My visit to Bahn was painfully brief, that was the price paid to the rain. Forty years of imagination took form that afternoon as I met the people of the mission, including Daddy Wonti, who was my grandfather’s closest friend in Liberia. Together we visited my grandfather’s grave – which had been carefully maintained and honored by the people of the village since 1990. I visited his home, the trails, gigantic trees, and the other places nearby that he had written about in many letters through the years.
It was two years ago that I made my first trip to the West African country of Liberia. In October 2012, many of my friends and colleagues had never heard of Liberia, so it is strange that today hardly a day passes without the country and its people being mentioned in the daily news updates on the Ebola crisis.
In fact, after landing at Monrovia’s Roberts Field Airport I spent the first two days and nights of my trip based at a guest house in the ELWA (Eternal Love Winning Africa) Mission Radio compound. During the summer of 2014, the ELWA hospital and staff were ground zero for the international media coverage of the emerging fight against Ebola. The media’s sad images of suffering men, women and children haunted me knowing that some of these were people I may have spent time with during my short visit.
September and October cap the rainy season in West Africa, bringing to the countryside unbelievable precipitation and mire which were obstacles to my plans. My objective in this trip was to visit the remote jungle village of Bahn where my grandfather, Tom Jackson, spent his life ministering to the Gio people deep in the interior of Liberia. I wanted to visit his grave, to meet the men and women who knew him on the east side of the Atlantic, and to encourage them as a brother in Christ from the west side of the Atlantic.
There was to be a collision of my plans with the elements and quagmires of the vulnerable country roads. My trans-Atlantic plans and arrangements to travel upland unraveled on the second morning as I sat sheltered from the downpour on a porch at ELWA. I had just learned that the driver who was scheduled to pick me up in his four-wheel drive called a no-go due to the upland road conditions – end of story.
I was feeling the pressure of failure since there was limited time and money to get done what I set out to do before my flight returned to the states.
The trip to Bahn in Nimba County requires traveling across 120 miles of mostly dirt roads with few roadside resources. Late season rain had been especially heavy, and the road conditions were the worst in recent memory according to some people. As I flew overnight from New York to Monrovia, I gauged the countryside conditions through conversations from my fellow passengers who were mostly western aid-agency workers.
The trip had launched with excitement, highlighted with the fact that our Delta 767 airliner was the ad hoc Liberian Air Force One, with the Liberian President and her staff aboard for the return trip from the United Nations summit. Despite the foreboding news of ground conditions, I remained excited to be on the trip and maintained confidence that I would overcome the natural conditions.
It’s not as if I wasn’t aware of the potential that the roads could be impassable at that time of year. In the days and weeks leading up to the trip I had completed my due diligence, made the confirmations with the in-country contacts, prayed for guidance and then proceeded trusting that God would make my path straight.
I was traveling with two friends who grew up in Liberia, and I knew that having them as my guides into the country was a unique opportunity. More than that, I took their companionship on this trip as a divine confirmation that I was meant to travel at that time and was looking forward to spending time supporting and enjoying being with the believers from my grandfather’s community. My friends were not making the upland journey with me, they had work to do in Monrovia, and I would be making my own journey with John, a Liberian friend who knew my grandfather.
So on that rainy morning at ELWA, with a storm of fear in my heart I realized that my options to complete the trip were failing. I should have been several hours into my journey by that time, when John called to tell me there were not many other choices and all of his other contacts were unavailable.
I actually wandered down to the SIM mission folks to see about hitching a ride somewhere upland, but they were not traveling my direction. I explored the option to have the medical helicopter to airlift me across the jungle, but (thankfully) the flight was not an option. By now the rain was ending, and I yearned for my restlessness to change to peace, so I decided to take a walk around the ELWA grounds, past the school and hospital, past the lagoon and along the ocean drive with the crashing breakers.
Somewhere along the path, it came to my senses that I was missing the entire opportunity of trusting God to lead me – really letting go of my feeble resources and arrangement. Hadn’t I prayed weeks and months before for Him to lead me on this journey? I didn’t want this trip to be Rob exploring the planet; somehow I wanted to be part of God’s work in Liberia.
I began laughing to myself, relaxing as the sensation dawned that I was being led by a sure hand. I didn’t hear a small voice at that moment, but I was suddenly aware of the element of faith that I had been neglecting in all of my attempts to succeed through my project management skills.
I returned to my porch side bench alone at the guest house to have a seat and see what the next phone call from John would reveal. If my trip to Bahn was called off I was content to be part of whatever other plans God had for my time in Monrovia. After a few cycles of the ocean waves John called with no other suggestions, and added to the bad news by telling me that the car which he was using in Monrovia suffered an engine failure and was no longer operational. He did not want to leave me behind with unfinished business, but he needed to return to his upland home in Nimba County.
