Orchard Hotel Africa Road

Hotel Africa Road

We're flying and we're driving and we're hurling down the road to Charles Taylor's Africa. I came to see Liberia, Africa's first free society, now reduced to Taylor's scorched legacy. Fourteen years of war finally eased their ghostly grip in 2003 in the country known simply as "The Republic," where close to 300,000 died, where Taylor fought for his people and destroyed a generation of them, where thousands of children joined the combat, and where the airport just installed lights on the runway.

I'm here, 40 miles from Monrovia, tearing through the Bassa blackness on this midnight bombed-out highway lined with strange, shadowy life for Samuel Simeon Holmes, the smiling, wiry 18 year-old Liberian tennis champion who played exhibition matches at Taylor's annual birthday tournament while the warlord held power, who had to burn the photos of him with Taylor when the paradoxical president came under siege, and who's coming to live with my parents in Texas. I'm here in the city where the air is thick with Africa and desperation and life because Sam will play tennis with the best and get an education he wouldn't otherwise receive. I'm here at his house, where the war came twice but where there are now mothers and brothers and a thousand people to greet me, to give Sam the chance his family has prayed for. I'm here on the pepper coast, the diamond coast, the grain coast, the violent coast, in this bleeding heart of darkness and grace because I'm finding it harder and harder to believe in absolutes, because common elements of selfishness and greed, love and joy exist throughout humanity, but manifest themselves in unique and touching and horrible, horrible ways. Learn about them; know how to think and help within them.

The Holmes family hugs me and tells me my father is a great man. They feed me cornflakes and we watch the NBA on satellite. They sleep five to a room to give me my own, complete with a gorgeous blue mosquito net and a UN radio discussing the upcoming Taylor war crimes tribunal in The Hague. I'm giddy and I'm exhausted, and this is perfect Africa.

"I want you to be happy," Mr. Holmes says.

"Your father is a great man," Mr. Holmes says.

"I cannot believe he trusted me enough to send you here," Mr. Holmes says.

The Holmes family brings up war again and again, almost mid-sentence, almost as if they're trying to impress me with it, and I'm glad they do. I expected the war to be taboo, that they may be too embarrassed to indulge my curiosity. But they do this thing where they stare off into the distant pink sky, as if expecting attack, and I do this thing where my mouth hangs open slightly when they speak, as if desperate for more. So Mr. Holmes speaks in understatements about the myriad of conflicts that bludgeoned this nation for parts of three decades — the wars that followed a 10-year dictatorship that followed a popular but bloody coup that followed 133 years of a mulatto apartheid, dominated by a small group of freed Americo-Liberians who resettled in West Africa following more than a century of slavery in the United States.

He explains Liberia's bewilderingly complex history. Nothing fits the straightforward ways I've ever thought about war, and I struggle to keep up.

In 1980, Samuel K. Doe became the first non-Americo Liberian to hold power when his troops stormed the presidential mansion and disemboweled President William Torbert in his sleep. Doe held popular support among the 95 percent indigenous-African majority, but after the economy deteriorated, and after violent corruption and fraudulent elections became obvious, Doe lost international support and Charles Taylor launched an insurgency. Doe's troops began retaliating by burning villages and slaughtering 600 displaced civilians huddling in a Lutheran church. So, ten years after Doe's coup, when Taylor and friends overwhelmed the nation and a long conflict seemed inevitable, nearly a third of Liberia's population fled. Mr. Holmes paid a month's salary per head to helicopter his family north to Sierra Leone. Taylor's troops took control of most of the country. The leader of still another rebel faction, Prince Y. Johnson, controlled most of Monrovia and was seen sipping a Budweiser on news reports worldwide as his men captured, tortured and killed Doe on September 9, 1990, just a few kilometers from the Holmes household.

In Sierra Leone, when Sam was just two, Mr. Holmes made life normal by purchasing a cassava farm and enrolling the older kids in school. But the family's new mud-brick house was not yet dry when Sierra Leone's own nine-year civil war erupted. Charles Taylor-backed rebels sparked this struggle too, and the flow of refugees from Liberia reversed course. Taylor's alleged facilitation of the diamonds-for-arms trade in Sierra Leone would land him in the war crimes court in The Hague 15 years later.

