We've been able to do a lot of good for the hospitals

 

We visited our project at Tubmanburg Government Hospital. It's about two and a half hours away from here. The picture is some of the equipment that we supplied. Lots of beds and cribs and lots of basic medical care equipment such as incubators and ultrasound machines. We also put a new roof on part of the building and new doors and new windows for most of the rooms. We replaced all of the broken tiling throughout the building. 

This is almost a perfect project. The contractor performed well. The things the hospital needed should make a significant improvement in their ability to help the community. The building improvements and equipment additions should last for a long time.

We were asked to speak at "The Gathering" graduation ceremony. The gathering is a job training program where the church supplies instruction and supplies free of charge to teach young single adults employable skills. For Liberia those skills would mean soap making, pastry making, beauticians, computer training and tailoring. Almost all of these skills will allow the students to start their own small business . That's about all they have available here as there are no companies that employ many . For the computer class the church purchased 17 laptop computers that they have to keep in a large safe.  

The church tries very hard to not only improve the spiritual lives of the Africans but also to improve their temporal lives. Not only do they spend a lot of money and effort trying to bless the members, but they even spend a greater amount blessing the country as a whole. All of the church centered activities that are done are also open to those who are not members. As a result  many non member participants see the goodness and fruits of the church and end up joining it.

This is a typical taxi bus it has four rows of seats which all will have at least four people on them. When it fills up you can ride on the top or on the back. It was probably going about 35 miles an hour.

We went to Buchanan government hospital to check on our project. I'm going up to check on the roof. The contractor has been struggling here and so we've had some conflicts with the hospital. The contractor took a long time getting the solar panels back on the roof so the hospital was dark for quite a while. When they did the re roofing they didn't quite complete it and during a couple rain storms the hospital flooded. I think we have it worked out now.

This is a cemetery next to an old abandoned church. People here are buried above ground in crypts. With no zoning laws the crypts are everywhere.  Sometimes they put a crypt for one of their relatives in their yard. I assume it makes it tougher to sell your house.

The rainy season has been a little slow starting here and it's been unusually hot. A big thunderstorm has just come in and is dumping a ton of needed rain. It has also lowered the temperature about 10 degrees. The bad thing is that many of the houses have poorly constructed metal roofs that will probably blow off and the interiors will flood.