What calls us back: a story of escape and return in Liberia

***July 2023, Monrovia, Liberia. Precious Jabloh Buxton, Managing Director of Rising Academies, Liberia.***

This is the story of how, on the 3rd April 2023, I came back to Greenville, the capital of Sinoe County in south-eastern Liberia. But to tell you the story of how I came back, first I need to tell you the story of how I left.

That story begins thirty years ago, one sweltering Sunday morning in early 1993, a few months before my seventh birthday. I was sitting with my family - my dad and siblings - in St Joseph’s Catholic Church, when a man came to the door and changed my life forever.

“The rebels are coming!”, he yelled. “Run!”

So we ran. A group of us fled the church towards Seebeh, about 5 miles away, going towards Puchan, where my mother’s people are from. But when we got there, it was already deserted, so we continued another 15 miles to Upper Tartweh, where my father had family, finally arriving late that night, safe but exhausted.

Tartweh offered sanctuary for a time. There wasn’t enough food to go around, and there had been no school during peacetime, never mind when there was a war on. But my grandfather had a rice farm across the river and we stayed there for a while. After just a few months, however, my grandfather came and told us the rebels had now entered this area too. We had to pack up our things and go, leaving behind my eldest sister who had polio and couldn’t make the trip.

So we kept running, from Tartweh to Jeabpo, from Jeabpo to Karweaken, staying in each place as long as we could before new reports of encroaching rebels and fresh atrocities in nearby communities would force us to move on. From Karweaken we finally made it to a camp for internally displaced people in Pleebo, near the Ivorian border. By the time we reached Pleebo, it was approaching Christmas time in 1994. “Oh, we missed celebrating your eighth birthday”, someone said. “We never celebrated my seventh, either”, I thought.

Camp life was hard but for the first time since leaving Greenville I got the chance to go back to school. Some of the kids were sent to a nearby Catholic school, but by this time it was just me and my sister, and there was no one around to pay the fees for us to go. Not for the last time in my life, someone gave me the gift of education. I got to know a kind woman who taught first grade. She’d secretly let me sit in on her class, give me a pencil and paper, and tell me to do what the other kids were doing. Whenever the school principal came I had to stay out of sight.

Before long, even Pleebo wasn’t safe any more. We made our way to the port of Harper, and from there across the border to Tabou in Cote d’Ivoire. I was officially a refugee.

Tabou would be my home for the next three years. My brother, sister and I were reunited with families, and went to an English-medium school for displaced Liberians run by the Adventist Relief and Development Agency. School didn’t make much sense to me. I never seemed to finish a grade. They would give me tests and after each test I’d find myself bumped up another grade. Only much later did I discover how little I had really been learning.

In 1997, four years after leaving Greenvillle, we got a call to say that an American woman was looking for us. The woman, a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Liberia who had employed my birth mother as her housekeeper when she’d lived there, had been watching the unfolding horror of the civil war from her home in Northern Kentucky and was desperate to get us out. She couldn’t take all of us, but she had space for two girls. My sister and I were the lucky ones. She flew to Liberia to complete the paperwork, we re-crossed the border to meet her, and a week later we were on a plane on our way to a new life, and a new home.

January 1998, Northern Kentucky, my first month in the United States.

Adjusting to life in the US was tough. The local schools really didn’t know what to do with me. Without the patience and love of my adopted mom, I’m not sure I would have made it. But I did. I graduated high school and then college, where an internship at UNIFEM (now UN Women) took me to New York. It was love at first sight and I decided then and there that I wanted to come back for grad school, taking a Masters in Public Affairs at NYU’s Wagner School. No doubt inspired by my own history, my program piqued an interest in peacebuilding and conflict, and I found myself drawn to working on these issues in schools, first through a placement in Rwanda and then as a volunteer back in New York. That turned into a 10 year career in education, rising through the ranks to become a Director of Operations with Uncommon Schools, one of the leading charter school networks in the US.

