Harper – At World’s End

Nowhere is the post-Apocalyptic atmosphere of Harper, in southern Liberia, felt more than in ex-President William Tubman's burnt-out presidential residence. Once a striking mansion sat on top of the hill overlooking the sweeping lush green cape, it now stands as a shadowy, derelict wreck. Destroyed by frenzied rebels in the civil war and left to...

Harper – The Forgotten City

On Africa's western shores, where huge Atlantic breakers roll onto Liberia's jungle-covered beaches, Harper sits like a forgotten city in the Deep-South of the country. Its previous splendour now faded away into the landscape, it's as if the Apocalypse has been and gone, and tenacious human life has returned to live in the ruins of...

Work Down South – Community Visits and Education Assessments

In our second week in Harper, in the isolated South East of Liberia, we began the school’s baseline assessments, testing twenty-four children from every school to compare their performance and tailor future teacher training sessions. While students in Street Child schools in other counties had scored around 40% on average in a series of maths...

Work in South Eastern Liberia – Thunderclaps and a brand new school

The isolated city of Harper, in Maryland County, is located way down in the South East of Liberia, on the border with the Ivory Coast. In fact, to get there from the capital Monrovia, it takes two ten hour days of driving, pitching and rolling along severely rutted dirt tracks through the jungle interior, with...

Fieldwork

For the last week, I’ve been based out of the bustling capital Monrovia, accompanying the Street Child social workers and the Family Business Scheme teams on their daily activities, putting together reports and stories from their work. For both of these groups, they work out in the field full time, travelling between schools and the...

New President. New Hope.

‘My fellow Liberians, let not the splendor of these ceremonies, nor the celebration of electoral victory, make us forget how we arrived at this moment. We have arrived here on the blood, sweat, tears, and suffering of so many of our citizens, too many of whom died, longing for real freedom and equality. So that...

Distribution Missions – Margibi

After the distribution assignment in Cape Mount County last week, this week we set off for the second cluster of Street Child supported schools in Margibi County, working out of the field base in Kakata. In contrast to the jungly landscape of Cape Mount, Margibi is home to the enormous Firestone rubber tree plantation, stretching...

Distribution Missions – Cape Mount

Wednesday morning last week, we left on our first assignment outside of Monrovia, headed for the county Cape Mount, a jungly landscape in the northern interior of the country, about three hours away by car. The aim of the trip was distributing the latest batch of learning materials to the students and monitoring the rural...

Liberian Life – 2

The Monrovian roadside markets are hectic, especially Red Light, the huge gateway market you usually have to pass through to enter the city, and West Point, a sprawling warren of narrow streets, located in one of Liberia’s toughest slums, where the tarmac is slowly losing a battle to the encroaching stalls on all sides. Throughout...

Liberian Life – 1

It’s been just over a week now since I arrived in Liberia to start my work as a Communications Volunteer for the NGO Street Child, and I’m slowly easing into the West African pace of life, at about the same rate as my skin loses its ghostly paleness left over from a British winter. So...