Five days in Liberia...

Oct. 9, Friday, Monrovia, Liberia --

We flew into Liberia four days ago, but it seems like a few months ago. Each night, the six of us – Tom, Al, I, Okorie (the Navigator director for West African countries), his friend Viashima, and Joe (the Ghana director for the Navigators) – have slept in a different house. We've slept on mattresses and box springs, couches and floors. We fly out tomorrow night.

I'll try to sum up the week.

Tuesday: We arrived at Roberts International Airport in the late morning. The airport was pretty small and was built right next to the massive, sprawling Firestone plantation and factory. The plantation is basically its own institution in Liberia and the country's largest employer – thousands of acres of trees producing rubber and a huge and very smelly factory. As soon as we walked out of the airport, we walked into a huge downpour. The rest of the day were off and on downpours – even our hosts said they were surprised by how much it rained.

We drove down a very pot-holed road to a town called Cottontree, about an hour east of the capital, Monrovia. The houses there were rudimentary. We stayed at a pastor's house just off the main road. The bathroom was a hole in the ground in an outhouse. That evening I took a walk with Okorie through the town market. It was filled with hundreds of kids running around and crossing the street – and large trucks packed with young guys hanging off the back drove by at incredibly fast speeds. Not a good combination.

At night, we turned on the generator to power a couple fading lights and a rickety ceiling fan. Four people from the group crammed into one room to go to bed. I slept on the floor with a couple couch cushions.

Wednesday: We woke up early, founds some taxis and made the long drive to Monrovia. Taxis here are even more perilous than in Ghana. There are no seatbelts in the back seats and, on this day, the rain had flooded the roads in some places... but that didn't stop the taxi drivers from pushing 80 mph on two-lane roads.

We arrived at a house where one of the Liberia Navigators live. When I got out of the car, I was staring at a quaint house surrounded by green grass only a few dozen feet from a beautiful beach spotted with palm trees. Not too bad. We spent the day doing a lot of discussing and planning on the young Liberia effort with the Navigators.

Thursday: I slept in until 8 a.m. – by far, the latest I had slept during this whole trip. That day, we drove in taxis to an extremely crowded and hectic market called Red Light (it was named such because it was the first part of town to get a stop light, not because of other reasons...). In all, there were nine of us. So we took two more taxis to a government high school called the Booker T. Washington Institute. The drive was almost an hour, and I was crammed in the back seat of a taxi with three other people for the whole ride. As I would later found out, it's standard procedure to cram four in the back of a taxi in Liberia.

We had a good time touring the school, known for its academic excellence. We met with one of the administrators there and talked about forming a Navigators ministry there someday – he seemed very receptive to the idea. My favorite part, however, was when we were invited to sit down in a gazebo where the school choir was gathered. They performed a handful of amazing songs – about 40 young Liberians singing from the soul. It was powerful stuff.

Friday: We drove into downtown Monrovia, taking two roads named after former dictators: Doe Road and Tubman Blvd. We arrived at the University of Liberia and spent the afternoon touring the campus, meeting with a few people and praying for the students' future. It was heartening to see so much potential in a country that is still struggling to recover after 20 years of war.

Tomorrow morning we fly out back to Ghana. The Baptist Guest House in Accra wasn't that impressive when I first saw it, but now I'm looking forward to sleeping the Baptist Guest Palace.