A Better View

This is where I went swimming last week. It is an abandoned iron quarry known as Bong Mine. A group of five or six people from the hospital ship I work on took a train ride from Monrovia to Bong County, where this quarry is located. It was really fun, with the exception of one of my mates getting her camera stolen...

For me, one of the most difficult things about being in Liberia is the mix of response to our presence. Some people are all smiles and waves and so happy that someone is trying to help them out. Others see us as an easy target to extract money and goods from. Still others despise us for how fortunate we are. Within each of the responses, there is a spectrum of differences in the attitude still. Some fall into two or even all three of these responses at different times, but that's just another example of how you can't group people together nicely and make generalizations.

I know of several pastors in Liberia that are really glad we are here, and glad that we are helping out, but they still take every chance they get to take advantage of the white man from the big ship. It's not their fault, for the most part. So many NGOs and missionaries have come through and given out so much that they've come to expect handouts.

What I'm about to say next is in no way saying that the people of Liberia are less human or valuable than any other people group on the face of the planet, it's only a metaphor to exemplify the NGOs and missionaries have a tendency to be like a child that finds a wounded baby animal near the treeline in a park. The child wants to help the animal recover so that it can survive, but lacks an understanding of the animals needs for survival. Since the child does not realize that the animal needs to maintain its survival instincts, the child may bring the animal home and give it warm milk and splint its leg and feed it plenty of food and love the animal and play with it, but when the animal is taken back to the park, it will have a much more difficult time surviving in the wild if it has become dependent on the care of the child.

Many NGOs and missionaries that have worked in Liberia have done this to the Liberian people. If we come to the aid of a country and hold it up, how will it learn to stand on its own? If we come and show them how to stand, and coach them. We need to maintain a very tricky dynamic tension to help Africa and I by no means think that I know better than anyone else how to do it, but I know if we keep doing things the way we are, we will change some of the problems into different ones, not help eradicate them.

I've been stressing sustainability for a lot of this post, but that is not the whole story. The reason we have to maintain a dynamic tension is that there are people that will die if we don't help them and they won't die because they have some disease that is just too awful to treat, they will die because there is no one to treat it. That's the thing that I like the most about working with Mercy Ships, the organization has an understanding of the need for sustainability and for the immediate need of people in life threatening situations, and they address both. There is room for improvement, though. We still have a lot to learn about how to work in each of the nations of West Africa.