Last Days in Liberia

Friday & Saturday, August 12-13, 2016

Today Elder Wollenzien needed to be on the job to check on another bathroom that he is having built at the small school we saw the other day.  He was to pick us up later on in the morning. Finally, after hanging out and writing reports, Sister Wollenzien showed up at 11:30 with Sister Kimball (served many times in Liberia over the years) and Sister Degomez (arrived here the same night we did)  and brought us to the Church offices.  The roads were excessively crowded, probably because there were a lot of graduations today.  The Church offices are in an older building that also has electrical problems, but has a view of the ocean and many rooms for the various workers.  The Charities room is on the bottom floor.  After the entry there was a large room that was filled with supplies that needed to be delivered to various chapels, things such as TP and cleaning supplies, etc. 

View at the back parking lot behind the Church office building.   

   

They deliver supplies here to take to various church buildings.       The Charities office is directly ahead through the double doors.  There are several offices on this floor and also an upper story for many other offices.

As we waited for Elder Wollenzien to show up, we walked down the street with E/S Degomez and Sister Wollenzien to have lunch at the Anglers Restaurant. Elder Wollenzien showed up in time for us to all eat lunch together, and it was good.  We went back to the office and waited for Morris.  He didn’t show up so we drove to Wollenzien’s new apartment and waited for Morris there—it is a little bit closer to his area.

We ate lunch at the Anglers Restaurant, a very short walk from the office.

  A much better apartment on the 4^th floor overlooking the sea except sometimes they don’t have water or electricity…always there are problems…

When we were last in Liberia many years ago we saw the apartment that E/S Miles had to stay in.  It was so dark and almost permanently dirty-looking and so depressing.  I was so glad to hear that they had found another place to live.  This apartment complex where the couples live is really lovely, and they got a huge discount on the price as many NGO’s departed after Ebola got under control.  It is on an upper floor and they overlook the ocean.  In time the church might build something there in that location so that all the couples and the office can be in one place.  Their apartment was like a breath of fresh air.  I was so happy for them!

This swimming pool is supposed to be for their complex, which is behind the apartments.  They already have a wonderful gym.  They can see the ocean from their balcony.

So, we waited, and we waited…after a very long time Morris finally showed up.  We had a list of all the places that we had needed to see and found out that we had seen a lot of our water projects but many of them were not on the list of those we really needed to see.  So, poor E/S Wollenzien are going to have to do it for us.  We didn’t have a full week to do it because of the two days with Water Aid, but I still thought we’d see a lot more of what we needed to.  By the end of next week though, they will have seen nearly all of the ones that we missed on both projects, and then we’ll have a more accurate report.  Most of what we saw were area projects…anyway, they certainly were good ones.  The others won’t have nearly as good a report as what we saw, but I realized how important it was for us to see all these area projects—they are VERY successful and when we have couples that are good at what they do, we could ask for more area monies so that we can do many more area projects—more latrines here and water projects on a smaller scale that can be watched better and be very successful—and this we have seen, so I don’t feel what we did was wasted time after all.

Saturday we met with Water Aid for their last meeting with us.  They came by at noon so we could have a lunch/meeting. We probably learned more about them at that meeting than we did the two days we spent with them before.  The rest of the time we wrote reports. 

Tomorrow we fly back to Accra.  Almost home…