February 27, 2008: Sierra Leone Assessment

SIERRA LEONE

Sierra Leone Is Very Mountainous and Very Breezy, Not Like Liberia. Praise God!

Our time in Sierra Leone has been different than what I expected. Since there war has been over for the last 11+ years, secret cults and organized crime has risen up amongst even the poorest community. In comparison to Liberia, it is a much darker place with evil acts

One community has only 3 out of 16 wells working. We found the 3 working wells under control of sub-chiefs who were extorting money from families to use the well under the notion that money recovered would be used to maintain those wells. As usual I am very suspect of these things so while my team was talking to some previous Mercy Ships employees I went on my own walkabout to see what I could find. I’m not sure if it was the Holy Spirit or God simply using my previous lifestyle as a tool, but I quickly found a palm wine party going on. The party was in the house of one of these sub chiefs. They were suspicious of me at first, but they offered me a drink of palm wine and I took it (faked drinking it). They invited me into their party which included the thugs who guard the wells and a couple of ladies-of-the-night who seemed to be plying their trade in the day as well.

Local "Poro" Mob Chief and his entourage

A local well controlled by the "Poro" who charge locals for water, even thought he well was built by an NGO for the community

It was here I found that these chiefs were members of a male secret society called a “poro”, the women’s societies are called a “sandi.” These societies are based on witchcraft and organized crime and are

responsible for the demonic hold on these people of west Africa. It is the “sandi” societies that force girls to have circumcisions in tents where many die from infection; they even force the girls to eat their own body parts.

Life is hard for children most walked an hour to school with no shoes

The traditional medicine men are brutal witch doctors. They use spirits to heal or curse people and are rich and important due to the fear they bring. One man, Numu, even showed me papers from the government saying he was licensed to cast evil spirits. We have heard from western health workers that these people have repeatedly killed any child with a deformity. What they tell the mothers is that their child is not “mortal” but in fact an evil spirit. They walk into the bush with the child and come back later with a viper, saying here is your child’s true form. Unfortunately, the child is never seen again.

This child was treated by a witch doctor and has a green paste and talsiman. He has Burkets Lymphoma and could be treated by our ship with a chemo treatment that has a 95% success rate, if we can get there in time.

The devil does not walk here, he dances! This country is held more in the demonic reigns, in my opinion, than even the home of voodoo, Benin.

I cannot emphasize the need for Christians to pray for the workers here, we are facing extremely dark powers as we try and help these people. At times I wonder why God has brought me here but when I see Him use my old lifestyle as a tool to find out what is going on under the surface I realize he has been leading me up to this my whole life. The chief had former military guys working as thugs fro him, they respected that I was ex-military with “powerful” tattoos on my arm to show what a great warrior I was. It was through this strange bonding that allowed me to win their confidence and learned what was really going on in the community. My role as Security Officer has honed these skills to allow me to approach them as a peer and find out what is going on so that we can effectively counter the works of the enemy.

My suspicions were confirmed when the sub-chiefs told me that they drink their profits from the wells every day instead of trying to maintain them. We must be sure to build wells only in safe places where the wells are controlled by religious schools or churches. This won’t guarantee they won’t be taken over by the “poro” but at least we will have a better chance at keeping them open to the public.

My meetings with the government officials have gone well and the Minister of Health for Sierra Leone is a former US doctor so we could really sit down and honestly address the scope of the problems here. I do not wish his job for anything. They are able to get the important supplies to clinic HIV and TB test as well as treatment, especially for pregnant mothers because the World Health Organization gives it to them.. But they can not get them basic antibiotics or ibuprofen. Most child deaths that we saw recorded was from respiratory infections because they had no way to treat it. We must see what we can do to assist this. If we build any clinic, it must be in cooperation with another NGO, because we have shown that the government s alone cannot support these clinics appropriately.

We have been eating sardine sandwiches while in the bush. On hot days it take a lot to choke one of these down along with our water that is the temperature of tea. The roads here are really rough as we have to travel through the mountains everyday. We have found a lot of cataract and max-facial candidates. The boy below has berket's lymphoma and will require chemotherapy. It is awesome we found him, this tumor has been noticeable for 2 months and is growing rapidly.

