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Church schools confront challenges in post-war Liberia

Aug. 11, 2005

NOTE: Photographs and related features - UMNS stories #442 and #447 -
are available at http://umns.umc.org.

By Dean Snyder and Jane Malone*

BUCHANAN, Liberia (UMNS) - "Give me pen, not guns" reads a hand-written
poster on the cafeteria wall of J.F. Yancy School at Camphor Mission
near Buchanan.

The slogan is not hyperbole. Beginning in the early 1990s, boys as young
as 12 and 13 years old were recruited or forcibly drafted into rebel
armies, given guns, and deployed to fight and kill other Liberians for
more than a decade.

Since 2003, when former president Charles Taylor finally stepped aside
and the United Nations deployed peacekeeper troops, Liberia's deadly
14-year civil war has largely subsided and order has been restored to
much of the nation.

Yet the chaotic war took countless lives and has left the nation's
buildings, roads, schools, businesses and government in disarray.
Liberia has no centralized systems for providing electricity, sanitary
water, safe disposal or trash collection. Unemployment is estimated at
95 percent.

In an election scheduled for Oct. 11, Liberia will select a new
president, and many people hope the nation once considered the "jewel of
West Africa" will be able to rebuild.

In the meantime, Liberian United Methodists are eager to get the
nation's children back into the classroom.

As the 2004-05 school year drew to a close in July, Richard Clarke,
director of the Department of General Education and Ministries for the
denomination's Liberia Annual Conference, reported that its 120 schools
are at least partially back in operation, although some are meeting in
church buildings because classrooms vandalized during the war are
unusable.

To recover the scope and quality of education that characterized its
pre-war school programs, the conference must overcome overwhelming
challenges: ruined school buildings; insufficient funds to pay teachers
and to provide training; shortages in basic school supplies and school
furniture; and inadequate resources to cover costs for families who
cannot afford the modest tuition (the equivalent of U.S.$12 to $67 per
year, depending on the school's location).

Circumstances at J.F. Yancy School and two other United Methodist
schools in the Buchanan vicinity in southeast Liberia illustrate the
desperate lack of resources in the nation's United Methodist schools.

Yancy School is a boarding and day school on the grounds of Camphor
Mission, a few miles outside Buchanan. Its faculty and students fled
Camphor when rebels took over the campus. Since the war's end, the
school has reopened and serves 184 elementary and junior high students,
a fraction of its former enrollment. Only a few students live at the
school; most walk to class from villages as far away as two or three
miles.

Other programs at Camphor Mission that serve the school's students and
families as well as the larger community include a health clinic, a
church with a congregation of 300, and a fledgling agricultural project
that includes the making of soap, growing of vegetables, and the raising
of pigs and chickens.

Arthur Jimmy, director of Camphor Mission, is eager to repair the
mission's schools and other buildings so its educational and other
programs can become fully functional again.

As Jimmy guided visitors from the United States around the grounds in
July, he talked about the need for books, salaries for teachers, and
repairs to the buildings.

"We have another obstacle, a big one," he added. The mission's only
source of water is an untreated shallow stream.

As Jimmy led his visitors down a narrow muddy trail through the bush to
the stream, he explained that the mission desperately needed a source of
clean potable water for the health of the school's students, but also
for the thousand nearby residents who depend on the Camphor clinic for
health care and midwifery.

Without a well or reservoir, students and mission personnel must carry
water from the stream 100 yards up a steep hill to the dorms and
cafeteria. The stream is so shallow that a bucket can be filled only
half-full at a time. Because the water is untreated, students and
faculty often suffer from gastrointestinal illnesses and even cholera.

The cost of building a reservoir where water can be collected and
purified - about U.S.$60,000, Jimmy said - is almost inconceivable in an
economy where families can afford only small tuition payments on their
meager incomes.

Five miles away is the Brighter Future Children Rescue Center, a United
Methodist school system serving more than 500 students from first
through twelfth grades. Built with funding from Operation Classroom, a
United Methodist-related program, the W.P.L. Brumskine High School is
already overcrowded.

During the war, about 2,500 refugees were crowded into the school's
buildings, according to Principal Chapman L. Adams. After the displaced
families were resettled by the United Nations, the school's teachers
returned to repair and repaint the buildings.

As the school year ended in July, Adams worried about where he would put
students in September when classes begin again. The high school has four
classrooms. This year, the school had one senior class with 50 students,
a junior class with 50 students, and two sophomore classes with 50
students each. Next year, he will need two sophomore and two junior
classrooms, as well as a classroom for seniors. The year after that, he
expects to need six classrooms.

The campus includes a large metal frame structure that was once covered
with a tent, until refugees tore it apart to make makeshift shelters.
The large tent had provided space for three elementary classes. If Adams
could erect a new tent on the old frame, he could move elementary
classes into the tent and expand the high school classrooms. To do so
would cost about $2,000, he said. Barely able to pay teachers' salaries,
he has no idea where he will be able to find the money to rebuild the
tent by September.

Another school, the J.C. Early United Methodist School, is inside the
city limits of Buchanan in a neighborhood called Gbehjohn. The school
was begun during the war for students forced to flee from Camphor
Mission into the city.

Faculty and parents built a makeshift facility out of dried reeds and
bamboo in this urban community. Once the mission reopened, Buchanan
continued to need a school, so the makeshift school became permanent. It
serves 316 elementary and junior high students.

Recently, the school administration recognized that the bamboo buildings
constructed in haste 11 years earlier would not serve the needs of a
permanent school. With almost no resources, the school is being rebuilt
a block at a time, with dirt blocks fashioned by the workers.

It is a slow process, said Vice Principal Abraham K. Wilmot, but with no
money to buy building materials, it is the only option.

A corollary benefit of a United Methodist school continuing in this
Buchanan neighborhood is the birth of a new congregation. The school
buildings are used on Sunday mornings for worship and Sunday school by
Gbenjohn United Methodist Church, a congregation begun by the Rev.
George Mingle eight years ago. The congregation has grown to more than
200 worshippers.

*Snyder and Malone are communicators living in the Washington D.C. area.
Snyder is senior minister of Foundry United Methodist Church. Malone is
an affordable-housing advocate with the Alliance for Healthy Homes.

News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York (646) 369-3759 or
newsdesk@umcom.org.

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

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

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