October 9. 2003

"Peter and Comfort, Liberians"
by John Victor Singler

Dr. Singler is professor of linguistics at New York University
and a member of St. John's in the Village

This past summer, Peter and Comfort were among the people we prayed for during the prayers of the people at St. John's in the Village.

We did so at my request. They're the people I'm closest to in Liberia. They're wonderful, remarkable human beings. This is the story of their survival. I tell it to you to illustrate what the war in Liberia has meant to Liberians, in this case to one Liberian family.

Peter and Comfort have been together since1977. Their first child--named Florence after my mother-was born in 1980. They now have five children, and Peter and Comfort each have two other children as well, for a total of nine.

Liberian custom delays church weddings until the couple has reached what is deemed to be a suitable level of social stature. Peter and Comfort both come from humble backgrounds. By 1985 they felt that they had achieved sufficient standing so that being married in church wouldn't seem presumptuous on their part, and they were wed.

Peter is a nurse and a pharmacist. He has a remarkable head for business, and his drug store prospered in the 1980's. In the mid-1980's he built a house-plus-pharmacy. He built another house for his mother's relatives, and then he built a house as a real-estate investment. Comfort (whose picture I took in the drug store) is good at business too, and she made money selling clothing.

In December, 1989, the warlord Charles Taylor led a band of 200 fighters who invaded Liberia. Civil war ensued. By July of 1990, troops loyal to Taylor had reached Greenville, where Peter and Comfort lived, and taken command. In Greenville, the fighting had a local ethnic component. Peter tried to mediate between the ethnic groups. Neither side proved willing or interested in mediation, and each distrusted Peter for having tried to make peace.

Moreover, his prosperity made him a target. Later in 1990, with my urging, Peter and Comfort joined all the other Liberians who were fleeing the country and took refuge in San Pédro in the Ivory Coast.

A prosperous middle-class Liberian household is a wonder to behold. The last time I had visited Peter and Comfort before the war began-in June, 1989-I counted 35 people in the house. Most of them were schoolchildren, primarily relatives of Peter's, who had come to Greenville to go to school and needed a place to stay.

When Peter and Comfort prepared to leave Liberia, the question came up as to what to do with all the children in their house. Comfort said that one didn't take children into one's house in good times and then abandon them in time of peril. When Peter and Comfort went to San Pédro, they took with them their own nine children and 17 others.

Early in 1992 the war had abated. Peter and Comfort hated being refugees, and they took advantage of the lull to move their household back to Liberia, back to Greenville. The houses and the pharmacy had been damaged, but they worked to fix them back up. In July, Peter went to Monrovia to get medicine. The roads weren't safe, so he went by "surf boat," traveling more than 100 miles in a boat little bigger than a lifeboat. He came back the same way.

When he got back, it was Comfort's turn to go to Monrovia so that she could see her family. While she was there, the war started up again in the Monrovia area. Comfort survived, but-unable to cross enemy lines-she was separated from Peter and the children for almost two years.

At first Peter and the children were safer in Greenville than Comfort was in Monrovia. But then the Nigerians bombed Greenville (as part of their war against Charles Taylor). At one point Peter's house was a target for the bombers, and Peter and the children ran into the swamp for safety. Fortunately, the bombs missed the house, and Peter and the people in his household were able to return to it.

One Sunday morning in October, 1993, while Peter and the children were at church, a new army entered town to rout Charles Taylor's army. The new army-the faction called itself the Liberian Peace Council-came into town on the main road from the north. The church was on the way out of town to the east. Peter and his family and 75 other parishioners fled on foot. They walked five hours to Peter's father's house, where they remained for roughly three months. Then as the Liberian Peace Council neared the area where Peter's father lived, Peter and the church members left, again on foot, walking ninety miles to Plibo, in the southeastern corner of Liberia.

They were given housing there, and that's where they remained until June, 1994. The imminent arrival of the Liberian Peace Council in Plibo sent Peter and his family into the Ivory Coast again, this time to the town of Tabou. Comfort was now able to join them, and the family was reunited. Peter and Comfort lived in Tabou from 1994 until 1997. The household size varied, from a "skeleton crew" of twenty up to fifty and more. Once, when Comfort's sisters and their sizable households all took refuge at once, there were 120 people in the house. Whenever I talked with Peter and Comfort on the phone, I was always afraid to ask how many "houseguests" they had.

Officially the civil war ended in Liberia in 1997. As eager as Peter and Comfort were to return to Greenville, they were wary about going back. In particular, they wanted to be sure that there were schools for their children to attend. Early in 1998, Peter did go back, in order to start up his business yet again. He first had to convince the soldiers who had occupied his house to leave. The issue of schooling for the children proved to be a problem, and Comfort and the children were not able to rejoin Peter until early in 2000.

At that point, then, Peter and Comfort were once again home in Greenville. During their period of exile, they had managed to get three of their daughters out of Liberia and into the US-it has been an extremely painful separation for children and parents alike-but now Peter and Comfort and their younger children and all their nephews and nieces and cousins were back in the house in Greenville.

The civil war had officially ended in 1997, but the warlords who had lost to Charles Taylor had never given up. Rather, fighting continued. In March, 2003, another set of rebels-the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL)-was perched to take over Greenville. Peter and Comfort had regained a portion of their former prosperity. This fact would make them targets for the MODEL crowd. Recognizing this, Peter and Comfort and the children packed up all their clothes and fled to Monrovia. (Because of war inside the Ivory Coast and Liberian participation in that war, Liberian refugees were neither safe nor welcome in the Ivory Coast any longer.)

Being in Monrovia put them in harm's way, but they didn't stand out the way they did in Greenville. They hoped that being unobtrusive would protect them. In fact, no one living in Monrovia was safe.

The months of June and July and August were traumatic months for Peter and Comfort and their children. Everything they had been able to take with to Monrovia was stolen from them by soldiers. Government soldiers brutalized Peter.

For the long siege in July and August, Peter and Comfort were cut off from each other, across enemy lines, the children with Comfort. Where Comfort was (at her nephew's), it was relatively safe but there was almost no food. Where Peter was (at a church), it was much more dangerous but there was food.

Early in this summer, early in the siege of Monrovia, there was a slight chance that Peter and Comfort and their family would be able to leave Liberia and go to Ghana. It didn't come to pass, but if it had Comfort was ready to relocate-and to do so permanently.

"I'm tired," she said.