Excerpts from Stephanie Vickers… More later
I have been on an internet diet…for the last 13 days. We have had no internet connection and so I have been unable to share photos or adventures and post anything on the FOL website blog. As they say here: sorry-yah! Luckily texting and cell phone calls home are not expensive so I have had the good fortune to talk to many in my family. As far as I know the world may have stopped and I would not have a clue… I will post some photos very soon.
We completed the Capacity Building Workshop on Saturday evening and the Liberians all left early on Sunday morning. I could not believe how well dressed many of the woman were to being get in a taxi for several hours. The workshop was very successful and the Liberians left feeling quite confident and pleased with their new skills to develop their own NGO and get into the schools to train more early childhood educators. They elected officers and a board, held their first meeting following their by-laws and even completed a proposal to submit to a funder.
We will leave the Peace Corps Compound and return to Monrovia on Monday where I will volunteer to help with the Ministry of Education’s training program for their new Early Childhood Development Curriculum. This was rolled out when I was here to present at the conference in April.
There are a few left of the group of 23 travelers that convened at JFK on May 4. It has been a great reunion and return for every one in the group,that is, by returning to their towns of service and/or meeting up with old students, neighbors and friends. All have wonderful stories and adventures of being back in this country of delicious Liberian soups and fruit, the dusty laterite roads with all its pot holes and the same for the paved (or coal tar) roads, trying to “hear” and understand Liberian English again and just taking time to enjoy some wonderful people in a place that meant a great deal to all of us so long ago. Most of the group spans in living here from 1963 through the last group in 1989, but for some, that is 6 in the group were born on the Firestone “Plantation” and all of them except one had not been back to Liberia since they left as children to go to High School in the states over in the 1960s and 70s.