West Africa Journal

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Nelson, I extend my warm and sincere greeting in the most precious name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Sir, since honour must be given to whom it is due, I think thanks must be extended to those also who deserve it. In this regard, I thought it fit and necessary to extend my profound gratitude to you for your kind heartedness in canceling my debt, Sir, your kind heartedness has been registered in my book of memory where I will be turning the leaves every day to read them. I also strongly believe that it has been registered in the book of life. May God richly bless you and your family. Sincerely yours, Tamba.

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When the UN was in Sierra Leone, the vast numbers of employees and all those connected to the UN, created a false economy in Sierra Leone. We saw house rents rise from an average of $2,000/year to $25,000 and higher. Many groceries were imported, goods and services became available that we have never seen in all our years in Sierra Leone.

Of course when the UN pulled out, the economy crumbled, leaving landlords with hundreds of empty houses and groceries and goods sitting on store shelves with no marketable community. Many local people who were employed as office workers, drivers, builders, yardmen, housekeepers etc were suddenly unemployed, with no social system to provide services to care for them and no foreseeable job replacement in the future.

It wasn’t long before people started coming to our compound, begging for work, food and medicine. This is high malaria season and we regularly hear weeping and mourning in the villages around us indicating that someone else has died from it.

Men are desperate to feed their children but have no means of support. Women have no one to sell their vegetables to, the young children clinging to their legs often go to bed with nothing more than a piece of bread to eat the entire day. How can we at Dove, live here as their neighbours but keep saying no, sorry, we can’t help you?

But Dove doesn’t have funds to help all these people in our community so we asked our prayer partners to pray that the Lord would provide a way that we can help. We strongly support the community by giving away baby clothes and toddler clothes and toys when we have excess but these people need food and medicines. At Easter time our teenage kids went in to the villages to find the poorest people. They gave these people crayons and stuffed animals and baby shoes. They came back with fantastic stories of mothers breaking down and crying, holding their feet and saying thank you, thank you. Their children had never had a toy before and some of those babies were just given the only pair of shoes they will ever own.

Last week we received an email from one of our past volunteers from Ontario. Her family has been huge supporters of Dove and this need moved them to help again. They held bake sales in their community and they have donated huge funds for us to use to feed and care for needs in our community. We are thrilled to now be able to assess needs and give to our needy neighbours the crucial basics of life- food and medicine! Thank you to the Birnies for their hard work and the love they show for these people, so very far away from Ontario, Canada. If you are reading this and would like to contribute to the fund please contact us either on this website or by writing our Olds office. Mark your donation Benevolent Fund. Thank you! The letter at the top of this page was given to us by a man who had borrowed money from us in his desperation. As he has no means to repay the money, we forgave him his debt. He keeps coming back to us to say thank you.

Filed under: Sierra Leone on May 5th, 2006