5
Peace demands the most heroic labour and the most difficult sacrifices. It demands greater heroism than war.
THOMAS MERTON
Father Pat Maguire used to arrive with a roar on his very large motorbike in full leather biker’s gear. Among the regular visitors to Craig Lodge House of Prayer were many dear friends, but my children were always particularly excited about his appearances. Father Pat had become one of our biggest allies in the collection of donations for Bosnia-Herzegovina. His house in Dunblane had become a collection point for aid from that part of Scotland, and I would visit him frequently to load the accumulated goods from his garage into my van. After the hard work was over he would, over a cup of tea, tell me of his time as a missionary in Africa and his love of that continent. He talked a lot about the civil war in Liberia where several priests in his Order (the Society of African Missions or SMAs) were working. He explained to me that over half the population there were living in huge displaced camps around the capital Monrovia and amid them was an English priest called Father Garry Jenkins. He described the suffering and the needs of the people there, which sounded even more acute than those in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and began to ask if we might think about sending aid there too. We started looking at shipping costs and talked to Father Garry more specifically about the needs and the practicalities of moving the goods from the port to those in the camps. He was desperate for us to try it and reassured us he would oversee all of the logistics and distribution if we could just get the containers to Monrovia. And so, during 1996, we wrote up a new ‘list of needs’, this time for the displaced people of Liberia, and began to ask for help on their behalf. In addition to the food, clothes and medicine we had been sending to the former Yugoslavia, towels and soap were identified as urgently needed items for people living in extremely hot and humid conditions.
Not far from Father Pat’s home is the world-famous hotel and golf course at Gleneagles. One of the housekeepers there, another friend of Father Pat’s, heard of this urgent need for soap. She and her colleagues then began to collect the bars of soap, until then discarded after one use by the hotel guests, and tie them in plastic bags for our collection. Over the next few years I became a regular visitor to one of the world’s most exclusive hotels, and for a while the back of my van began to smell very nice indeed. As well as soap, candles (also desperately needed in Liberia, but not required for more than one use in Gleneagles Hotel) became part of these consignments made ready for my collection. I always drove out of the beautiful grounds of that hotel smiling. There was something about transporting these sumptuous things, discarded by people of great wealth, to those living in abject poverty, that gave me great satisfaction. And although it was all done with the consent of the hotel’s manager, I managed to feel a little like Robin Hood and the Perthshire moor I drove across for a moment would become Sherwood Forest. When, some time later, we eventually wrote down our vision, part of it read, ‘that all those who have more than they need share with those who lack even the basic things’. Those kindly housekeepers in Gleneagles Hotel certainly made possible a spectacularly direct way to do that. It seemed appropriate that nearly ten years later the UK government, whose turn it was to host the G8 summit in 2005, chose Gleneagles Hotel as their venue and decided that this summit should concentrate on Climate Change and African Economic Development. Sadly, when they made those choices, they were entirely unaware of the soap and candle recycling initiatives that had been pioneered here. However, on several occasions since then, when I have attended meetings involving politicians talking about international aid and development, in order to combat feelings of dislocation and despair, I endeavour to conjure up the perfume of that soap and the mood it engendered.
Soon, alongside the lorries bound for Bosnia-Herzegovina, we were filling and dispatching shipping containers from our warehouses in Glasgow and receiving reports and warm thanks from Father Garry and the recipients of this aid. He amused us by explaining how they were removing the huge, heavy shipping containers from the trucks that transported them from the port (some of these, rather than being returned empty, were kept for use as secure stores). In the absence of a crane, they tied the container securely to a tree and the lorry would then accelerate away leaving the container to crash on to the ground. It didn’t always work first time and a number of palm trees had simply snapped in two.
