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.

January 4th, 2008: Mark Begins His Masters of Diplomacy Program

Hi well I have started my Masters Program in Diplomacy and International Conflict Resolution from Norwich University.

I am excited that God is giving me a new skill set to serve Him by better serving the poor of this world.

Please keep Zana and me in prayer as this will challenge my already stressed time management capabilities as I travel to Africa 3 times each year for a month.

Christmas, 2007: Christmas & Gingerbread Houses With The Dickinsons

It has been awesome to have Christmas in our new home! Zana made sure the girls got to do all the things that we missed while we traveled the word the last 4 years. She is a great mom and wanted to make sure the girls had memories of our first Christmas in this house.

Both girls were in Christmas pageants and Jessie got a solo. The girls made gingerbread houses and helped cook our Christmas dinner. It was a great time and a Christmas we will remember for a long time. The Dickinson's came down for Noah's graduation from Teen Mania's Honor Academy and it was awesome to celebrate with friends who have prayed and supported us from the beginning.

November 12th, 2007: Trip to Baltimore & New England

Zana and I are in home town of Plymouth for my birthday as we finish up a professional road trip. I attended a week of training at the American Evaluation Association conference in Baltimore, while Zana represented Mercy Ships at a medical conference in Louisville, Kentucky. We were able to spend a night with our good friends, the Ranfts, from my former company Inktomi. I drove our truck with a trailer north to Plymouth and collected as much of our stuff as we could. We ended up looking like the Grinch's sleigh. Except getting caught in violent thunderstorm with tornadoes in Tennessee we made it back safe!

Cailin continues to WOW us as she learns to play the violin, we are so proud of her!!!!!

September 2nd, 2007 Assessment Trip to Liberia and Sierra Leone

Hi Everyone,

It is Sunday night, the 2nd of September. It has been a busy week on Monday I visited another village where we have done some Community Health (CHE) work and some sanitation and well work. It is amazing to see the difference between villages where we have done just one type of work compared to where we have done the combination of CHE, Sanitation/Water and Birthing training. This one village had received all of the training and the English mid-wife (Elizabeth Hunter) had also built a birthing house consisting of one room with a bed, a birthing table and another small wash room for mothers to clean themselves up in. In this village over the last year they reported 12 children being born including twins. No deaths to children or mothers from labor nor children deaths to waterborne diseases. Praise God!!!!! What an impact we can have by simply providing some simple training and tools. This is the type of model I hope we can replicate over and over again. Unfortunately the birthing training can be politically charged depending on what country you are in. On Tuesday I was headed off on a grand adventure south of Monrovia, to Buchanan to meet with 25 major church leaders in the area, who had attended a pastoral conference on church unity in May. What was supposed to be a 2 1/2 hour ride took nearly 6 hours because of the terrible road conditions due to lack of maintenance and the effects of the rainy season. About half way to our destination we stopped for lunch and a bathroom break. The leader for this trip is Winston, a South African man in charge of Church Empowerment, who needed to use the bush bathroom(s). So here we are stopped at a random spot on this road, he picks a random bush to do his business in and he manages to find the local latrine by stepping into it with his dress shoes. I mean these things were covered and wreaked of nastiness. We paid some local boys to clean them in the river and when they brought them back we sprayed them with some air freshener. We all assumed this was a good omen and continued on our way. The trip itself was beautiful with bamboo and rubber tree forests on each side of the road. The bamboo went 40-60 ft up in the air and in some places formed these natural arches that seemed to welcome us to explore, but after Winston’s exciting "find" none of us were too keen to go exploring in the bush. I will definitely post some pictures on the web when I get back. We also saw some locals selling "grass cutters" on the road. These are basically a large beaver or groundhog. Now we have been teaching the locals to raise rabbits, but they just don’t like to eat them. But they just love these giant rodents, especially barbequed! I tried it myself and its not bad…..for a giant rat! Next month the Chinese government will be starting to build a new 4 lane road to Buchanan. The Chinese Ambassador convinced the Liberian President that Monrovia’s port is so bad and corrupt they were better off starting a new port to the South to ship the major resources out of. This was especially true since an iron ore company, Mattell is building a new facility in Buchanan and Firestone could ship there rubber from there once the road was done. To give you an ideal of how corrupt the Monrovian port is, they just replaced the 4th Port Commissioner in 3 years and each one has left their job with a better car and house than when they started their short term there.

Once we got to Buchanan we checked into the "Guest House" For Africa it was what you expected, small dingy well used bed with a mosquito net (with holes in it). We sprayed our rooms with raid and headed into town to introduce ourselves to the Superintendent, Mayor, and Police chief. You are required to do this or you will bring dishonor on to these people of authority. Basically you need permission to be in their city and you definitely need permission to do anything in the city. So we went to the President’s Buchanan residence and we sat in these gilded chairs while we waited. The expensive chairs and sofas are there for the president to entertain people with. In walked the Mayor, a heavy set local man wearing a British pit helmet much like a British officer from World War II might do. He introduced himself, took off his helmet off and cradled it in his arm just like I’d seen officers do in the movies. This hat was obviously the symbol of his authority and he was quite proud of it. He was very cordial and welcomed us, he informed us the Superintendent was

