Meeting the Future

The situation after the war in Liberia was dire: infrastructure gone, rule of law in shambles, 14 years of worn down education system and a system afflicted by the brain drain of displaced citizens.  But under the ashes left by the conflict there is a country rich in natural resources and gifted with a perfect tropical climate of sun, breezes and waves.  To lift the burden left by the war that ended in 2004 Liberia will need to harness its gifts in a new way, one that looks to strategic and systematic thinking, that looks towards the sustainability of their nation, and that will consider the complexities of development.  We believe education is a sustainable investment towards that new way.

Liberia needs new roads, new energy systems, new ways of adding value to their natural resources and a rebirth of their agricultural systems.  New students need to be trained in the sciences, math, engineering and agriculture to help the country germinate out of the state it was left in.  Those students should be allowed to see how their disciplines cannot and should not live in a vacuum for Liberia to quickly move out of the post-war period.  Interdisciplinarity needs to be infused in these students so that their engineers will learn to work along side their agriculturalists, geologists and farmers to tackle the country as a system and not a simple area of the economy. 

Students also need to discover their passions and be allowed to become enthusiastic about the careers that they are tackling.  The new generation of Liberia needs to realize the opportunities ahead of them and the rewarding careers that they can use to harvest those opportunities.  Students need to be exposed to innovative curriculum—science that can help development, complexity and sustainability. 

Most importantly, students need to realize that a good professional succeeds, but a great professional lifts others with her as well.  One Liberian succeeding will accomplish very little, but if this new generation starts to rise together, their dreams are the only limits that will stop them. 

Maybe we can start with 80 young freshmen and sophomores, practice how to be a community, teach them the basics for them to succeed in their upcoming years and inject them with enthusiasm about what their careers can be.  Maybe while we are at it we can listen to them and hear from their lips where they think their country should go and how they think we can lift it there.  Maybe we can then challenge them to think bigger, go farther and dare to do more.  Maybe then we can see a little seed rise up in the Liberian soil. 

That is what we have come to do to Liberia with Summer Start.  Summer Start is a pilot program sponsored by the USAID through the Excellence in Higher Education for Liberian Development (EHELD) grant.  A team of instructors, teaching assistants and staff will start this new adventure tomorrow.  Over the next month you will hopefully hear from some of them.  We hope you follow our challenges and cheer our success. 

The whole of the staff met in person for the first time today after months of preparation work done from their respective institutions (almost 20 people coming from University of Liberia, Cuttington University, University of Michigan and Research Triangle Institute).  For those months, I personally felt like I was holding my breath afraid that at any moment one of us in the staff would drop the ball bad enough that we would not be able to recover and the program would not go on.  But true to what we are trying to teach the students, today it became obvious that in spite of our different backgrounds, expertise, geographic locations and approaches (as well as internet limitations) we all lifted each other up to prepare a program that will truly enrich the life of the students and add to the hopes of Liberia.  

After our staff meeting we toured around the community and took in the surroundings of the campus.  Africa, in its splendor laid out in front of us, is filled with vast patches of rubber plantations, small farms and gardens, wildflowers, creeks with foot bridges to small clusters of houses and a permanent breeze cooling off the sun.  We can see for miles from the top of the campus, we can breath in what literally feels like the future… tomorrow we will hopefully meet them!