By early 1997, the fighting in Liberia had lulled and Father Pat and I decided it was a good time to visit. Sadly, my first experience of Africa was one of a war-ravaged, dark city. There was no electricity in Monrovia, home to more than a million people, and as we drove through the late evening from the airport, I could see groups of people huddled round flickering fires within the eerie carcasses of roofless buildings. The SMA Fathers had a little flat in the centre of town, which like virtually every other building here had been looted of every single thing it once contained. Even the light-bulb fittings and electrical sockets had been ripped out – not that they would have been much help to us anyway. We unpacked our bags in the dark with the aid of torches and lay down in the hot, sticky blackness for a few hours’ sleep.
Liberia was founded in 1847 by American freed slaves to become the first independent African republic. The descendants of those Americans became the rulers of the country and during the 1970s Liberia was considered a relatively prosperous country with huge potential given its enormous natural resources. But a coup in 1980 ushered in an era of gradual decline and eventual descent into civil war by the end of that decade. Various armed factions, divided along tribal lines and motivated by a desire to control the lucrative gold, diamond, iron, rubber and timber industries, had become engaged in a brutal conflict that had already claimed the lives of over 150,000 Liberians. Over 60,000 people had taken up arms, many of them children who were forced to become slaves or ‘child soldiers’ by armed groups who had ransacked their villages and killed their parents. The notorious warlord, Charles Taylor, leader of the NPFL faction which had controlled much of Liberia’s territory for several years, had recently emerged victorious and a fragile peace had now held for a few months. ECOMOG, a West African peacekeeping force, was helping to provide stability and elections were planned for May. As we drove out of the city at first light, we were stopped at checkpoints and asked by Guinean soldiers for our passports. Nearby, a huge rusting tank was parked in a petrol station, as if waiting for an attendant to appear and ask if he should fill her up. Every single building in the city appeared to have been raked by gunfire and many had been shelled. Among the rubble people had rigged up pitiful shelters for their families with pieces of plastic. As he drove, Father Garry gave us updates on the war, explaining its complexities and answering our questions with colourful and disturbing anecdotes. His love for the people here was clearly deep. I had the impression that because they were suffering profoundly then so was he. He spoke fiercely about justice and how there could be no lasting peace without it. He quoted Old Testament prophets on this subject. He also told us a little of his own early life story; how he had been raised Methodist and left home at sixteen to join the British army. He was enormously impressive; a warrior priest, the like of whom I had rarely met before. We crossed the main bridge over the St Paul River (which I recognized as the scene of recent fierce battles shown on news reports) and passed the port where our containers from Scotland had been arriving. Finally, we reached the enormous sprawling camps on the edge of the city, home to hundreds of thousands of people who had been forced out of their villages. These never-ending rows of hastily erected mud-wattle huts were the home of the Gola people, among whom Father Garry had lived and worked for over twenty years. It was to these people that he had been distributing the contents of the containers. And those gifts were immediately and delightfully evident as we walked between the homes and talked to Father Garry’s friends, who emerged to greet us. Many were wearing Scottish football stripes, or other shirts whose slogans made their origin clear. Glasgow’s 10k Sponsored by Irn-Bru, read a T-shirt worn by one of a group of young people who gathered round us eager to say hello to Father Garry and his guests. Some of them, such as Abraham who was sitting in a wheelchair sent from Scotland, wanted to thank us for the gift. We sat and talked for a long time with them. The conversation was an excited one. Some of them believed it might be time to risk a return to their village of Jawajeh, which they had fled in terror three years earlier when one of the factions, Ulimo J, had taken control of that part of Liberia. The men had just heard encouraging news passed back by those who had already left the camp for the villages – they believed the fighters had now left those areas. They sought Father Garry’s advice. Eventually he suggested we all go back together later in the week. That way he could give them a lift and carry some supplies. I noticed that as well as the smiles and laughter that this offer elicited, looks of fear, even dread, flitted across some faces too.