I asked him what he planned to do, and he told me that he would travel back as he had come down – by bush taxi and motorcycles back up to Nimba County. There it was – the simple answer, and nothing that I would have ever arranged – but I was to travel by bush taxi and motorcycle. After convincing John that I was no stranger to mud and motorbikes, he agreed to arrange for my travel with the locals.
In our American society where failure is not an option, the beauty of my failed plans was that by getting out of the way and allowing God to cancel my plans, I was able to see and experience authentic Liberian moments that I would not have otherwise. While bouncing along and swerving around mud holes in a Toyota Corolla bush taxi, I experienced firsthand the daily struggle of the African countryside police injustice as the western NGO (Non-Government Organization) vehicles travel unhindered, while the local people are stopped and pressed for bribes. At one point, our already overloaded car was stopped and packed tighter by a policeman who needed a “favor” to travel a few miles to the next station.
What was to have been a day trip up in a Land Cruiser took two days by bush taxi. On the second day of driving, while stopping for passengers in the town of Ganta, a woman named Eleanor joined me and John in another crowded bush taxi. It turned out that Eleanor grew up attending the small Christian school in Bahn that my grandfather and his mission colleagues had provided to the village. Here she was, decades later, in the infinite loop of Christian love and grace known as the church – offering me some of the tangerines she was taking to market.
Later that morning, the taxi could no longer pass the otherworldly mud pits, so John and I set out on foot for several miles to another village. Along the way, amid the cries of “White Man” shouted in my direction from the huts, I witnessed the daily lives of the villagers all in plain sight of the walking traveler – bathing, discipline, commerce, eating and sleeping. Midway on our walk, John and I came to an overgrown sign for the village of Flumpa and I recalled that my grandfather had written about walking to this village during his missionary circuits. My awareness grew that I was being shown the depth of the missionary life in a way that I would have missed if I were speeding by in a truck as planned.
At the next town John and I hired two motorcycle taxi’s to take us the final leg of the trip – what a sight that must have been to the villagers to see my lanky frame clinging to an African rider who was half my size while puttering along the jungle trails.
Just before entering Bahn, John told me we needed to walk into the village to avoid police attention. Nevertheless, I was detained by the police at the town gate, and was led into the station hut to be interviewed. The fierce suspicion of the police towards me turned to joy for them and embraces for me after they understood who I was. The people of the town had loved my grandfather. Their evident love for him now expressed to me was part of the legacy of his work on behalf of the Lord. I was experiencing an unplanned, unscripted testimony to the gospel mission of my grandfather, my grandmother, and the other missionaries as a result of their faithfulness in bringing God’s Word to the land.
My visit to Bahn was painfully brief, that was the price paid to the rain. Forty years of imagination took form that afternoon as I met the people of the mission, including Daddy Wonti, who was my grandfather’s closest friend in Liberia. Together we visited my grandfather’s grave – which had been carefully maintained and honored by the people of the village since 1990. I visited his home, the trails, gigantic trees, and the other places nearby that he had written about in many letters through the years. Through the whole experience, the bond of Christian fellowship took root in my heart in ways that I did not expect.
After just a few hours, instead of an overnight stay, I was returning to Ganta and then Monrovia, but by then well accustomed to jungle bikes and bush taxis. I returned to America a few days later with countless other experiences. The chief impression of faith by which I grew during my visit to Liberia was that when God tells us that His ways are not our ways, and when some say that failure is not an option, failure is an option to the faithful heart.
Rob Workman is a member of Mitchell Road Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Greenville, S.C. Rob’s grandparents, Tom and June Jackson, were missionaries in Liberia for 40 years and were slain by rebels in March 1990.
Read more on Tom Jackson: Life & Letters of Tom Jackson (small file)
From the New York Times, March 29, 1990
U.S. Missionary and His Wife Are Reported Slain in Liberia
Villagers today found the bodies of a missionary couple slain in Liberia’s eastern Nimba County, where Government troops battling rebels have killed hundreds of civilians, diplomats said.
The bodies of the Rev. Tom Jackson, an American, and his British wife, June, were found in the village where they lived at Bahn, the diplomats said.
The American and British Embassies in Monrovia advised their citizens in Nimba today to leave the region immediately, except those working at a well-guarded iron mine at Yekepa.
The slain couple belonged to the United State-based United Liberian Inland Church and had lived in Liberia for 40 years.
In Washington, the State Department said it could not confirm the couple were dead, although it had received reports their car was found abandoned.
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