One phrase we hear continually in conversations is, “before the war…”. We’ve been able to hear people’s experiences of the war; stories of lives that were turned upside down by chaos and violence. Gladys was at college when the war broke out and called everything to a halt; she and her family ended up fleeing to Cote d’Ivoire. Mr. Sulunteh and Mr. S-Saah stayed in Bong County through the entire war, and survived by fleeing and living with their families in the bush from 1991 to 2003. Before the war, all the other countries around had problems like this, but Liberia was too civilized for that kind of nonsense. But when it came, it came big and horrific. The war affected everyone here – not in the sense of just being inconvenienced: everyone I’ve talked to has seen people being shot all around them, has spent time fleeing through the bush, has had near brushes with death. They’ve watched what was a decently advanced and civilized way of living crumble to pieces. The war moved around the country, so people would go from place to place, for a while trying to resume “normal” life and then being uprooted again. Many missed elementary education, so if they were to go back to school now, they might be 20 but be in 2nd grade as far as education goes. And that only touches on the trauma: kids were drugged and forced to fight, and sometimes, to rape and kill their own parents (completely devastating to the strong African value of respect for elders). Charles Taylor was so charismatic that the kids in the army would chant, “you killed my ma, you killed my pa, I’ll fight for you”. In the US, 9/11 was a defining moment for us, but if 9/11 had come individually to every city where we live, every town; forcing us to flee on foot from one state to another, perhaps to Canada or Mexico, or – if we had connections – out of the continent, destroying and separating families bit by bit, we would have a much better sense of what these folks are going through as they deal with each bit of evidence of the brokenness and destruction that uprooted their lives.