Later we visited lots of families in their makeshift homes. Most of them had obviously known Father Garry for many years and the welcomes were warm and sincere. As we crowded into little rooms to talk, it was nice to smell that wonderful Gleneagles soap, now in a very different setting, and to recognize the candles which provided their only light in the hours of darkness. Many of the children were obviously severely malnourished, some with swollen bellies and depigmented hair caused by kwashiorkor. They held my hands and stroked my forearms, fascinated by this enormous, very hairy white person. Some of the babies cried when they saw me and cowered into their laughing apologetic mothers. Later we crowded into a little makeshift chapel where Father Garry and Father Pat celebrated Mass, and the people sang with all their hearts and prayed that God would deliver them from these camps and bring them safely home to their villages. They prayed, too, for all the people in Scotland who had helped them in their time of need.
Afterwards, Father Garry received news that our latest container had been released unexpectedly early from the port and was on its way to us now. Father Garry implored those around us who had heard the message not to spread this information. ‘Please be quiet about this,’ he pleaded, ‘we don’t want to distribute the contents of this container immediately as we want to be able to give it to those returning to villages in the coming weeks. We want to encourage and support people to go home to their farms, not stay here forever in these camps. For now we want to unload it into our store. So we do not want large crowds here.’
I looked at the ‘store’ to which he pointed. It was a previously emptied shipping container sent from Scotland, on the doors of which were roughly spray-painted ‘WITH LOVE FROM SCOTLAND’. I smiled at a memory of one of our volunteers, Debbie, who had surprised us all just before the truck bearing that container pulled away from our Glasgow warehouse doors. As the truck driver had climbed into the cab to start his long journey towards the port, she had suddenly clambered on to a stack of pallets beside the lorry and produced a can of white spray paint from her jacket. While we laughed uproariously she, like the experienced graffiti artist that she obviously was, handwrote her message with a flourish. When I last looked, that container with those words as clear as ever, still sits at our HQ in Liberia today, more than eighteen years later!
But Father Garry’s plea was in vain. By the time the truck rumbled up, hundreds of people in rags had gathered offering to help. Their desperation was obvious. I had always enjoyed loading and unloading trucks – especially being able to distribute ones that I had helped pack in Glasgow. In fact I had personally collected most of the goods in this load from homes and schools and churches in Scotland. I knew many of the people who had made the gifts. It was usually a thrill to be able to return home and reassure those good people that I had indeed seen their gifts being given to those in need with my own eyes. But this unloading was certainly not one I enjoyed. Father Garry and Father Pat had driven on to say Mass in the other camp and left a group of us to take charge. These people around us were hungry. And they had hungry, naked children at home. They were in urgent need and it was very difficult for them to understand why we could not give this particular container of aid to them. In the absence of a secure, walled compound we decided to make a human chain to move the aid as swiftly as possible to the store, while others tried to keep the pressing, ever-growing, mass of people back. Some began to shout angrily and by now several thousand people had congregated in the fading light. Zinnah, who had worked with Father Garry for many years, and who was calmly organizing the team, told me not to worry and explained that he had sent a message asking for ECOMOG troops to come and help us. To my great relief, a few minutes later, several Nigerian soldiers climbed out of a pickup truck and restored order. Wheelchairs, bundles of clothing, farming tools, boxes of spectacles and bags of familiar soap were carried speedily into the other container which was then firmly padlocked, as the disgruntled and frustrated throng dispersed into the evening.
While the unloading of that container had been difficult, especially for those in need who had had to watch, I absolutely understood how important it was to encourage and support the return of the people to their villages and farms where they could resume their previous self-supporting way of life. There was a risk of aid dependency developing in the camps and it was certainly easy to understand why some would be less than enthusiastic about a return. Apart from the traumatic circumstances in which many had left the villages, the option of returning to overgrown farms in areas that currently had no health care or schooling was not an easy choice to make for families.
