For thirty members of Friends of Liberia, May will be a month of returning to service, reacquainting themselves with Liberia and renewing friendships with former colleagues and former neighbors from our previous work and time in Liberia. The majority of the travelers on the FOL trip served in Liberia as Peace Corps Volunteers during the first 30 years of Peace Corps’ work in Liberia. Some had returned as election monitors or teacher trainers and several have spent their careers contributing to the study of Liberia. For others, it’s been a long time since they’ve “gone Monrovia.”
The group will arrive in Monrovia on May 1 and spend the first weekend in the city getting oriented to the new ways of working there. On May 3, the group will travel together to Ganta, where they will stay for that first week doing service projects in the area. Ganta Hospital has welcomed the assistance of 11 travelers who are medical professionals. Lead by Jim and Pat McGeorge, they will give workshops on medical practices, mentor Liberian health professionals on best practices and make visits to neighboring villages.
Former Liberian Education Assistance Project (LEAP) administrator Stephanie Vickers will lead a second group who will be doing observing primary school teachers and principals in the area. Former co-trainers from the long-time FOL teacher training project will join them in a workshop setting and in one-on-one classroom coaching.
Finally, former Forest Service professional Mike Waite will lead environmentalists on a project to survey the environment in the Nimba Reserve Conservation area.
FOL has been in contact with the new director of the Peace Corps Response team, which has been in Liberia less than a year. Many of the Response volunteers are working in the areas of health and education and the travelers are looking forward to meeting many of them while in the Ganta area.
During the three-week visit, the Liberian Studies Association will be holding its first conference in Monrovia since before the war. This will give travelers who study Liberia a unique opportunity to attend this scholastic forum in its historic setting.
In between the service and the scholarship, many of the travelers plan to return to the villages and towns where they first worked in Liberia. It will be a time to renew old friendships and make some new ones that will undoubtedly contribute to Friends of Liberia’s work in the years to come.
More about the Friends of Liberia Return Trip
| 
