From Chaos to Calm, A New Liberia

In the basement of the Tolbert Hotel, Dickson George sat on the floor, naked and prepared to die.

Opposition fighters had arrived in the city of Robertsport that morning, spreading fear along the way. At the time, anyone the soldiers suspected of having ties to then-President Samuel Doe would be captured and often killed.

Dickson had been the student body president at Cuttington University — one of Liberia's best. He had frequently visited Doe at the executive mansion. In the president's office, they discussed the new student center at Cuttington. Doe was financing it. Dickson was in charge.

So when the soldiers rolled into town and sent everyone to the beach that day, Dickson had reason to worry.

"That very day, they checked my pocket and saw my [Cuttington] ID card," he says. "They said, 'Oh, these are the people that used to go to Doe.' They stripped me naked and put me in jail. Right in front of me they took two persons and killed them."

Then they came for him.

The door swung open and he was called out. Suddenly, he says, his mind went blank.

An Unlikely Hero

Up until that point in his life, Dickson had excelled: he won Peace Corps scholarships, captained his volleyball team for seven years, had a wife and three kids. One hot bullet was about to end all of that.

Then he saw George.

"I know you," the young man said, staring at him.

"I know you!" Dixon replied.

"You taught me in Sanniquellie," George said.

"For sure," Dickson said.

"What are you doing here?" George asked.

Dickson realized the young man pointing the business end of a Kalashnikov at him had once worked algebra problems in the back of a math class Dickson had taught. George was now — whether out of desperation or force — a soldier, a hired gun.

George talked to the right people and secured Dickson's release. For the next decade, George the former student became George the savior. During the blackest days of Liberia's war, when people walked miles for rice and ate raw snails, George never forgot the thoughtful teacher all the kids loved. He would squirrel away rice and save it for Dickson. Without George, Dickson says, he may have starved.

From time to time, Dickson asked George about his life, why he was involved in the fighting. George wouldn't discuss it. And Dickson may never find out. George was killed during the last months of the war.

The war is over now, and Dickson, who works on agriculture projects for Catholic Relief Services, survived it unscathed. His past cracks open a window onto Liberia's history and reveals a man who bucked the odds to become a success despite the chaos around him.

Jim and Lyn Gray were Peace Corps volunteers at Dickson's high school in the northern town of Sanniquellie in the early 1970s. Jim taught Dickson when he was a freshman in high school.

He remembers him being a classroom leader, so he put him in charge of dealing with tardy students. "Dickson was one of my top students," Jim says, "[He was] interested in learning and unfailingly polite."

After he graduated, Dickson went to a teacher training college in Zorzor in northern Liberia. He then returned to Sanniquellie where he taught math and general science for seven years. But the bug to be a school administrator bit him and he enrolled in Cuttington to get his degree in educational administration. But only days before Dickson was to graduate in 1989, the rebels moved in with an aim to use the university as a base. Dickson stayed on the campus — at great personal risk — to make sure all the students were evacuated before the rebels took the university.

"The dreams that our students from the 1970s had for their lives and the lives of their families were destroyed by the war," remembers Jim, who has returned with Lyn to Liberia to work full-time.

Jim and Lyn kept in touch with Dickson during the war. Lyn visited his family in Monrovia in 1993. "Like much of the population," she says, "they had fled to the coast in a moment of terror as the rebels took over their communities."

 During that time — when food was scarce and people were struggling to survive — Dickson and his wife somehow managed to keep their kids in school. They knew it was one of the most important things they had to do. And it paid off: Dickson's three children are all university educated.

After his experience with the soldiers and George, Dickson eventually made his way to the central Liberian town of Weala, about an hour and a half from the capital, and lived at a mission while the war destroyed the country. Broke and out of work, he turned to Weala's most lucrative commodity for survival: diamonds.

He wasn't a big-time trader. He only bought "the small ones," he says. It was the only work in town.

"The bigger ones were bought by the bigger guys who had the money," he says. "We bought them just to be able to find food and survive."

Starting Over

When the fighting cooled, he moved back to Monrovia.

In 1999, some friends at CRS told him about a job opening as an educational field officer. That started his career at CRS. Other job offers came up, but his commitment to CRS, and his belief in its mission of helping the poor, won out every time.

During the war, work at CRS came in spurts. One of his best jobs, Dickson says, was in the mid-1990s when he worked in Greenville, a port city in the southeast Liberian county of Sinoe. There, he was in charge of school food programs and working with parent-teacher associations.

The city, now sparsely populated with sandy streets, radiates charm. In its halcyon days, the town was full of Americo-Liberians — those whose ancestors were freed American slaves. They built houses that looked like those in the American Deep South.

You can still see the grandeur in sagging roofs and wraparound porches. Houses often had chimneys — useless in the tropical heat — but an impressive display of aristocracy. The indoor carpeting they thought was a sign of wealth was better for growing mold than impressing guests.

American culture seeps out of the town and grins at the newcomer from the most unlikely places. From the choice of breakfast — sugar-coated donuts and Cream of Wheat — to Liberian lovers walking hand in hand, Greenville feels like an old American beach town.

When Dickson strolls down the streets, Greenvillians greet him like a lost brother. It's like Michael Jordan walking through downtown Chicago. People light up. Dickson, who never seems to be in a bad mood, makes time for everyone.

"Long time. How's it?" they ask.

"All right," he says, breaking into his trademark smile.

Dickson is back in Sinoe assessing communities for agro-enterprise, which helps farmers find markets so they can increase their income. It's a field that he believes has the potential to lift Liberia out of poverty.

Dickson can't stop talking about agro-enterprise. He gets so excited his voice — in that beautiful, lilting Liberian English — grows loud. He raves about its possibilities, about how it can heal Liberia.

"Our concentration has been on production," he says. "Agriculture should take a new direction with agro-enterprise, which is geared toward increasing not just production, but income."

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