Sardine Sandwiches Are Tough To Choke Down In Heat

I have been blessed with meeting two former African crew members who are married and now living here as they try and start ministries here to bring light to such a dark place. I am actually going to a wedding today for one couple. The wedding was planned for last week, but they postponed it because it was clean up day. A day where all the roads are closed and each family must clean the area in front of their house. Well after all that the government also postponed the clean up day to today, so the weeding is on and we will need to take a 2-hour journey in the bush to get around the city to get to the weeding. It is guarantied to be a long hot day, especially for a big white guy like me. I will update tonight after I have returned from wedding.

The second married couple is Festus and Jessica. Jessica is a Mennonite woman from Pennsylvania who fell in love with Paul and the desire to reach his countrymen with the Gospel while on the ship. I have a great deal of respect and love for these two and the difficult task God has laid before them. I hope to continue to update you on their progress as they seek to engage the enemy on his home turf.

May Christ meet each of you every morning with a sense of purpose and joy of being in His will. Thank you all for being a part of our ministry, we could not do it without you.

February 17th, 2008: Liberia Assessment

I spent this first week in Liberia and then on following Sunday I will fly on a small single engine plane run by the World Food Program to Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Liberia has not changed much since I left it 5 months ago. The power promised to the city runs less than a mile and the water system only shows the improvements that Mercy Ship had done by the end of last outreach. These people are still in great need.

On a positive note, I got to visit our orphanage 3 times during my stay and I am so proud to see what has happened there. The work of our family and many other families from the ship and you our supporters have made such a huge difference in these children’s lives. When we first cam they slept on the mud floor with a roof that did little to keep them dry. There was no school, no church for them to worship, no means to cook and feed during rainy system. Now that has all changed. They have roofs that keep them dry, they have cement floors so they don’t catch parasites from the dirt floors, they have a church where they here the word of God twice a week, they have a place to cook and eat during the worst weather. The boys are learning masonry and the girls are learning sewing as possible jobs later in their lives. But most of all they know that there are brothers and sisters in Christ from around the world that love them and desire to have God do all that His will has for them. I can not tell you what a great feeling that is to be a part of this. For those of you supporting us, part of your donations has gone to build this haven for these children. I hope take great joy in knowing what the Lord has done with your offering. I am glad to say the girls who suffered the longest, now have the best accommodations and truly feel special in their living quarters.

We are in the last stages of building the last building to house the new orphan boys that the government has entrusted us with. As usual, the boys we have trained made over 500 mud bricks while we were gone and now only seek concrete to lay them and plaster over them so the rain does not dissolve their hard work. Amongst our families, we are trying to raise 8 thousand dollars to finish this building. That would include cement, roof, doors, mosquito screens, and beds with mattresses. If any of you feel like you would want to become a part of this, please let me know. I guarantee that the money will only go to the building and we will make sure to update all of you on its construction progress.


Orphanage School in Session

Orphans Getting Ride in Truck,

for most it was their first ride in a vehicle

Well back to the work at hand; we are concentrating our efforts in an area North West of Monrovia just past the orphanage you all helped us build. The first community is Royesville, it is comprised of 53 micro-villages having populations between 50 and 600 people. A horrible road and a bamboo bridge, which yes could hold me as I crossed it, link these communities. The people are the poorest of the poor. If someone gets sick, they must carry that person up to 11km in wheelbarrow to see a health tech. If they have cholera they would have to go to redemption hospital up to 20km away. Most can not afford the trip or the treatment (roughly 2-3 dollars)so they go home and call a traditional medicine man who will use leaves and spirits to cure the disease. You can guess how that story usually ends.

Yes, This Was My Indiana Jones Moment And Yes, I Do Hear The Movie Music In My Head When I Do These Things...Is That Wrong?

The second community we are working in is Tenegar, a predominantly Muslim community. The president requested we work in this are to ensure that the Muslims know that this Christian President is concerned for them as well. We actually found that there was more to this then we were told but I can discuss that in private at another time. For now we will use this opportunity to show these people what the love of Christ can do for them as people from around the world come to their village to build a clinic and wells and teach them better health, water, sanitation and agriculture practices. People who came simply because God asked “who will I send?” and they replied “send me!” We found a Muslim school that was using the bible as their reading curriculum, never doubt the way that the Lord may reach these people, they may do it themselves.