The family came home to Monrovia in 1992 to an empty, looted house. Despite another tenuous peace agreement brokered by Jimmy Carter and the continual presence of US-funded African peacekeeping troops, Liberia never really settled. Doe-loyalists and a mix of other discontents regrouped in Sierra Leone and grabbed a diamond-rich area in Liberia, while Taylor launched what he called "Operation Octopus" to take control of the capital. Five American nuns were killed along a roadside. The supposed peacekeepers swapped their neutral white helmets for green, and switched to an active combat role against Taylor, bombing innocent civilians at the Firestone rubber plant.

The Holmes family could see the burning city from their house in the Hotel Africa neighborhood, 10 kilometers north of town. With the government in shambles, Samuel's father couldn't resume the surveyor job he held under Doe. The family survived by selling what they could from their cassava farm and garden.

The failing peacekeeping forces changed leadership, and a United Nations observer mission began. But Taylor's troops engaged in cross-border fighting, looting intensified, more than 2,000 aid workers fled the country and thousands of civilians took refuge in the U.S. Embassy compound. Massacres and mass rapes were committed by all sides. Soldiers would often cross-dress in women's clothes, believing the gender mixing would confuse bullets, and access to this cocaine-fueled magical manhood lured in the kids.

The bewildering mix of massacres, annulled elections and broken cease-fires in the dodecahedronal war continued on, and on, and on until when in a fair and free election in 1997, Liberians democratically chose appeasement, hoping that ushering Taylor into office was the country's best chance at lasting peace.

Mr. Holmes regained his surveying work, including projects for Taylor's wife, and the family rebuilt their lives. Sam, just eight years-old, learned tennis from a Bangladeshi UN peacekeeper while hanging around courts at a United Nations compound as a ball boy, and eventually became the No. 3 ranked junior tennis player in West Africa. He traveled to tournaments in Nigeria, Togo, Benin and Cote D'Ivoire, and played—nervous and in matching shoes as the president—three times at Taylor’s home. Sam grew into an intensely likeable young man whom people were willing to help, including USAID's Stan, the best man in my father's wedding, who put Sam in touch with my mother and father.

"What do you do? You're strong and you choose to live or you die. But why die?" Mr. Holmes says.

"He killed my ma, he killed my pa, and I will vote for him," sang Taylor's electorate.

"You will be a little afraid if you meet him for the first time, because he has that kind of strong spirit. I was 14 and very little and tiny. But he smiles and throws a joke at you. He promoted tennis to its high peak in Liberian history. He told me that I will be a great tennis player in the future to represent our country," Sam says.

III

We're crawling and we're clawing down this bomb-pocked road, lined with people, thousands and thousands of people spilling out of Monrovia's Duala market on Christmas Eve. There are kids with fish and women with fruit on their heads and knockoff Gucci bags everywhere. Nat King Cole sings on the radio about chestnuts roasting on the open fire, but nothing smells like pumpkin pie. It takes nearly two hours to get into town from Sam's house each day; people are walking faster than the car. A cop gets hit by a car and starts a scuffle. A woman with a baby hops into a moving taxi. This is resilient Africa, and I think it's a wide-eyed thrill.

Less than a week before he's scheduled to fly back with me, Sam still doesn't have his visa, so each day we wriggle to town and wander through a maze of UNs and NGOs to get to the US Embassy. Each day the consular section turns us away to wait another. Sam and I wince, but with the extra time he shows me a whirlwind.

We play tennis with the top players in Liberia, and basketball on an uneven court with uneven rims, with a ref and coaches and a crowd all the way around. We meet a player from Liberia's amputee football team. We go to a Christmas party for western aid workers, and a guy with 25 years in Africa tells me he hopes Liberia never finds oil. We go to an orphanage, where the kids sing to my camera.

