Return to Liberia for 23 FOL travelers

For some, it will be the first time back to Liberia in more than 40 years; others have been back to Liberia for various projects and work in the last decade since the peace. The 23 people traveling together on May 4 from New York’s JFK Airport are a mixed sample of the people who make up FOL: 13 are former Peace Corps volunteers, 7 people who worked or grew up on the Firestone Plantation, two former missionaries and one spouse who hasn’t been to Liberia before.

As on the trip in 2009, the U.S. Embassy is ready to fete the travelers with a welcome back reception at the start of the trip. FOL officers Stephanie Vickers and Pat McGeorge will make courtesy calls to the Liberian Ministries of Education and Health to talk about the service projects they will be undertaking while in country. FOL President Vickers has long lead the training of early childhood education educators in five rural counties. She and Vice President Peter Levitov, along with board members Pat Reilly and Harmon Lisnow and fellow travelers Steve Griffith and Ron Mertz will be giving a workshop in organizational development to the leaders of a teacher training non-profit called Liberian Educators for Action and Peace (LEAP), composed of teachers FOL has trained over more than a dozen years.

FOL Secretary Pat McGeorge and her husband, Jim, one of the organizers of the trip, will be including a half-dozen travelers in a needs assessment of rural health clinics as part of FOL’s strategic plan to look for areas in which the group can have high impact.

The service projects will be based in Kakata at the Peace Corps Training Center. One of the highlights of the trip promises to be a Saturday night reception at the center for currently serving Peace Corps volunteers. On the following day, some of those volunteers will be guiding former volunteers back to the towns where they served as Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s and 70s.

The Firestone alumni will be travel to the Harbel Firestone facility, where some of them grew up and went to school.

Travelers blogs and a photo gallery will be available in the next couple of weeks at: 2013 Liberia Travelers Blog under News and Events.

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