Meet the children of liberia
All God’s Children (AGC) is the Liberia branch of Serve the Children. We offer tuition free education, counseling and medical care to over 1000 Liberian children who would otherwise have no hope of going to school. The brutal 14 year civil war ended in 2003, but the people of Liberia are still reeling from the devastation. Imagine what life would be like in the United States if 8% of our population, or 23,437,500 people, died in a civil war. Now imagine that 80% of us live below the poverty line. Try to picture life here with no electrical service, not enough food to eat, and very little safe drinking water and sanitation. Imagine that there is rampant disease, few medical personnel, that only 25% of our schools still exist, and that our roads and most of our transportation system have been destroyed. This is life in Liberia.
Almost half of Liberia’s 3.4 million people are under the age of 15. These children have known nothing but war and its aftermath. For 14 years, Liberians had to be ready to run away from their homes at a moment’s notice when armed bands charged through, killing, raping and looting. Over 250,000 Liberians, most of them civilians, died in the war and more than 3.1 million people were displaced from their homes. Many families have been torn apart, and there are people who still do not know the fate of their loved ones. Human rights abuses were rampant. It is estimated that 10% of the children in Liberia were recruited or forced into militias, and also that 10% of the children have suffered the horrifying trauma of seeing their families and friends assaulted, tortured and murdered. All have experienced the terror of war. A recent UN-funded study estimated that, because of the grinding poverty, up to 80% of girls being educated in Monrovia have resorted to prostitution to pay their school fees.
AGC was started in 1997 to provide the only tuition free education and counseling in the name of Christ to Liberia’s child soldiers. We soon expanded to include war orphans and other children who were too poor to pay for school. Our four schools stayed open throughout the war years, except when they were forced to close or were destroyed by the fighting and looting. We reopened two of the schools after the war ended and have recently started rebuilding another to serve children in a rural location. There are over 1000 children being educated in our schools, including approximately 100 former child soldiers. We give them hope for the future through education, counseling and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
“I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder; which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty, too, will end.”
— Anne Frank, 15 year old Holocaust victim
