The Website of Miah and Michelle Collins

These are a few observations and fun stories from Liberia that I (Michelle) wanted to share. Miah and I spent 2 weeks in Liberia doing training with their students, coaching Trokon and some of his ministry partners, and doing some pre-marriage counseling for Trokon and his fiancee, Ube, as they get ready to be married in December. Miah did the first trip to Liberia in July while I got to see my family in Europe. This time I got to go with! We will have another training session there in January.

Josh.
Josh is an ex- child soldier from the war who is trying to readjust to society. The most amazing thing was that Patrick and Trokon are mentoring him as he adjusts back to the Monrovian lifestyle.  He was always so polite to us and we watched him cleaning our yard, and bringing us water day in and day out without asking for anything. My heart was filled with extra compassion for him because of his gentle spirit in spite of all that he had been through.

Liberian Jokes.
Jo Jo? Johhhhhhhhhh. This is how you introduce your jokes in Liberia. In Liberian English, you never pronounce the endings of words, you just let them fade off. And if the word is longer than 2 syllables, you never say any consonants after the first syllable, just the vowels. So, as you can expect, it sounds very strange and it is almost impossible to understand when they speak quickly and with their slang. This quick Liberian English is what they use to tell most of their jokes because as they start laughing, all consonants become too hard to pronounce and they just mumble the vowels.
When I was lying on the mattresses with the girls one day, one of our favorite pastimes, they started wanting to tell jokes. But they really wanted me to understand, so they told them to me in better English than usual. I still didn’t understand them. One thing that I have really learned over these last few years is that humor is most definitely a cultural thing. Many South Africans think it is hilarious to make fun of other races. I get offended by this, but I now understand their intent.  Liberians think it is funny to tell civil war stories. I am honestly really disturbed by this, but because they are laughing so hard, I can’t help but laugh with them. Seriously, Liberian laughs are very contagious. Here are a few examples of jokes:

Jo Jo? Johhhhhh. There was a pastor who held a church meeting during the war. He began to talk bad about the rebels and speak against them. Then, there were some rebel soldiers walking by the church and they heard him speaking bad about them. They went into the church and pointed their guns at everyone saying, “Who is it that is speaking against the rebels? We will shoot him right now.” Everyone was quiet. They said again, “Whoever was speaking against the rebels should identify himself or we will shoot everyone!” Then the pastor said, “ Whoever begins cursing is not the man who was speaking against the rebels!” And the pastor started cursing.

That is the end of the joke. Now, I’m sure like me, unless you are a Liberian, you are sitting there with your mouth open or waiting for them to continue on to the punch line. There is no punch line. That is the joke, and I am telling you that these girls could not hold back the laughter as they told that last line and then everyone just erupts in laughs. In some ways it is disturbing beyond belief and in other ways it is comforting to know that even these girls, most of whom stayed in Liberia during the war, are finding it easy to laugh at some extremely hard circumstances they went through. I think it is therapeutic to them as I think laughter all over the world is used to comfort people when they are troubled or sad. That is why I think South Africans use humor to deal with their new country after Apartheid. It is overwhelming to think of what people might have been through psychologically during these periods of political turmoil, but I now know that jokes can lighten that load and make things seem less daunting.  And as long as these girls can still laugh, life can go on, and things can get better. And ideally, they will never have to go back to a time when those jokes were actually a fearful reality in their lives.  Okay, with that said, here is one more joke that I want to write just so that I can remember it and their faces and accents when they told it. I’m going to spell things how they say things:

Dare wuz a Liberya wooma who ha two cheedre. Wa of doze cheedre wuz baaah, and wa wuz goo. Wa chai was goo to hah, wa wuz reelay baah. She luh da wa chai, buh da oder she hat. Den, one day, da baah chai dah, buh da goo chai wuz stee aly. Weh peepo cay fo da funero, eeyeh deh wuh cofateen heh, she say, “ Gaw, wah you go tay, den you doan tay? Gaw wah you gotta go tay, den you doan tay?”
Translation:
There was a Liberian woman who had two children. One of those children was bad and one was good. One child was good to her, one was really bad. She loved the one child but she hated the other child. Then one day, the bad child died but the good child was still alive. When people came for the funeral, and they were comforting her, she say, “ God why you go take, then you don’t take? God why you gotta go take, then you don’t take?”
(as they say this they motion one hand to one side and then the other hand to the other side, basically saying she wanted God to take the bad child and not the good child and was complaining to him.)

