Mighty Be Our Powers

"Liberia still has a long way to go.
Even in Monrovia, roads remain wrecked and many building are ruined and abandoned.
Most neighborhoods don't have reliable electricity and running water;
women and children walk by the road carrying buckets on their heads
and used plastic water bottles create huge piles of garbage.
You can see exhaustion on the faces of those in the city center,
crowded together and struggling to survive.
Almost everyone is poor.
Unemployment is around 85%, only half our population can read or write,
and life expectancy hovers at 58 years.
Official corruption remains rampant and crime is a serious problem.
The desperation everywhere in Liberia can make it a hard place to visit......"
-Leyma Gbowee 2011

That was an excerpt from the book Mighty Be Our Powers. I read it before I went on the trip. After the trip I went back to that paragraph that I had copied into my journal and highlighted everything I found true and had seen while I was there.
I highlighted everything.
The entire country is running on generators and will be for at least the next four years. The generators run out of fuel and go off multiple times during the day. One turned off in a restaurant we were in and the waiters calmly brought out lamps as if it happens all the time. Which I'm sure it does.
There are security guards outside of every store and restaurant because opportunistic crime is so bad.
As we drove places there were hundreds of people outside sitting on chairs in front of their shacks. Hardly anyone has jobs, so they often have nothing better to do.
There is no garbage collection so trash is just thrown on the streets. Even when they do collect it they just throw it into the jungle. There are no landfills.
All of the buildings are run down, or just shells. Bullet holes were seen in most of the structures.
It was a hard place to visit.
But seeing how the Lord is working gave me such hope.
God is working in Liberia. I feel so blessed to be witness of it.
Please keep Liberia in your prayers.