Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Steve Pike
NOT many people can lay claim to being in war-torn Liberia one day, and walking on a red carpet in Monte Carlo the next.
After piloting an iteration of Cape Town-based trauma programme Waves For Change (W4C) in the remote povertystricken town of Harper in eastern Liberia, director and founder Tim Conibear got on a dinky plane and flew to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Then he got on a flight to Freetown in Sierra Leone. This was followed by a flight to Paris, and then another to Nice in the south.
An hour’s taxi ride later in a fancy top-of-the-range Mercedes provided to the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, he had arrived in the Principality of Monaco, playground of the rich and famous, where 30% of the population are millionaires.
Before you could say “14 years of devastating war and then came a dread disease like Ebola”, he was accepting the shiny Laureus Sport for Good award from Princess Charlene of Monaco. Dressed in his tux and bow-tie, he stood there while the creme de la creme of the sporting world looked on.
“It felt rather odd,” he confessed.
Multiple Olympic gold super-stars like Usain Bolt, Michael Johnson and Simone Biles were there. So were Wayde van Niekerk, Roger Federer, Nico Rosberg, Michael Phelps and MTB star Rachel Atherton. Leicester football club manager Claudio Ranieri and captain Wes Morgan were there. So was former All Black captain Sean Fitzpatrick, and a slew of South African rugby stars, such as Bryan Habana and Morné de Plessis.
Tim’s wife Daniella sat next to MC Hugh Grant. Laureus had flown Daniella and a member of the W4C management team, Guyver Ngeyake, to Monaco, putting them up in an historic hotel near a famous yacht club bristling with superyachts. The Cinderella dream ended in a taxi with Michael Johnson to the airport at 4am after the after-party.
What a world of contrasts we live in. But that’s what you get when you are working in tough ghettos to help youths most affected by social dysfunction, and then get recognised for it. And in the place he had just left – the county of Maryland in the far east of Liberia on the southern tip of the African bulge – it was not just dysfunction, but total infrastructural and healthcare collapse from war and disease.
Tim had travelled to Liberia to work with counsellers at William Tubman University to set up a W4C programme, which has become scaleable and not dependent on surfing as the method, although as he told me, there are incredible surf spots there. No one surfs in eastern Liberia, barring a chap called Ian Mountjoy, head of NGO Partners for Health, who W4C are also partnering with.
Partners for Health have launched a mental health project for people suffering from trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “We are building a referral service where the worst affected are selected through a process we have instituted with the uni-