We buy a shirt from a sweatshop; kids slump asleep on their machines. In a jewelry store we watch news of Benazir Bhutto's death. Ex-combatants sell huge, gorgeous fish by the river, but don't trust me to take their picture. Our driver shows off the shoes he's had since the mid-70s — "One pair, two wars and a dictatorship." — and Sam's brother, Abraham, boasts about Liberia as home to the first republic in Africa, the first female president in Africa, and the oldest pair of working shoes in the world.

Sam and I meet with a businessman who has sponsored other Liberian tennis players to go to the States, and who himself was a regular playing partner with Taylor. He's stern and warns Sam about the other young tennis champs who flamed out in disgrace, unable to cope with western abundance. America wasn't theirs. Sam stands tall and absorbs every word.

Sam takes meticulous care of me. He cleans my room when I'm not looking, wards off beggars and chases down a car when I forget my camera inside. He calls me "brother" from the start, and when I introduce him as "my friend," his face drops and he starts doing likewise.

Sam's father, still incredulous that I'd come, feeds me five times a day and looks hurt when I insist I'm full. He tells me he wants me to be happy, and again and again that my father is a great man. We argue about who is more generous. It's polite and proper but I don't want him to feel like he owes me.

We go on long walks through the swamps and villages where they still speak tribal tongues, and it feels like TV Africa. Sam tells me about his nine brothers and sisters, life during war and playing tennis for Taylor. He tells me about schoolmates who disappeared into the war, a tennis friend who at 15 was small but brave and became a general, and another who rejoined his class under a UN program that has rehabilitated more than 7,000 such scarred souls.

I tell Sam's friends about America. I apologize for being rich, and I hate that. I realize I'm eager to criticize the lack of community and perspective there, as if it will make Liberians more proud of their country, as if it's the only way I know to help, as if otherwise it's just poverty tourism. The UN radio excitedly announces that a group of American doctors have arrived to donate a flurry of reconstructive facial surgeries, and I envy their unambiguous trip, improving life for 75 Liberians and leaving with at least that. I arrived alone with only some gifts and a camera and a charge to make Sam's family feel part of ours, to learn how to know, to make sense of the staggering spin and translate Sam's context to those waiting for him in Texas.

"It's easier for Americans to live lacking perspective," I say.

"What I mean is, it's easier not to try to understand something as solutionless as the war and the poor. I see it in myself," I say.

"I guess, what I mean is, Sam will do wonderfully," I say.

Sam's brother Ryheim speaks in anecdotes about the war, telling about rumors of a medicine people got from the mountains, which made them bulletproof and able to walk across the river while fleeing. People without it could follow the medicated across the water, granted they stayed in a perfect line. Step out, and they'd get shot or drown or be eaten by crocodiles. He demonstrates the technique.

He tells me about rumors of soldiers on all sides cooking and eating the hearts of prisoners as displays of loyalty and strength, and soldiers who would stop pregnant women on the bridge, make bets on the sex of the baby, and then cull out the fetus for settlement. He tells me how soldiers would give captures a choice — long sleeves or short? — and then cut off their arms accordingly in the name of voter suppression. It seems like thd war has left Liberia only with rumors — enough to fill the ongoing Truth and Reconciliation Commision with more than 17,000 testimonies. I realize that some stem almost verbatim from the Sierra Leone flick Blood Diamond which, much to my amused dismay, Ryheim and his brothers have seen six or seven times. I realize the Holmes family, like much of the country, spent half the war fleeing or hiding, and that the rumored history of what happened around them had to spread one way or another — even if by way of Leonardo DiCaprio.

The second war started in 1999, when opposition groups in both Sierra Leone and the Guinea Republic emerged from the northern border and started burning through the interior. By 2003, a separate Ivorian-backed group emerged from the south, and the two forces marauded in toward the capital.

The war trickled into the neighborhoods and villages outside Monrovia, two or three rebels at a time over the course of a month. They'd arrive in modern urban African camouflage, looking haggard enough to slip unnoticed into neighborhoods wracked by the nation's 85 percent unemployment. Monrovia had swelled during the first rounds of fighting, and poorer-looking newcomers were nothing new.