But, certainly, the strong men clasping machetes, who squeezed into Father Garry’s truck a couple of mornings later, were clearly determined to rebuild their old lives. With fourteen of us squashed into the pickup, we drove out of the city, through ECOMOG checkpoints into what had been rebel-controlled territory for many years. From time to time, as we drove through the war-scarred landscape, with remains of various buildings visible at the sides of the road, the men would start to sing. I could see how emotional these returning exiles were, Father Garry included. We eventually reached Tubmanburg, the county capital and former mining town, where Father Garry used to live. He showed us what was left of his house – not much more than a pile of rubble – and pointed out his looted church. He had chosen to stay here, behind enemy lines, for much of the war to help the most vulnerable – the blind, those with leprosy, amputees, elderly and other sick people – who had congregated around his church. He had been cut off from all his colleagues in Monrovia for fifteen months. During this time, he had experienced hunger, armed robbery, and escaped on foot from ambush and artillery attacks. In 1996, over 300 children died of hunger and related diseases here. He showed us the little mounds of earth near his church where he had buried them.
‘While those children starved, the people who caused their deaths continued to dig for diamonds,’ he said sadly. ‘They say here now that even the trees are crying for the lack of children. Those mangos that weigh down each branch because the kids haven’t been here to pick them, they are their tears.’
We squeezed back into the pickup and continued on our way, leaving the tar roads and making our way slowly through overgrown forest tracks. Sometimes we had to wait while the men used their machetes to clear fallen trees or overhanging branches that blocked our way. Eventually we stopped in a clearing, over which towered some enormous cotton trees. As the men scrambled out of the car, I realized that this was Jawajeh and began to notice tumbled-down houses among the undergrowth. The men eagerly slashed some of the overhanging branches as they began to explore. Then they stopped and waited for Father Garry and Father Pat. They spoke quietly with them and then sat down in a circle under the trees. They had asked the two priests to say Mass there in the remains of their village. I noticed, through the trees, a man and woman sitting outside a derelict mud-brick house that had been daubed in the graffiti of Ulimo J. They were watching us.
‘A fighter,’ said one of the men quietly and then ignored them as the priests, in their white cassocks, began to say the words of the Mass. After we had received Communion the men stood and began singing, quietly at first, ‘Jesus Come, Devil Go’. As we walked through the village around their various broken homes covered in vegetation and graffiti, they sang all the louder while their priests liberally sprayed holy water with a palm leaf all around them. In a space where a house had once been lay two human skulls.
Paul, who was about the same age as me, and in fact the village chief, showed me his own roofless home. ‘I think I must knock it down and start again,’ he said sadly, after a brief survey.
Before we left them in the village, they had already begun a ferocious attack on the encroaching forest with their machetes. They were determined to clear a farm for planting. This, for them, was the first priority. Only when they had planted new crops, made their homes habitable and satisfied themselves that their village was once again safe would they take their wives and children back from the camps.
Later that week, we returned to Jawajeh. In our pickup was a pile of fruit, bags of rice, cassava seeds, new machetes, hoes, wire for trapping animals and a cockerel and hen who would be tasked with beginning a new chicken population here. We could not believe how much of the forest the men had already cleared with their bare hands. They were delighted with the supplies we brought and said they believed they would be harvesting cassava by August. Meanwhile they would live on whatever they could catch or find in the forest. They told me about bush yams, palm cabbage and other wild food to be found in the forest, but asked if we might be able to send them supplies of rice from time to time.
And so it was that our work in Liberia happily entered a new phase. For a time, at least, our focus moved from emergency response to supporting people as they returned to their old homes and worked to rebuild their lives. Much of my time during the remainder of that first visit was spent organizing the purchase of supplies for returnees to seventeen other villages in Bomi County. We used donations to buy thousands of machetes, large quantities of seeds and various other essential supplies. We also funded the rebuilding of village schools and the setting up of a mobile health clinic that would serve this area. This work was incredibly direct and effective. ‘£1.75 will buy a machete,’ we wrote in our newsletter, ‘£10,000 will rebuild a village school.’ People gave the money, and we bought the machetes and rebuilt the schools. Our donors had huge confidence in our very direct approach and they understood that all we were doing was based on a genuine partnership with our friends here. We were supplying some of the basic things they desperately needed in order to become independent again. The mobile clinic we funded grew and began visiting villages across Bomi County, providing the only primary health care available. The local nurses and midwives we employed, and the medicines we shipped, were saving lives every day. As the farms began to produce food there was great hope that the Gola people were entering a new era of peace and self-sufficiency. But the peace was short-lived.
