My Friend the Timber Wolf
Deep in the Alaskan wilderness, the author comes upon an injured mother and her pups.
arrived. They showed smiling children with book bags and notebooks. Willie had bought out a market, rented cab to haul the loot, and blesses five schools with abundance.
“He came through,” Taylor says. It was a revelation.
Taylor set aside his doubt and distrust, and then he did something else he never could have imagined a few months earlier: He traveled 6,500 miles to Monrovia, Liberia. He wanted to confront the man who’d tried to scam him, although confront probably isn’t the right word. Willie says scam isn’t the right word either. He says he had just been looking to make a friend. But he also needed money.
By the time the two men finally met in person, he had found both. “We were business partners. And we were friends,” says Taylor.
When he got to Monrovia, Taylor felt surprisingly at home. “I saw the places and the faces from the pictures Joel had sent,” he says. When he got to Willie’s street, he recognized it right away. He found his friend sitting outside his house, which was little more than cinder block walls, a dirt floor, and a tin roof. Inside were Willie’s wife and some of his seven children, who also greeted Taylor like an old friend.
Willie confessed to Taylor that he used to send Facebook messages to strangers, hoping to find some way a new friend would help him out of poverty. He said he was “more than desperate.”
“To feed the kids, a lot of things run into your mind,” Willie said. “Go and do this—the wrong thing.”
Fortunately, “By D Grace of God,” it never came to that. The booklets kept selling (8,000 at press time). People started taking pictures of themselves holding their copies and posting them on social media with the tag #bookofjoel. Soon Willie had new friends in more than 40 countries, and Taylor’s fund-raising campaign had raised $12,000.
Some of the profits went toward Willie’s basic needs, such as a new roof to keep the rain out of his home. But the two men decided most of the money should be reinvested in the community.
Half the people in Liberia survive on less than $2 a day. Over the past 20 years, the country has seen two civil wars and an Ebola outbreak that killed nearly 5,000 people in a nation of more than four million. Because need is everywhere, Taylor and Willie decided
to start with the most vulnerable and supplied five more schools with book bags, notebooks, and other necessities.
Taylor decided to tell their story in a second booklet, By D Grace of God: A True Story. Sales of both booklets total some $90,000 so far. And over the past year or so, with Taylor in Utah keeping track of the money and wiring it as needed and Willie the man on the street in Monrovia, they have done a lot more good. They paid the utility bills at one school and the teachers’ salaries at another that was about to close because its funding had dried up. For Christmas, Willie handed out care packages of used clothing to 500 kids—what he said they wanted most—and 25 bags of rice to needy families. They have begun mentoring entrepreneurs and making microloans of $50 to $100—a life-changing sum in Monrovia.
Of course, the locals aren’t the only ones who have been changed by this unlikely partnership. Taylor says he’s no longer the cynic who started all this. “That’s just not me,” he says. “I’ve changed. I set out to embarrass a guy. I ended up helping a guy. I would much rather continue to help people. You feel good when you help others.” As for Willie, he says he’s changed too. Although he still has to support his wife and kids on what many Americans spend at Starbucks, he says he’s OK using much of the money to help others. In fact, he says the opportunity to be charitable may be the best thing to come from all this.
“I used to receive,” Willie says. “I’m the one who’s giving now, and it’s better to give than to always receive.”
Did he ever consider keeping the $500? No, he says. “It’s stealing. And that would be dishonest. When you are truthful, when you are honest, you can come from nobody to somebody. I have come from zero to hero.”
Taylor has already been back to Liberia, and he says he plans to keep going, to keep helping. Because, as he says, “when you give someone a chance, sometimes they’re not who you thought they were. Sometimes they surprise you. And sometimes you end up being the answer to their prayers.”