away and he was going to give us the "key to the city." He then stood up raised his hands and said "I give you the key to the city" and that was it. He told us by simply telling people this we could visit any of the culturally sensitive areas of town like the prison or famous leader’s graves. We all thanked him and headed out on our tour of the city. Every where we went police officers would come up to us and we would simply say we had the key to the city and they would simply wave us on. Buchanan is a beautiful small city, it is right on the ocean and it is CLEAN, well in comparison with Monrovia. The streets are made of cement with no potholes and the buildings are painted and for the most part have no trash piled up in front of them. It was easy to see why companies like Mattell and Firestone were willing to invest in this part of the country. We went down to the fish market area and we found ourselves transported to a different time. We were surrounded by fishing canoes and men fixing their nets, it could have easily been 1907 as 2007. One of our team decided he was going to be like apostle Peter and began to preach right their amongst the fishermen. It was awesome!! We just started yelling the message of the Gospel and these men laid down their tools and listened to us. Except for one man who mocked us all of the fishermen said they believed in Christ and prayed with us. I was so impressed that this young man with us had the courage to openly preach with out being asked nor worried about his reception from this crowd. He said he was moved by these men performing their timeless work and there was no way he was going to miss a chance to follow the apostle’s example. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do that, but now after seeing the result I can’t wait for my next chance to spontaneously preach like that.

That evening we had a traditional meal consisting of some jalaf rice (good stuff) and some fried fish that was great. Now most of you know I love spicy foods, and there were a lot of pepper gravies to go with the food that ranged from hot to "Oh my God don’t let me die." They also served an African pea, which is actually a small egg plant and was one of the most bitter thing I’ve had so far. Not only was it bitter but it had an after taste that I assume would be much like licking an ash tray. It got dark as we ate and we adjourned to our rooms. Mine was at the very back of the house and I was up most the night because there were people outside my window talking most of the night. At one point a small hand of either a woman or child came through a window looking to see if it could reach anything. I turned on my flash light and whoever it was ran away. So I didn’t get much sleep till dawn but at that point I slept for 2 good hours.

The next morning saw the 25 pastors arrive on time, a great sign of their commitment to this program. We began our discussions on what they got out of the course and how they were beginning to work together. They all decided they needed a biblical library, all of their study books and concordances were lost in the war. They were asking who they needed to ask, when Vincent one of our team said that Mark Elliott was the man who would be the face of Mercy Ships for the next 10 years and that I would be the one to ask. Never has a man complicated my life so quickly! I quickly corrected him that I was not the "face of Mercy Ships" and that I was not committing to be here for 10 more years. But I would be glad to look into finding people who would be willing to donate books, if they were willing to work together and either buy or build a building to act as a study library, that all of them and their subordinate pastors could use. They assured me they would, and I informed them it would be good for me to see that when I return in a year to do the assessment for our return to Liberia. Needless to say I have already received multiple emails from these pastors thanking me and offering suggestions on how I can help them. Vincent is a dead man ;-) We enjoyed a thank you lunch that even had some of our local staff looking at a little hesitantly. There were several types of mystery fish and some I wasn’t sure how it was cooked but it appeared be only part done and the fish was still a little slimy. I wasn’t even sure what part of the fish it was, the only thing recognizable was some boiled plantain and yam root (the stuff that fufu is made from) Ship food was starting to look really really really good. Our trip back was uneventful and we shared each others salvation stories and what led us into missions. That vehicle contained 5 people, a Zimbabwian, South African, Sierra Leonian, Canadian, and American. We all came from different backgrounds, economic status and denominations but yet God was able to take what we had in common, a love for the Lord and His children. He brought us together wove our lives, skills, and giftings around each other to make this wonderful tool for His purpose. When you stand in that moment recognizing that you are part of the Master’s much bigger work, it takes your breath away and you realize that you are a piece of the Master’s plan. It is a truly humbling moment.

On Thursday I was notified that my luggage was on the way from Nigeria. Now you may ask why Nigeria, but then again you could ask why it had visited Ivory Coast and Senegal as well. My luggage was definitely well traveled! The funny thing was each tag had "RUSH" on it starting 2 days after I left the states till 2 weeks later. When I finally got it I found my laptop and a pair of shoes had been stolen. The funny thing was that the air line worker was trying to convince me that the crooked Nigerians must have stolen it, I mean no Liberian would ever steal something from my luggage……….yeah right. I just had to laugh as he said it. I’m told SN Brussels may offer me $50 for my loss, welcome to traveling in Africa. The only reason I had the pc in my luggage was that I was already carrying 2 new laptops for our land base and ship in my carry-on. Oh well in the big picture it’s a small thing. At least I have some underwear…it was getting a little difficult to wash and dry my one pair every night.

Saturday saw me back at the orphanage. This time a German film crew came out with us to document what Mercy Ship’s families have been able to do for these 53 children over the last 3 years. The transformation that you have helped to make is amazing; each child is not only doing well but has a future thanks to your gifts to us that we have in turn used on this orphanage. I will be updating the web site when I get back so you can see the difference you have made in these kids lives. The film crew wanted me to lay tiles with our trained boys to show that we help on these projects. Needless to say the guy laying tile had to redo my tiles after the filming was done, I hate to think I was documented laying such uneven tile. You get what you pay for I guess with us old white guys. J Sunday saw me staying with our missionary friends the Gallingers. I had 53 of their movies in my luggage and they were celebrating their safe return with my luggage. They are awesome people when you think they have been here 11 years it blows my mind. They make the rest of us look like amateurs.

Well its bed time; tomorrow starts a week of dozens of meeting with other NGO’s. Please continue to pray for me, I will be flying into Sierra Leone the day after their election and it has been a little violent lately, 20 people were beaten and stabbed on Saturday. So I need to be reviewing my travel plans daily to make sure I’m playing it safe and not "challenging the Lord, my God" with any foolishness.