have taken over a complex of Ganta Mission buildings as the base for
their peacekeeping activities in the region.

Hospital rebuilds

Past the U.N. compound is Ganta Hospital, with many of its wings and
outbuildings in ruins. Having once provided inpatient care to 250
patients a night and outpatient treatment to another 175 patients a day,
Ganta Hospital has only recently managed to restore medical care to some
of those who make their way to the hospital from throughout northeastern
Liberia as well as nearby regions of Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire.

Head Nurse Williette Bartrea says the hospital, which reopened to just a
few patients in April 2004, is now caring for some 60 patients daily.

The hospital's blood-testing lab used to be one of the best in Liberia,
Bartrea says, but all of the equipment and supplies were stolen by the
rebels. Slowly over the past year, the lab has been rebuilt and basic
blood tests are being performed there again.

Bartrea had relocated to Monrovia when the hospital's nursing school was
moved to the crowded United Methodist University campus in the nation's
capital, far from Ganta, for security reasons. She is praying, she says,
that the nursing school will soon be able to return to Ganta, but many
of the school's buildings will need to be repaired first.

Last February, Liberia's interim government promised Ganta Hospital a
grant for repairs, but so far it has not delivered on its promise,
Nyanti says. He had hoped the money would help rebuild some of the
hospital's bombed-out wings.

Because of limited usable space, at times the children's beds must be
pushed into the hallways, according to the Rev. John T. Togba, Ganta
Hospital chaplain. Togba, who stayed behind during the 2003 bombing to
rescue a child who was a patient, was the last person to leave the
hospital. Bombs were exploding all around him, sometimes in places where
he had been standing moments before they hit. He is still amazed that he
and the little girl he was trying to rescue survived.

"Praise the Lord," he says, "the little girl God used me to save is
doing well today."

Ground will be broken Aug. 13 for the construction of a new 100-bed
facility, according to Bishop John Innis, episcopal leader of the
Liberia Annual Conference. United Methodists from all the districts of
the conference will bring bags of cement and building blocks to
contribute to the project he said.

"Ganta is the hope for medical work in Liberia," the bishop adds. "It is
key for United Methodist evangelism and education in Liberia. We want to
do everything we can to tell our missionaries, 'you didn't come here for
nothing.'"

Donations to the "Ganta Hospital Emergency," Advance No. 150385, can be
dropped in church collection plates or mailed to the United Methodist
Committee on Relief at	PO Box 9068, New York, NY 10087-9068.
Credit-card donations can be made by calling toll free (800) 554-8583.

*Snyder and Malone are communicators living in the Washington D.C. area.
Snyder is senior minister of Foundry United Methodist Church.

News media contact: Tim Tanton, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or
newsdesk@umcom.org.

********************

United Methodist News Service
Photos and stories also available at:
http://umns.umc.org

----------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this group, go to UMCom.org, log in to your account,
click on the My Resources link and select the Leave option on the list(s)
from which you wish to unsubscribe. If you have problems or questions, please
write to websupport@umcom.org.

Powered by United Methodist Communications http://www.UMCom.org