The Trapani's in Liberia

Today was another Parade day. We don't know what it was for other than the participants were all School children. Lots of small parades all over the city.  Fortunately they don't shut down traffic for the parade, you just kind of drive around it. This was contract signing day for our largest project so far. It is a $96,000 project to bring water and sanitation into 12 Villages for about 8,000 people. Our contract is with an organization that will do all this for us. All we have to do is pay them the money and monitor it. The person signing the contract is Paul Who is the CEO. Unfortunately his eyesight is failing. We had not seen him for a few months and we could tell that he was seeing less. I don't know what his ailment is but I wonder if it's something that would be treatable in a more advanced country. This is the official contract signing picture. We sure have learned a lot about African culture during the contract process. Time is way different than it is in Ameri...

 Most women seem to wear clothes that are made by themselves or by tailors here in Liberia. The men seem to wear used donated clothes from america. This man enjoyed the story about the logo on his Sunday shirt. We visited another, Gathering Place program. This one was in the Bushrod stake. They actually had sewing machines for the tailoring class. It's hard to see in the picture but they are treadle operated. Here is their coal heated iron. They have electricity at the church so they also had an electric iron. The electric iron gets hotter These are some of the goods from the pastry class. The small yellow things are meat pies. They were good. The larger round things are cakes. We finally got payment to the contractor and he started work on the Gbokolleh school.  This portion of the project is a 3-room classroom. The community dug the trenches. Everything is of course done by hand. Now they are backfilling so they can lay the concrete floor. The contractors general laborers ma...

This is Jackson Doe Memorial Hospital. It is one of the larger hospitals in the country. It is located in the middle of nowhere. It took us 7 hours to drive from Monrovia to the hospital. Two of the hours were on bumpy dirt roads. It was built to serve the rural corner of the country. It is located in a town where all of the buildings are just Shacks with metal roofs. They contacted us and requested help to obtain equipment. The hospital is 12 years old and all of the equipment inside is 12 years old. They have not had a budget to replace anything. A lot of stuff is broken. It is always the suffering babies that put a real face on the reality of the problem. This is the maternity intensive care area. A lot of things didn't work in here such as heart monitors, ultrasound equipment, and suction equipment. They wanted us to tour the operating area so we had to get dressed up.  Here's mainly what they want us to see. This is an operating table that doesn't go up or down or tilt...

As dangerous as this looks it's actually worse. These motorcycles will dart in and out of traffic and often go on the wrong side of the road.  This is not an uncommon photo.  This is Brother Jensen. He asked if he could get a ride with us as we went home from church.  We asked him about his family. He has two sons and one daughter who are still alive. Two of his other children died in the civil war.  One of his remaining sons was so changed by the war that all he could say was that now he is a bad person.  The Civil War ended in 2003.  People don't talk about the Civil War much. It may be because they are so consumed with their current needs of finding food and employment. We had another get together dinner for Cinco de Mayo, with all the senior couples and the mission president and his wife. They are an amazing group of people. I want to be like them. The paperwork is trying. We do project proposals, funding proposals, contracts, budgets, PowerPoint presen...