Our team met with the local Imam and Islamic leaders to discuss our plans and reasons to help their community.

The Bible Was Being Used To Teach English In Islamic School

Our Assessment Team
In these communities our 12 man team would sit down with the village chief, elders and imam to meet and discuss the needs of the community. We would sit under trees or in huts and hold council. It was a learning experience to say the least, I can feel my diplomacy training already kicking in.

Their water situation is dire. January through March most of their wells dry up and become useless. They are forced to seek alternate water sources such as creeks and rivers, which are also for bathing and their goats and chickens. Contamination of the water is guaranteed and huge outbreaks of cholera and typhoid persists during these times. I know you may be thinking, why we do not just teach them to boil the water. The problem is that they cannot afford the charcoal or wood to “burn” the water, so the drink it “raw.” In their mind, it is cheaper overall to risk cholera and seek treatment then to pay to boil their drinking water every day and even if they did boil it the men working in the swamp would still scoop water from where they are standing as they try and work the rice crops.

Wells are the only hope for these people to change their morbidity rates and allow them to become productive people. We also have to defeat the enemy here. As in most African countries, even the Christians hold on to demonic customs such as scarring and talismans and will quickly resort to witch doctors as a cheaper alternative or when modern medicine does not appear to act quickly enough. We as Christians must be in these villages every day to make a statement that there is a better way and it is only through the love of Christ that will break the bondage of the witch doctor and the evil that empowers them. We must be realistic. In the year that we are here, we may only truly change the habits and beliefs of a few people in each villages. But they will become voices of truth long after we have left and hopefully be the spark that brings the light of Jesus in to these people’s lives.

As you know, my job is to find how we can measure whether we are doing any good for these people in transforming their lives so that they may rise up and pursue God’s will for them and their people. It is hard for them to just live at this point. We have found that the rural clinics, which are funded by the ministry of health, keep awesome records each month of the type of diseases they are treating. It will be these historic records that we will measure the success of our programs against. We will come back a year after our programs are complete and see if we had any impact on the morbidity rates from malaria, cholera, typhoid, STD’s, HIV, TB and the whole cast of other diseases and parasites. I praise God that he allowed us to find these.

Praise God! They Keep Awesome Records For Us To Use At The Rural Clinics

As usual, there have been many “cultural” moments on this trip. Mark Wright who is my partner on this trip is quite skinny, since our names are both Mark and somewhat confusing, I am now BIG-BIG and he is small-small. My two skinny travel companions are amazed to see how many African women find me quite attractive with offers of marriage almost on a daily basis, they say I look “fine!” You will be happy to know, that these proposals are not going to my head as the appeal of my size is simply that they believe there will be enough food left over for them as well. We visited a village that built a track in the middle of the bush, to entertain and train the youth. Jeff King, one of our team members, decided to bless the new course with the sweat of some old out of shape white missionaries. He raced three boys around the 400-meter track and lost badly. Mark Wright raced an accomplished runner who easily won against him. But me I won my race. How you may ask, well the fact is I raced a woman. I was quite proud of this, until I found she was pregnant. Man just when I thought I was doing good, God reached down and offered me a little more humble pie ;-) I beat a pregnant woman, yeah that is simply hard to boast about. Oh well, it was fun and the children and pastor seemed to enjoy our pitiful display immensely, and we did not die from heat stroke.

Mark - OUT!

February 14th, 2008:Getting Ready To Head Back To Africa

Hi,

well I am headed back to Africa to perform our first assessment trip in West Africa. I am really excited that we will be able to bring Mercy Ships into a new era where we operate much like the other professional Christian NGO's. We will finally be able to measure what impact our programs have on our target communities to be better stewards of the gifts that God has given us. Please pray for me as I will be spending a majority of my time in these communities. As usual I will depend on the Holy Spirit to protect me from all the parasites that eagerly await my arrival. As usual, I am abandoning my girls while I go on this great adventure please continue to pray for my girls as they deal with the struggles of being without dad. I will try and keep you guys updated on the adventure. I will also need to finish my first thesis paper to close my first semester at grad school.