Life, hope and optimism in war-torn Liberia

Getting held hostage inside the sweltering conference room, where it can easily reach one hundred degrees, is not an option. In Ganta, a small town in North-central Liberia, Karen Cheng and I heed the night manager’s warning about the electrical shutdown and building lock down. We gather our hospital administration team from Sierra Leone and establish a makeshift work station outside of the building that consists of basic benches and wooden chairs. For the next hour with computers in laps, we answer questions and walk the group through financial models on the last day of our Finance Workshop to promote transparency and accountability through good financial reporting. Finally, laptop batteries give-out as twilight descends upon the Liberian jungle. Our “students” prepare to head back to Sierra Leone and implement the skills they and 20 other delegates from Liberia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Guinea learned over the past three-days.

As they leave, we marvel at the fact that war-torn Liberia, a country just beginning to recover after 15-years of civil war, is the site of this optimistic, forward-thinking endeavor. When Karen and I developed the idea for this conference, we were unable to form expectations or develop a sense of what we would discover in West Africa, a region riddled with tribal strife and violence, often fueled by greed and corruption.

It all started two months prior, one crisp afternoon at Samovar Tea Lounge on Howard Street in San Francisco, where we talked about Facebook, about jobs that might excite us, and about our contacts. Our rapid-fire conversation clicked back and forth until, suddenly, we knew. After hours spent on "Who do we know?" we literally forgot to look right at each other. Perhaps the tasty Indian chai jolted us. We could start something ourselves and create change. Karen's past as a preferred stock trader, her current passion for photography and promoting third world health care combined with my hospital finance background and writing pastime, sparked the idea to meld finance with movement toward positive change.

After our return to the States, we work hard to retain the joy we found in being part of something greater than ourselves; to look forward to what a new day will bring and what new opportunities await us. Rather than getting caught in the downward spiral of doom and gloom constantly bombarding us from all angles, we remember that any glimmer of hope ignites from within each of us. That is what we learned from the enduring spirit of the West Africans picking themselves up and moving forward after over a decade of war, blood shed and *entrenched* poverty that we Americans can only imagine. We must strive to side-step the quicksand of negativity around us and instead plant our feet on fertile ground. From there, we can use the tools for positive change within our hands, build a brighter future and move our own feet forward.

To read a detailed write-up of our Liberian experience, please click here.

Check-out our photo gallery for a first-hand look in pictures.

Article by Jody Madala
Photos by Karen A. Cheng