Main Stories Society

Liberia: For lack of money orphanage church project stalled

James Fasuekoi

…Orphan boy appeals to Pres. Joe Boakai for assistance

By James Kokulo Fasuekoi|Editor-Publisher in Liberia, West Africa

Shedrick Smith came to the Calvary Mission orphanage home when he was 7 years old. Now he’s 27, and a leader at the orphanage. It’s located in Dixville, Monrovia, and runs a high school, enabling youths from the surrounding to attend school there. 

Shedrick Smith

Young Smith, a Christian and now spokesman for this center, graduated 2017, from William V.S. Tubman High School, and has ever since moved on to college, he told Global Ekklesia last week as a team from the Joseph Nyuma Boakai Foundation delivered some food supplies to their orphanage.

Nevertheless the campus’s Christian worship center, a project Smith and the orphanage owner/director, Dr. Alexander Stemn started 15 years ago, to allow close to a hundred or so less-fortunate orphan-students to worship God, is yet to finish due to serious financial constraints they are experiencing. 

Orphan children at Carvery mission including Smith (2nd left) gathered before the stalled church project recently to meet staffers from the JNB Foundation.

After giving bountiful thanks to current President Joseph Boakai Tuesday, for his farsightedness and continuous kind gestures toward the center, Smith appealed to President Boakai for financial help in completing this church project.

A die-hard Joe Boakai fan, he said he awoke at 4: a.m. and walked to his neighborhood polling center where he cast his vote for Boakai during the final run-up in last year’s general presidential elections.

Smith, when asked, could not give an estimated cost of how much the center needed to finish the entire project nor disclose how much money they’ve already put into this project. He instead referred some of our questions to the orphanage owner, Dr. Stemn. Stemn wasn’t immediately available at the time of this interview.

According to Smith, the center currently conducts its regular Bible classes and Sunday worship services in the campus’ cafeteria, a fairly looking but modest blue and white building, adjacent to the girls dormitory.

A girl stands against the women’s dormitory smiling last week as members of the JNB Foundation staff walked by.

The idea of erecting a worship center for this Christian orphanage home Smith says, first came from Rev. Alexander Stemn himself, a man he said, saw the need to feed these little souls within the orphanage and beyond with the Word of God.

The idea, accordingly, was embraced by the orphans and being so determined to build a church, they began saving whatever little offerings (or tithes?) collected from their Sunday worship services to purchase construction materials for the project.

Two teenage boys at the orphanage stared at their school’s poster stand.

The orphanage’s future church, probably with the sitting capacity of not less than 400-500 people, sits next to the girls’ dormitory just yards away from a mangrove swamp.  

For now, its round pitiful frame stands visible and begs for help from every visitor to this area, after accumulating ample molds as a result of the long years of what seems an abandonment.

JESUS CHRIST IS COMING SOON! ARE YOU READY?