They'd come, moving seemingly aimlessly among the seemingly aimless hordes shuffling in and out of town on the side of the main road, with weapons caches hidden nearby. Then any night, overnight, the number of the seemingly aimless would swell. In the morning, a warning flier would be posted, and word would spread to leave before an afternoon assault. The rebels would attack and slip back into the countryside before Taylor’s government troops could respond.

The rebels repeated this again and again, each time in a different village closer to the Holmes' house. The Holmes family had lost everything in the first war, and were hesitant to flee. But then, one morning in early June when Sam was 14, it happened close, too close, a mile or two away. Sam's father was at his office in town. His mother had stayed the night at her store in the Duala Market, so the kids were going to have to flee alone across the St. Paul River and into town. Government troops needed help defending the bridge — a key strategic flashpoint. Sam and his brothers were strong and ripe to be drafted as they crossed.

The family's aunt sent a truck — one of a thousand minor miracles needed to get the family through the war. To avoid looking like a sympathizer, Sam burned photos of him shaking hands with Taylor. The boys escaped, heads down and crouching in the truck as they crossed the bridge.

The family hid at the aunt’s house in the main part of the city, on the other side of another flashpoint bridge. By early July, the rebels overran the St. Paul and stormed toward the city center — motley bands of non-uniformed kids firing out of the back of pickup trucks. On July 18, in the name of freedom and democracy for the Liberian people, the rebels rained rockets onto downtown Monrovia in a month-long siege. The action peaked on Liberia's July 26 Independence Day, when several rockets hit a church packed with displaced civilians, and others a crowded junior high school. One hit directly across the street from the Holmes' hideout, next to their grandmother's house. Another rocket hit right behind the house, killing four. Government reports showed at least 600 civilians were killed in the first few days.

The house swelled. Dead bodies were dumped onto the street like sacks of trash for the Red Cross to collect. Only Ryheim and his friends would venture out for food.

Government troops came to the house and told the family to move to the basement for their own safety. The soldiers then carried away what they could from the room above, including Sam's tennis equipment, tried to extort money from Mr. Holmes, and promised to return for more under the cover of darkness. But when they arrived in a truck, a neighbor was able to phone one of Taylor's generals. Officially, looting was a capital crime, and the general's men arrived to arrest the troops just as the scavengers were climbing the stairs.

The family huddled up and said the rosary, a prayer of faith and fatalism, for the next month.

"We are going to fight block by block, street by street, house by house," Taylor said.

"I did not kill innocents," says 'General Mosquito', an ex-combatant I met.

"You saw it on TV, right?" Samuel says.

We're singing and we're swinging and this is Christmas Africa. There's a picture of White Jesus on the Catholic church wall, and the symbolism reeks.

In 1822, as part of the Anti-Slave Trade Act of 1819, freed American slaves sailed past where the Statue of Liberty would one day stand in New York Harbor, and founded the country of Liberia. The flag resembles America's (one star, 11 stripes). The official language is English, and Liberia is one of only three countries in the world to not officially use the metric system. The capital city was named after James Monroe, and Liberians routinely buy their cassava with American dollars. The country's constitution was drafted by a Harvard professor, Firestone tire company gets most of its rubber here, and during World War II, the U.S. secretly built an airport here to support British operations in North Africa. Doe's government played a key role for the U.S. in preventing the spread of Soviet influence in Africa. Taylor himself studied economics at Massachusetts' Bentley College in the 1970s (he was also arrested by U.S. Marshals on embezzlement charges before escaping from a Massachusetts prison and back to Africa in 1984, adding 'U.S. fugitive' to his list of distinctions). The newspapers still talk about President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's 2007 trip to the White House, and they buzz about Bush's impending visit, where he'll discuss the possibility of relocating the AFRICOM headquarters here.

U.S. connections are everywhere, and Sam's friends seem to view Americans almost as cousins, proud of the unique historical relationship Liberia has with the States.

