Editor's note: Journal Staff Writer Philip Marcelo will be traveling to Liberia in August to report on that country's progress 10 years after the end of a devastating civil war. This is the latest installment of an online and print series called "Rebuilding Liberia: The R.I. Connection." The project is funded by the International Center for Journalists, in Washington.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Establishing schools, missions and orphanages has been one of the key things that Rhode Island Liberians have been involved in since the August 2003 end of the country's civil war.
One example is former Rhode Island residents Fungbeh and Neyor Karmue, who started Christ Children's Home in the city if Gbarnga in 2009.
The Karmues had been among the founding members of the Providence Church of Christ, located on Elmwood Avenue, before moving to Florida and then deciding to return home full-time.
Today, Christ Children's Home is a one acre, K-12 school complex that currently houses 44 children.
I've been in contact with the Karmue's adult children, who now reside in Tennessee, in the hopes of visiting the home.
Their daughter, Nyempu Karmue-Hall, runs one of the home's fundraising entities, the Christ Children's Home Education Fund.
Along with her husband, Adolphus Hall, she is also overseeing construction of a newer, larger orphanage complex on 19 acres in nearby Suakoko. That new facility is slated to open at the end of 2014 with separate boys and girls dormitories, a school building and a mission house. Eventually, they'll build a cafeteria, library and playground.
I also recently met up with Quanuquanei "Q" Karmue, their son, who attended The Wheeler School in Providence before his family moved south.
With a master's in fine arts from East Tennessee State University, he has written a memoir about his family's harrowing experience escaping the country's first civil war in the 1990s that he hopes to have published.
It's called "Witness: A Civil War Experience from a Child's Perspective."
In it, Karmue recounts how his mother fled their hometown of Gbarnga with her five young children when the fighting reached their doorstep.
Their father had been in the U.S. on business at the time. They would not see him for five years.
Quanuquanei, who was about eight years old at the time, said the family traveled on foot towards the capital city of Monrovia before eventually making it to a refugee camp in the Ivory Coast.
Along the way, he said, their mother was beaten, tortured and threatened with execution by soldiers as she tried to assure her children's safety.
Here's an excerpt: "Our days were long and the nights were dreaded as we walked miles and miles through fields strewn with bodies in various stages of decay. Men, women and children were piled together. Flies hovered above the bodies in thick black clouds. Survival was a matter of timing, nothing more."
To be sure, the Karmues aren't the only Rhode Islanders looking to help the youth of Liberia.
The Providence Church of Christ, which they helped co-found, is also raising money to construct their own mission, orphanage, school and medical complex on about ten acres about half hour north of Monrovia. They are calling it "Love Lights the Way."
Jim White, a board member for the nonprofit organization, says the goal is to offer technical and vocational training, health services, temporary housing, and spiritual counsel to young adults.
"Self-sufficiency is really what we are aiming at," he said recently. "You've got to get them equipped so that they can do for themselves."
The Christian Chronicle, an international newspaper for the Church of Christ, did a write up in December 2012 on Love Lights the Way.
Meanwhile, church leaders at St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church on Elmwood Avenue in Providence are also dreaming big.
They've launched the Gbarnga Lutheran School Mission Project. The goal is to build a school campus on 15 acres of land outside of Gbarnga.
Both those projects are in the early stages and have a long way to go to realize their lofty plans. But I don't doubt the sincerity of the missions.