***August 2022, Brooklyn NY, Uncommon Director of Operation***

It wasn’t an easy decision to give all that up and return to Liberia. Leaving New York meant leaving a system and a network of education leaders I knew well for a country that had not been home to me for three decades. It meant leaving one of the largest and best resourced school systems in the world for one of the smallest and poorest. New York’s public schools spend more money educating an elementary school pupil for half a day than a Liberian school would spend in a year.

But I’ve always known it was a question of when, not if, I would come back. I tried once before, spending two years working for Professor Amos Sawyer’s Governance Commission before that other great Liberian tragedy, the Ebola epidemic, cut short our work. In truth, it was not just the logistical disruption that sent me back to the US, but the realisation that my skills were not what the country needed at that time. I vowed to come back when I had more experience, and when my skills as an educator could be put in service of the right mission.

Which is how, on the 3rd April 2023, I found myself on my way back to Greenville. It was three months since I had taken over as Managing Director for Rising Academies in Liberia, and I was visiting Greenville for the first time in my new role. Rising partners with the Ministry of Education to operate 95 public elementary schools in Liberia, 12 of them in Sinoe County.

Since leaving Greenville all those years ago, I have been back from time to time. But this visit was different because one of the Rising schools I was visiting was Elementary Demonstration, and Elementary Demonstration is special to me and my family. Across the street from the school is the house where I was born and raised. In the evenings, after a hard day’s work selling used clothes and raising her children, my mom, Comfort Toe, would cross the street from our house for night school classes at Elementary Demonstration. She dreamed of giving her children an education, and in the end even a war couldn’t get in the way of that dream.

I started my day by watching a FasterReading session - a literacy program that Rising has rolled out across its schools in Liberia to help students build the foundational literacy skills they need if they are to succeed. After the session, I wandered down the hall towards the Principal’s office to give her some feedback on what I’d observed when a voice called out “Muki!” I turned around in shock. It’s a nickname only my friends and family would know. It was my cousin Juah Kanmoh. It turned out he teaches Grade 2 at the school. And it’s not just in the staff room that I found relatives. There were distant cousins in nearly every grade.

Being back in my hometown, and back at Elementary Demonstration, brought mixed emotions. Sadness, that some things are as bad today as they were 30 years ago. Elementary Demonstration is still a struggling, under-resourced public school serving families who are no better off than their parents and grandparents were. The classrooms are still filled with students over-age for their grades, like my mother was back in the 80s.

But hope, too. Hope inspired by the excitement of the students to learn. Hope inspired by the commitment of the staff to their community and their country. And hope inspired by the work Rising is doing to help. We’re training teachers and equipping them with world-class curriculum materials. Our coaches - what we call School Performance Managers - visit each school once a week to provide real-time coaching and feedback, monitor learning and child protection and collect data we can use to further refine and improve our program. We are changing how people view public education in Liberia.

People often ask me why I moved back. It’s pretty simple. I am one of 10 kids. Two of us got out. Eight didn’t. I was no more deserving than my brothers and sisters that were left behind, nor for that matter the thousands of other kids just like us who went through things no child should experience.

I live with that guilt every day. But on my better days I can find my way to seeing it not as guilt but as obligation. I guess you could say I left something behind in Greenville when we ran for our lives that day, and it has called me back ever since. I could not help then; I can help now.

Later that day in April, at another Rising school nearby, I met a different relative of mine. This young man is not even yet on the government payroll, but still commutes an hour-and-a-half each day on a bike to get to school where he is paid a meagre stipend for his efforts. For years, many of the villages around here did not have schools, and if they did, it was just a building without teachers because few would venture out to the far eastern counties. During his lunch break, we talked about how proud our townspeople are of him, and I asked him what keeps him motivated to work so hard for so little. Like me, he is obsessed with ensuring every child from the village has the opportunity to learn. “This is where we are from,” he said. “This is who we are.”

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