Community to Community Project

This the Story of Love

In 2004, Rebecca met a young boy from Liberia who inspired her.

She also met an incredible woman named Leymah Gbowee.  Leymah’s story is memorialized in a film called Pray the Devil Back to Hell.  She won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in Liberia which was to bring the women together to pray.  We highly recommend this film as a way of understanding the conflict that has affected Liberia so greatly.

Liberia has a way of getting into your soul.  From 2004 to 2010, Rebecca kept meeting people from Liberia and having serendipitous encounters that led her to help create a medical mission to Bomi County, Liberia to serve the region there.

In 2010, Rebecca met Hawa Quaye at the hospital in Tubmanburg in Bomi County.   Hawa was working as a midwife there delivering lots and lots of babies as this was the only hospital for many miles.  It was a bombed-out shell of a hospital really, with very limited resources compared to ours in the USA.  But, the healthcare that they delivered was from the heart.

Hawa impressed Rebecca with the work that she had done for the children during the war.  She set up refugee camps in Nigeria.  Here is a picture from that time.

 

Total Child Care Initiative School System is a nonprofit program that originated from the Oru Refugee Camp Ogun State, Nigeria while in the camp when Hawa fled the Liberian crises as the founder helping children.  She later returned to Liberia and re-established the school in Tubmanburg, Bomi County the western region of Liberia. She also reached out to other communities in rural Montserrado in Virginia to help needed kids in education and parents in their communities to be self-sustainable through agriculture projects.

These are some of the children and families she helped to serve in Tubmanburg.  Here is a recording from one of the children who attended there.

In 2011,  Rebecca and Hawa worked together to help the Tubmanburg school.

Hawa at the school in Tubmanburg, handing out clothing donations.

Then Ebola hit and Hawa worked throughout the epidemic and helped teach the children and families how to stay safe.

In 2016,  Ralph Gahagan, helped us purchase the land for the new school.  When he died in 2020, we established the Coach Ralph Gahagan Memorial Project to help build the school to honor him as a lifelong educator.

In 2021, we teamed up with Mindset Liberia to ship Rebecca’s car to Liberia for Hawa to use when she returns.  They also helped us kickstart our fundraising project for the school.  This locally run non-profit organization was very helpful to our cause and we are forever grateful.

At present, we are working with our local NC community to support the Liberian local community in creating the space for the school.   We are establishing a security building, a fence, a well, and then we will be ready to develop the agricultural area and build the school.