Helping Hand Appeal 2019
Working For A Better Future
The sound of enthusiastic chanting is the first thing that greets us when we arrive at Kpallah Public School near Monrovia, the colourful, sprawling capital of the west African state of Liberia. The kids here are keen to learn, but it’s mid-morning and they’re also hungry. Most of them haven’t eaten since yesterday evening, and most have been up since 5am helping with chores at home.
Yet however empty their tummies mightmiht be,b there’s no jostling or bad behaviour in the long queue that forms across the scrubland outside the school a few minutes later. It’s time for their school meal, and many of the kids hold out recycled margarine tubs for their food.
When they get to the front, they’re given three big dollops of Mary’s Meals porridge. It’s a lifeline, a passport not only to survival, but to a future in which they can make something better of their lives.
Momo is one of those in the e queue. He’d like to be a law wyer w one day, but studying ha as s to be balanced with other pri io orities in his life.
He’s 15 years old, but is alr a ready needed as a part-time breadwinner for his family, and yet he hasn’t seen his parents for a long time.
“They needed to find work, and they couldn’t find jobs here,” he says. “They moved away to work in another town, making charcoal. They send money back to us but they’re hardly able to get back to see us.”
How often do they come? “I’m not sure when I last saw them,” he says. “Maybe it was a year ago.”
He’s the middle child of five – two brothers, two sisters – and since their parents left, they all live with their aunt. Momo takes me and photographer Chris to meet her. The walk takes us along a mud-streaked road – it’s the rainy season, and there’s just been a heavy downpour – that’s fringed with shacks, their corrugated iron roof overhangs are makeshift shops selling packets of sweets, bottles of juice and bananas. Visitors from outside the area are a rarity here. As we arrive, word gets around and the cramped entrance to their house is suddenly crowded with other local residents.
Momo is keen to show us not only his family, but also the paid work he does to help support them. He fishes out a large plastic bag and begins to unpack its contents: pairs of broken shoes, mostly trainers, that he is fixing. What would be rubbish in
Life is tough, but there is real hope in the eyes of the young people here
more advantaged parts of the world are valuable commodities here. He spends his weekends sewing shoes, and when he sells them he gives most of the money to his aunt, Massa.
“It helps her a lot, because there are a lot of us here to feed,” says Momo.
As well as Momo and his siblings, Massa has ten children of her own, and “about nine” grandchildren, some of whom are part of this large household.
I’m introduced to the patriarch of the family, Massa’s pa and Momo’s grandpa, Thomas, who is 87 years old. He was born in 1932, less than a century after Liberia was founded by Americans of colour, former slaves who believed they would have a better life in Africa than in the USA. In his mid-life, Thomas tells me, there was a feeling of prosperity, of a country going from strength to strength.
“But then came the troubles,” he says. A military coup in 1980 overthrew the government and most of the cabinet were executed by firing squad. “There were many difficult times,” he recalls. “The worst of times.”
Over the next three decades more than 200,000 Liberians died, and more than a million fled their homes, as the country was wracked by civil war. Peace eventually came in 2003, but you can still see the bullet holes in the walls of Monrovia, and the country is still paying the price for the fighting that put them there.
Today, as Momo’s extended family crowd into the doorway of his aunt’s shack, there are more young children than adults. 64% of Liberia’s population is aged under 24. The statistic is reflected in the hope in the eyes of the young people we meet there, day after day.
Though life is tough, there’s a sense among the youngsters that their time has come, and that education – with the help of Mary’s Meals – really will make the difference to their future.