But if it weren’t for Stan, who launched the Samuel experiment during his 2006 stay in Monrovia, I wouldn't have known a thing about Liberia. Before Bush, only two U.S. presidents had ever made it here. In 2003, there was some discussion in the media about whether the U.S. should get involved with a country with such historical ties to America, but it never captured common discourse to the levels of other African conflicts. Somalia, Rwanda and Sudan hogged my African 90s war news attention span. Darfur later. Blood Diamond and Ismael Beah's recent memoir of his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone were all I knew of diamond-fueled West African conflicts. There was just no room for Liberia, about which I found nothing in three bookstores before my trip. Nor Uganda, Burundi, Angola, Eritrea, Côte d'Ivoire. And now Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia on steroids. Kenya, scheduled to start within weeks of my departure. Sudan part III by the end of the summer. Sam and I flipped through the BBC's Focus On Africa magazine one day at the embassy, in which nearly all of the non-football stories detailed ongoing or pending wars on the continent. Sam shook his head. "Africa."

On the flight in, a U.S. State employee tells me the war was too complex for Americans to care about. No causes like genocide or Lost Boys or invisible children. No clear sides, no single enemy, no good versus evil. Just war in all its horror, a hundred-different sides, each committing its own share of atrocities in a country of 16 different tribes. The people put Taylor in office, and ex-warlord Prince Y. Johnson still serves as senator. On the plane, a nice Liberian lady told me all about how safe/friendly/welcoming Liberians would be. But on a stopover in Abidjan, a cleaning team of Ivorians boarded and the nice Liberian lady told me to guard my bags. "They're dogs...".

So Liberia, the most American of the African wars, raged in the shadows.

But here, where ubiquitous white UN trucks carrying white UN development workers abound, where white UN tanks watch over the bridges and western NGOs like Save the Children dominate the city's Mamba Point district, White Jesus has his place. Since 2003, White America has supplied more than $750 million in aid. Bush helped push Taylor out of power. I may not have previously noticed, but Mother America is saving this place.

And so on Christmas we're drinking beer and we're at the beach and it's perfect relief from the hollow, haunted reminders of the war. The view is beautiful. UN radio plays a program called "Starting Over."

Mr. Holmes tells me about earning a degree from the University of Liberia, and about teaching at the polytechnic university—about students whom he longs to see build a new standard of leadership in Liberia. He tells me about his "Good Samaritans" church group that feeds the elderly, and about how proud he is to have visited every county in Liberia with his job. He tells me about traveling to Amsterdam and Taiwan for surveyor training, opening his eyes to more functional societies. He tells me that between diamonds and rubber and the port and fertile soil and an Atlantic Ocean full of fish, Liberia has all the natural resources needed to thrive. He tells me he's cynical about Liberia ever having the political will to get it done

He speaks proudly about his sons, about their intelligence and dreams of becoming engineers or economists or geologists, and about their waiting for chances to succeed. He tells me that Sam has that chance, about how he's sad to see Sam go, how Sam took the best care of him, but how at least one son in America would secure the family's future.

He offers me food. It's overpriced, and I decline.

"I want you to be happy," he says. A group of Pakistani UN troops assemble on the beach, wearing windpants up to their chests.

"I am," I say. I smile and nod.

"I want you to feel at home here," he says. The Pakistanis roll up their pant legs, tiptoe to the edge of the water, and scramble like crabs away from the waves.

"I need you to know that I am," I say.

"I cannot believe that your father sent you to this place. He is a great man. I want you to feel part of my family," he says. One brave Pakistani takes the plunge, and the rest rush to take pictures.

"Mr. Holmes, please know that I do. You've done more for me here than I ever expected. I think I needed to come here," I say.

"I want you to know that you are doing a great thing for my son and my family," he says.

I tell him about how my parents worked hard and prayed hard and found some wonderful luck with the business they started together. I tell him they felt no obligation to host Sam, but that they wanted to spend their blessings well. I tell him I think that this is what Jesus who wasn't at all white meant when he spoke of abundant life. I tell him that Sam is allowing me to learn about the world with this trip. I want to tell him that he's right, that if my parents don't choose to live, then they should just lie down and die.

