After three and a half
months of planning and praying – far more of the latter than the former – I
boarded the plane to Monrovia, Liberia, on July 10. We arrived on a Tuesday,
and the next two weeks were some of the most transformational experiences of my
life.
When we
arrived at Roberts Airport, tired and kinda gross from being on airplanes for
16 hours, our United Methodist hosts picked us up. Dehkontee is the volunteer
coordinator for the Liberian conference, and Sam is the manager of the United
Methodist Missionaries Compound, which is where we stayed while we were in
Monrovia. The sign on the door of the compound had our familiar United Methodist
cross and flame – one thing that felt like home. The concrete brick wall that
surrounded the compound and that was adorned with barbed wire and upside-down
broken glass bottles, however, did not feel like home. Sam and Dehkontee helped
us settle into our guest house for the night. We brought mosquito nets – tents really
– to sleep in, and then we left them for our friends to use after we left. We
met more of our friends who work at the compound that night – like Rose, who
owns a catering business and is always the resident cook when Bunny brings a
team to Liberia. Throughout our trip, she made amazing meals for us – eggs and
oatmeal for breakfast, rice and stew of all flavors, fried chicken and
plantains, donuts and coconut tarts. And fresh pineapple. Guys, I didn’t know
pineapple could be so sweet.
We hit the
ground running – the very next day, we started the teacher training in
Monrovia. First we held three days of training for five local schools there in the
city. We started each day with a big breakfast and a devotion, and we drove for
about an hour to Elaine Chapman United Methodist School and church. The commute
was a bumpy one, but our drivers, Roland and Harrison, always delivered us to
our destination safely. Our hosts gathered us all in the sanctuary for a moving
opening ceremony – one teacher preached, and others led us in several songs. Our
friends lifted their praises to God around us, hands clapping, voices singing.
And I was in awe.
We then
split up into small groups, each with one American teacher and five Liberian
teachers. We asked them about their greatest joys in teaching, about their
biggest challenges, and what we needed to know about their situation so that we
could best serve them. As we shared in our group, Jenny, Anthony, Benedict,
Arkie, and Alvin shared their teacher-hearts with me – they said they love
seeing a student finally get it, finally understand something they’ve been
struggling with. That moment of success, that moment of breakthrough – that’s
what I’ve described as my favorite part of teaching since I was a tutor in
middle school. That was the first of many times that I realized, even though we
are in such drastically different situations, we are so very similar. And those
similarities are, in the end, far more important than our differences.
They also
shared their challenges – not enough funding to buy books and other materials.
Not enough funding to pay teachers. Sounds familiar, too, huh? And yet I tried
to be very careful to acknowledge the drastic disparity in their lack versus
our lack here. The words we use may be the same, but the gravity of the
situation is certainly different.
We spent
the rest of the day and the majority of the next two days separated into grade
level groups for our training. Two of our teachers, Jeremy and Tanya, led the
kindergarten through third grade group; Carol and I led fourth grade and up
group. Some of the teachers taught the same class of students all day, like our
elementary teachers here; others specialized in math, science, French, or
reading like our middle and high school teachers. Their primary teaching method
is direct instruction – teachers write on the chalkboard, while students
silently copy it all down in their notebooks. I call that “sit and get,” and in
my classes, it doesn’t happen much. Less than half my lessons are days when
students take notes, and even when we do take notes, I have students
collaborating and talking with each other throughout the period. So our
training focused on ways they can help their students collaborate more, do more
hands-on work, and generally be more engaged than just writing down
information. Carol and I read stories that they could read with their students,
and then we talked about how to connect lessons in other subjects to those
stories. Our first book was about two friends who travel to visit each other,
so we talked about social studies lessons on map reading, math lessons on
calculating distance, speed, and time traveled, and science lessons on land
formations. I taught them about studying four representations of a single math
concept – graphs, equations, numbers, and words – and we worked together to
adapt the idea of deepening their students’ understanding to English, French, and
science classes. We taught how to ask students to graph numbers and functions
by standing in different places in the room, and we played card games to foster
number sense. I also taught about brain breaks – little exercises that we do
with our kids when they get lethargic or overwhelmed or just because they’ve
been working too long and they need a break. I love studying how brain research
can improve instruction and learning, so this was one of my favorite
activities.