Charles Taylor, the victor turned president, continued to terrorize the population and bleed the country of its natural wealth for his own personal gain. By 1999 a new rebel group called LURD had emerged and Liberia’s ‘Second Civil War’ began. This war, like all wars, was barbaric, but perhaps particularly so. Probably no conflict in the last hundred years has made use of child soldiers in such an extensive way. Both Taylor and LURD were guilty of this hideous crime, and eventually perhaps as many as 20,000 children were forced to become ‘ammunition porters’ or child soldiers. Other human rights abuses and cruelty became prevalent. The military leadership of many warlords was based on a confused dark mysticism and their young soldiers were often introduced to cocaine, khat and other drugs as a way of control. There were numerous reports of torture, cannibalism and ritualistic killings. The abuse and rape of women was widespread. LURD soon gained control of much of the rural areas, including most of Bomi County, and once again the people of those villages, who desired only to raise their crops and their families in peace, were forced to run for their lives. History had repeated itself. Our friends found themselves back in the camps outside Monrovia, and our focus once again became sending them emergency help.
But Father Garry chose not to flee to the capital. As the LURD forces advanced towards Tubmanburg, all other expats and aid organizations left. The archbishop in Monrovia encouraged Father Garry to do the same. But by now those most in need had once again gathered around the church looking for help. And so, remembering the children who had starved here in 1996, he decided to stay. I talked to him on a regular basis. He used to phone me standing on top of a table under a certain mango tree, telling me with a laugh that it was the only place he could always get a good reception. We were able to send him funding on a regular basis via some Lebanese friends who owned a supermarket in Monrovia and had a way to get the funds, or desperately needed food supplies, to him. Meanwhile, the rebel forces were getting closer. Finally, in May 2002, we heard the news that LURD soldiers had attacked and captured Tubmanburg. None of us had any further contact from Father Garry for three weeks. We were devastated and assumed the worst. Then to our delight and surprise we heard news he was in Guinea. A couple of days later he phoned us and told us his story. The young soldiers who took the town after fierce fighting were surprised to find there among the destitute, an eccentric English priest. They got on the radio to their commander for advice and were told not to kill him. So instead they took him captive. When Father Garry’s two close co-workers, Zinnah and Matthew, understood what was happening, they asked the LURD boys to take them too. They wanted to be with him and try to protect him. A three-week trek through the forest ensued before they released them in neighbouring Guinea.
‘I have learnt a lot,’ Father Garry told me next time I saw him. ‘For years I have been leading communities and assisting others. And then I became completely destitute with sixteen boy soldiers in authority over me. I depended on them for sustenance and survival. One day one of them saved my life when I slipped as we waded a deep river. Another time I watched them fire a rocket-propelled grenade into a pool and collect the floating dead fish for food. I experienced powerlessness, vulnerability and physical weakness in a new way. I also felt empathy with my captors. I joined the army myself when I was only sixteen, so I was a child soldier once, I suppose. I thank God for that experience, that journey.’
Finally, in late 2003, following fierce fighting in Monrovia, Charles Taylor resigned, was extradited and later tried for war crimes. The war was over and the largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world was deployed. A short time later I visited Tubmanburg once again. Huge efforts were now under way to disarm the population, including the child soldiers. On the streets some of the boys still had their AK47s and grenade launchers. They still retained their ‘war names’: Kill the Woman, Quick to Fire, Dissident Baby and a dishevelled eleven-year-old called Down to my Level were among the children we met and played football with. But eventually all of them handed over their weapons and referred to those ‘war names’ as if they had been a different person. Twice during that visit, once in a petrol station on the edge of Monrovia and once on a lonely forest track, we ran into Father Garry’s former captors. They greeted him warmly and embraced him. Their mutual affection and respect was obvious. Now they only wanted to regain their childhood and their chance for education. They asked Father Garry when he would reopen St Dominic’s School.