"I want Samuel to teach your family as much as they teach him," he says.

"I think that is why they want him to come. I think I know it is," I say.

The sun hits the horizon, something subconscious clicks, and Mr. Holmes brightens, claps his hands and beams. He absolutely beams.

"And he'll do it!" he says, clapping again.

With Stan's help, Sam secured a tennis scholarship to a college in Idaho, but couldn't gain academic admission. So we started Sam's visa process in July through a Houston community college instead. "Plenty of time. You're really early," the international student adviser said, but every step crawled. A week before I left for Africa, the embassy in Monrovia rejected a photocopied document that proved that Sam had passed his exit exams. He needed the original, which had been sent to the college in Idaho, and we needed to get that document on a plane to Liberia immediately. My dad called the Idaho tennis coach, who was just minutes from stepping onto a plane. He put us in touch with someone in admissions, who couldn't release the document without talking to Sam. They emailed Sam, who just happened to be at an Internet center, but he didn't have a credit card to pay for the shipping, and got hold of my dad just minutes before he too stepped on a plane. In one of a thousand minor miracles needed to get Sam to the States, the document left on DHL that afternoon.

We spent the next week watching DHL's online tracking and sitting on our hands, as there's no such thing as overnight delivery to Monrovia. The document left a week before Sam's next scheduled embassy appointment, the same day I'd leave for Africa. The document stopped in three U.S. cities, then Brussels, and finally Nigeria. It went to Côte d'Ivoire and sat for a day. It leap-frogged over Liberia to Senegal, before flying back to Cote D'Ivoire, where it stayed for another 24 hours. Sam's Liberian tennis coach just happened to have a daughter at DHL, who pulled some strings, and Sam picked up the document an hour before his embassy appointment. But the embassy still doubted him.

The head consular officer finally agreed to speak with me, however, so we worked our way downtown once again.

A guy getting his masters in the States is pleading with the officer. Sam says he won't get his visa renewed in time for the start of the semester.

"We just don't believe Samuel graduated from high school," the officer says to me.

She tells me that considering the war, plus his tennis travels, plus the fact that he graduated at 16, it doesn't add up. I'm almost willing to believe her, as I expected things might not be as expected. Sam is disciplined and intelligent, but Africa is poor and he would have every reason to mislead us. Still, I need to understand

"Well, these documents are clearly forged," she says.

I ask if she could show me how.

"I can just tell," she says.

I'm unconvinced, and ask if she's checked his test scores with the school.

"I don't need to check the test scores. I can tell these are fake," she says.

I politely disagree, we argue for twenty minutes, and I tell her that she shouldn't kill Sam's chance of a lifetime based on snap judgment. She gets defensive.

"I shouldn't have let this go on this long. In fact, I'm just going to give you back his passport and end this process right now," she says.

She pushes the papers underneath the window. I push them back and tell her she can't until she checks with the school. She pushes them through and insists she sure as hell can. I push them back, and she tires of me, and says to come back the next day at 11. I remind her that we are scheduled to leave the next night, and step out. Sam, waiting for me, sees my face, spins, grabs the back of his head and asks if we can argue some more.

We return and the consular lady is thrilled to see us.

She questions how someone like him could learn tennis, why he had so many passport stamps, and how he could make it to school while living outside of town. She says that his time in Sierra Leone as a toddler raises a red flag and that it has nothing to do with me, anyway. She tells me that by looking at his grades, she doubts he's ready to study in the States. If I care about him, she says, I'll encourage him to continue his schooling in Monrovia. I tell her he's done everything asked of him in the system in which he exists, and that the school in Texas has programs for immigrants like him. When Sam mentions that the school called earlier in the week to say someone had been by to verify the documents, she tells me that even if the documents are real, a school official probably helped him cheat his way through. I politely point out that her logic is inconsistent, and that it's not her prerogative to discredit the entire Liberian school system. She politely says she has other business to attend to, and walks away.