Later,
Carol and I discussed another book on music and emphasized having students read
dialogue aloud, and I tied it to a fractions scavenger hunt lesson. We finished
our training with a book called What Do
You Do with an Idea?, and we asked the teachers to use something we had
covered to create their own lesson plan. Carol and I gave them time to work and
helped them write lesson plans that they could implement in their own
classrooms. Some were excellent, and some needed extra help, just like in any
classroom.
Between
sessions, the teachers often broke out in spontaneous praise and worship.
They’d come back from break or lunch, walk up to the piano and drums, and just
start singing. Some songs were from their Liberian tradition – ones with lyrics
that said,
“God you are able, you are able, God.”
“Jesus, we just want to say thank
you…for our friends, for this day.”
“Good morning, Jesus, Good morning,
Lord. I know you come from heaven above. The Holy Spirit is in control. Good
morning, Jesus, Good morning, Lord. In the morning, I will rise and praise the
Lord.”
Other songs, though, were
familiar to me after singing them here, in this very room – “I Surrender All”
struck a particular chord in me. Our friends were passionate – they weren’t
just singing to sing along. They were really giving everything over to God –
everything.
Singing alongside our friends,
praising God with them, helped me realize something – there’s a difference
between singing because it’s Sunday morning and praising Jesus because you know
He’s God, because you know the Holy Spirit is in control. “Know that I am God,”
from the Psalm took on a whole new meaning in Liberia.
As the
trainings wrapped up, Bunny took pictures of students who attend the schools on
a scholarship sponsored by the Illinois Great Rivers Conference. Dozens of
students filed through to have their pictures taken, and even more milled
around asking how they could get a scholarship, too. I’ve been giving to this
scholarship advance for five years. Right now, $175 sends a single child to
school for an entire year – it covers their uniforms, their books, and their
tuition. If you’re interested in helping students like these attend school in
Liberia, there is a way to give directly to schools through the Illinois Great
Rivers Conference. Just contact me if you’re interested in supporting that
mission financially.
Each morning with breakfast, and
each evening after dinner, Bunny led us in a devotion and prayer. During some
of those times, she reminded us that we don’t arrive in Liberia, or anywhere
else for that matter, assuming we can change the entire culture or the entire
country, much less solve all their problems, fix their entire school system. We
can’t do it in the mere three days we held the trainings, and we certainly
can’t in a single trip or even multiple trips. We emphasized this idea in our
lesson planning session, too – not everything we discussed would be applicable
for everyone, but that’s okay. We just gave them the tools to make one change,
and we had to trust God would magnify and multiply it as He sees fit.
Bunny
emphasized that idea during our closing ceremony, too. During our last afternoon
with the group, we gave another devotion and gave each teacher a bag full of
school supplies and a certificate of completion for them. Bunny talked about
how we didn’t come with all the answers, but instead we came to be their
friends who worked alongside them – not ahead merely leading, not behind just
telling them what to do, but alongside collaborating with them.
As we were getting ready to serve them, before we could even
give them what we’d brought them, they told us of their gratitude – some
teachers stood to tell us how thankful they were for our help, for our
sacrifice of traveling so far to join them there. And then, before we could
offer our gifts, they gave us gifts – beautiful shirts made there in the city.
Each gift was selected specifically for the recipient – and we knew what kind
of sacrifice they had made to give us these gifts.
And in
those moments, I know, we were living out God’s intention for the church – in
Acts 4:32 it says, “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one
claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything
they had,” and that is what we were doing. We came together as a family of
faith, and we shared what we had. I just so happened to have educational background
to share with them. They shared finances that were already more limited than I
can imagine, and more importantly, they shared their deep understanding of
praising God and going to God in prayer honestly and humbly about everything.
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