This became one of our next priorities, the repair and refurbishment of this, the only high school in the area. It had been ransacked and looted of everything. A carpet of spent bullet cases covered the playground in which there was also at least one unmarked grave. We shipped containers full of books and teaching aids to re-stock the school library and re-equip the school, while he set about recruiting new teachers. Of the 600 pupils who eventually enrolled, over half were former child soldiers.
An incredible hunger for education, and a desperate recognition that without it there would be no escape from grinding poverty, was evident among all the young people I met at the start of that new school term. It was sometimes in jarring contrast to the very different angst that had been gripping my own family at the start of our school year in Scotland – and uncomfortably different to my own childhood memories of dreading the end of each school holiday too.
I had recently watched with relief as the tears dried and Martha’s limpet grip on Julie at our school gate weakened until at last she forgot to say goodbye before skipping off to see her friends. Now, in Liberia, I watched as a lady in a wheelchair approached Father Garry as he walked back from early morning Mass to eat his breakfast at home. She was pushed by a boy in his mid-teens and had strategically positioned herself on the well-worn path between the church and Father Garry’s house. She explained that she was a mother of nine and had travelled two hours from her home near Monrovia to beg that Father Garry take one of her children into the high school. He tried to explain that he had no places left and that anyway the school only took children from the surrounding three counties. She wailed and shouted in protest. He apologized again and gave her the fare for a taxi ride back to Monrovia. She sat quietly crying while the boy who had pushed her to the door tried to comfort her.
We also realized that the war had already robbed many older teenagers and young adults of their chance of ever going to school. For them we built a small trade school, hoping vocational skills such as carpentry, bricklaying, sewing and computing might give them the means to find work and support themselves. We also attached to this project a working farm to teach agriculture, as many who had lived in the camps or fought in the war had also lost their traditional farming skills. Situated just beside the spot (now marked by a wooden cross) where the children who had starved during the war were buried, we call this farm ‘The New World’. We bred sheep and goats with a view to repopulating the animal stock in the village – for they had been completely wiped out. Slowly the people began to readjust to peace. But without justice, peace is a hard thing to keep. One of the younger pupils confided in Father Garry that every morning, as he walked from home, he passed the man who he had seen murder his own mother.
Most of the guns had now gone, piled up rusting in UN compounds, but in some ways that was the easy bit. Truth and reconciliation in a land where tens of thousands of children were drugged and trained to kill is a difficult business. I was talking about this one day to Moses Flomo, an old friend in Tubmanburg, who was a physician assistant and senior member of the mobile clinic team, and he said to me, ‘You have to understand this is not just about the guns. We Liberians need to disarm our hearts.’
The growth of our work in Liberia was only made possible by the growth of our support back home. By now, a formidable group of fifty volunteers from the Glasgow area had begun to visit a different parish every Sunday where the parishioners had been previously invited to bring their unwanted clothing and bric-a-brac to place in the back of our van on their way into church. These goods were taken back to our warehouses and categorized. Some ended up on containers and trucks headed for Liberia, while others were sent to be sold in our charity shops, which were also being set up and run by groups of amazing, dedicated volunteers. The team collecting goods at the parishes then also began to give talks to the congregations at the invitation of the priests and ministers, and then to sell raffle tickets outside the churches as the congregations left. In time they recruited an incredibly committed team – among whom were teenagers, elderly people, a lady in a wheelchair and a blind gentleman – big enough to be present in at least three parishes each weekend and raising hundreds of thousands of pounds. They created massive awareness and respect of our work. To this day they continue this initiative, sacrificing their weekends, wind, rain or shine, and they humble me and teach me much with their good cheer and self-giving love. I like to describe our work as just a series of lots and lots of little acts of love, and when I do so, I usually think of them standing laughing outside a church in the face of the horizontal Scottish rain.