We stumble out of the embassy in a daze. I feel sick. Sam gasps for air and meaning after watching his dreams get crushed by a bureaucrat who labeled him a liar and fraud. I call Texas to say he's probably not coming. While Sam sits slumped on a tree with his head in his hands, an unhappy crowd gathers and says things like, "She wants you to bribe her," and "She only lets Nigerians through," but I guess I shouldn't blame her. She's part of a massive, necessary system, paid to be skeptical and keep problems out. This is desperation Africa, and America can't be everyone's solution.

"I think something's happening to me," Sam says.

"She's Nigerian. She should know how African schools work. I did everything they told me to do." Sam says.

"I hate it when Africans get power," Sam says.

VII

When rockets started hitting around the U.S. Embassy not long after the siege of Monrovia began in 2003, a contingent of American troops arrived to fortify the compound. But when the Americans balked at expanding into any sort of combat role until Taylor vacated the country, a crowd of Liberians protested, piling dead bodies at the embassy gates. Taylor began planning his departure at the beginning of the siege, but refused to budge until he could work out an asylum deal in Nigeria.

Finally, on August 10, after nearly ten weeks of siege and 14 years of worse, Taylor criticized the United States in a radio address saying "The rebels from nearby countries such as Guinea and Sierra Leone are cutting the breasts of women. They're cutting the hearts out of people and eating them on camera, Mr. President. You must help Liberia now." He handed power to his vice president, left for Nigeria and slipped around West Africa until his final arrest near the Cameroonian border three years later.

The fighting was pushed back out of the capital. Rebel leaders and peacekeepers symbolically shook hands on the bridge into Monrovia. Three days after Taylor's departure, the port opened and aid ships began to arrive. When 800 Nigerian peacekeeping troops and 200 more U.S. marines rolled in — the beginning of what would turn into the largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world — Liberians paraded in the streets. Rebel troops, claiming victory, looted their way out of the city. Government troops, without Taylor but still charged and confused, did much the same, and the new president would later be linked to the crimes.

Mr. Holmes sent Ryheim, Sam's older brother, and two friends to check on the family's home in Hotel Africa.

The boys walked over the bridges, past all that was looted and back to the house. Thanks to the heavy iron doors and window bars installed after the last evacuation, neither the rebels nor the government troops had gotten inside. But someone saw the boys return, and with Ryheim and friends inside, government militias returned to the house. They fired rounds in the air, peppering the thin tin roof, and told Ryheim to open the heavy iron door. Ryheim and friends stood quietly outside while the troops cleaned out the house.

The trio left early the next morning to return to the tenuous safety of the city. On the bridge over the St. Paul River where bloated bodies floated among the crocodiles below, the boys were stopped by another squad of government troops in a pickup truck with a heavy machine gun mounted in the bed, on their way to finish the war in the interior. Ryheim, strong and bold, was perfect to man the machine gun. One soldier was Ryheim's high school friend. The soldiers pointed their guns at the boys, no more than 15 years of age at the time, and "drafted" them on the spot.

A man driving over the bridge saw this and called Samuel's father, who called a prominent general’s wife, who knew Mr. Holmes through a surveying job. She sent a notorious bodyguard to the bridge to intervene—a last gasp of peace from the sanguinary, evaporating regime that seemed incapable of it. The soldiers headed out to the interior where scattered fighting continued. Ryheim and friends slipped back into the city.

This is million miracle Africa. Through 14 years of war, of huddling beneath rockets and rosaries, the entire Holmes family survives very, very much alive. Oh, how very much they're alive.

"I didn't want to step outside until the UN came, and then maybe I could go ten feet and come back. But then, because war had been there for more than a decade, they say Liberians now are more afraid of rain than guns. If you hear guns people will want to go and see. If there's rain people want to run inside," Samuel says.

"Evil is trying to change," Mr. Holmes says.

"Sometimes it was just like I wanted to leave and never come back," Ryheim says.

VIII

We're trying and we’re dying and we’re backsliding and I'm starting to hate this place. It's dusty and the traffic still sucks and I don't think Sam's going to get his visa. We're on our way to buy a goat for his grandmother's birthday, still spinning in an embassy haze. We eat lunch; it makes me sick.