Struggles of a missionary.

There is a proverb here in Liberia that says, “White teeth, black heart.” And they use it to describe how people like to put up a front in order to make themselves look good, but on the inside, they are struggling. I know that most of the time, missionaries are only supposed to write the great inspiring stories that everyone wants to hear. At least that’s what has been done in the past and that is what we feel pressured to do whether people tell us to or not.  It is hard to be open about struggles when someone else has never been here or felt the things we have felt, and sometimes it might seem like the struggles sound too much for the missionary if we write about all of them, and people will ask us to come home or abandon the mission we started out doing. But, I am a firm believer in sharing my burdens with other people and being open about my problems. Not in a needy, obsessive, pathetic way, but in a discerning way in order to let others help me. I think that this is something we are told by Jesus and Paul to do as believers, and I don’t think we do it enough.

Okay, I will stop preaching and tell you how God moved in my mind and my life in a powerful way in the time I was here in Liberia.
I think that missionaries like to pretend they are fearless. But I cannot take on this pretense. I am not any stronger, nor do I have any less fear than any other believer, but I believe that faith is trusting God in spite of fear and without knowing for sure what the results will be.  There are times when I can be very afraid of the places I go to and the situations I live in, but I accept this weakness in me so that Christ might be made known, and His power can be displayed through my life.

During my time in Liberia, the Lord led me to read the book of Acts and be inspired by the early church and their radical lifestyles of worship to God. They knew how to sacrifice in order to preserve community and equality.  For the first time the words, “ and they had everything in common and they gave to anyone who had need”, really convicted me. I have always been passionate about community and about sharing with other believers, even to a point where this makes me seem strange or backwards to my family and others in my culture. But it was this trip that showed me that I am still so limited in how I share with my fellow believers and how I look after those who follow Christ alongside me. But the early church, the ones who had been with Jesus, took this type of community very serious. I noticed that this type of community is even more serious to God, who took His wrath out on those in the early church who lied in order to keep some possessions for themselves. Read Acts 4……..Wow! I just can’t help but ask the question, “What does God think about our understanding of “community” now?” But the accounts of the actions and lifestyles of the early church became a deep solace for me as I wrestled through my selfishness and fear while living in community with my Liberian sisters.

The other words of inspiration that God used to comfort me and edify my soul during this time were the words of Martin Luther King. I have been reading Martin Luther King’s autobiography, and what he was able to do and to lead others to do because of his faith, in the face of violence, persecution from all sides, misunderstanding, and fear, was phenomenal.  Mostly, his accounts of what he went through in his head before and during his times of going to jail for the movement and suffering for the movement really spoke to me while I was in Liberia. People would criticize Dr. King for trying to bring integration too quickly or rushing the process when the time was not yet ready for it. This is the same temptation that Satan uses in missions. He makes us think that if we go to a certain place too soon, they might not be ready for the Gospel, or wait until the doors are open or they are out of war and then they will be ready to hear and it will be “safe” enough to go. We would never say this temptation out loud, but it is something that has plagued us in the Church.  Dr. King knew this trick and rebuked it straight up. Here are some of his words about waiting for the perfect, ideal time for things.

“ Frankly, I have yet to engage in a “direct action” campaign that was “well-timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word, “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait!” has almost always meant never. We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that justice too long delayed is justice denied”. …. “Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.”

I think that if we really see ourselves as co-laborers with God, if we really believe that we are to fulfill the Great Commission as Christians, we must see that the Gospel too long delayed is the Gospel denied.  MLK’s words spoke the message to me so strongly that no matter what you have to go through or what obstacles you will be faced with, if you truly believe in your end goal, that belief will overcome.

The passage of scripture that we memorized on our training program this year was Romans 12. There is a verse in this passage that God spoke to me over and over again during these two weeks and it was, “Do not be prideful but be willing to associate with those of low position.” The funny thing is that the longer I lived with these people, the more I realized that they are the ones who fulfilled this scripture in our training.
Lastly, I will end with some lyrics of Lauryn Hill, which witness with my life that He is continuously working out His salvation in us:

“Mounting down the walls of inhibition. Evaporating all of my fears. Baptizing me into complete submission. Dissolving my condition with His tears.
Bathing in a fountain of His essence. He’s drawing out my nature with his hands. Humbled on a mountain by His presence. Burning to be worthy of His lamb.