We arrive at a goat farm, where the herder is forcing hose-water down the goats' throats. Makes them fat, Sam says, as his father stuffs one into the car trunk. The goat doesn't like the trunk, and tells us about it. He likes it less when we start driving back down the dusty, rutty road, diving down into the craters. The goat bleats loudly with every bounce, and in another place, on another day I might be horrified. Here it's a cultural experience, and as the driver speeds up onto the main road after 15 minutes of violent bouncing down the first, we hit a crater and the goat hits the roof of the trunk. The goat shuts up. At home, we build a fire, I put on a blank white shirt, and the family crowds around and cheers as I become the first kid on my block to slaughter a goat in Africa. The bloated beast spews blood and bile, the carcass is tossed on a fire, and I lose my lunch.

The Holmes family laughs, cooks big meals, watches ridiculous Nigerian movies each night on satellite. They have a generator and are building a new house next door. They are middle class. The war could've been much, much worse for them.

Staying here won't kill Sam. He's bright and outgoing and has thrived in the midst of a pretty bleak situation thus far. Somehow Sam's father was able to rebuild, to stretch his meager government salary, to make just the right phone call at just the right time, every time. Liberia might just have the best president on the continent — the Harvard-trained, World Bank-tested "Iron Lady", Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first female president in Africa — and might just avoid another war.

But being middle class and relatively well traveled from his tennis adventures, Sam might just be well-adjusted enough to be the kind of African who'd thrive in the States and return as a future leader. In 2003, he'd been a plane flight away from joining a top tennis academy in South Africa when the bombing started and shut down the airport. Last year, he turned down a job running a tennis program in Dubai when his father insisted he seek further education. The very next day, Sam received his first email from my dad.

These are the chances his brothers, smart and funny and hard working and unemployed, are waiting around to get.

So this is White Christian confusion. White Jesus on the wall talks in his book about sovereignty and God's ability to outmaneuver the visa system. The book says White Jesus could also sovereignly maneuver to keep Sam here, working for the good of those who love him. America doesn't always need to be the solution. I tell White Jesus that I came only bearing gifts, and doubt that all my observing, learning, struggling for understanding on behalf of the poor who fight the African wars means much at all for anyone but me. This is humility Africa, and White Jesus says it's not about me. But I still don't know and I'm exhausted, and on Friday morning, 12 hours before I'll fly away, I'm anxious and I'm sick and I just want Sam on that plane.

So we form our plan. We bring the picture of Sam holding his tennis trophy high. We find every school ID and graduation picture we can. We bring along tests and papers, covered in Sam's scrawl. We call the school's dean and the school's proprietress, and agree to pick up the school's vice principal the next morning for his testimony.

We leave early to beat traffic. Bullet holes scar the bridge. UN radio plays a program called "Dignity Without Borders." At the Embassy, the guy pursuing his masters sits beneath the smiling pictures of Cheney and George W., with his head is in his hands. The BBC reporter on TV sits with Kenyan malcontents, who threaten blood in Africa's crown jewel of development. The Nigerian delta-dwellers in the magazine want to fight about oil.

"The missing black sheep, which you did not see during daylight, you will never see at night," President Sirleaf says.

"God will do it," Mr. Holmes says.

"Circle yourself in all the pictures," says one of the consular assistants.

We're racing and we're chasing and we're tearing down the road away from Samuel's Africa. We're late, slaloming the potholes to make the flight, and I'm leaning out the window to breathe, breathe, one last moonlit gasp of Liberia, and the gritless air is pure African romance. Sam crosses the St. Paul River, this time sitting high and upright in his seat.

He got his visa at 3 that afternoon, and the vice principal never even left his seat. We danced through the embassy and high-fived the security guards. The assembled crowd threw their hands in the air, danced and cheered. His father bought Club Beer. The driver shook my hand. The grandma kissed my cheek. Sam, breathless, spun through Monrovia in a whirlwind of supplies and goodbyes. Jogging through the neighborhood one last time, Sam gave away nearly everything he owned.

And now we're flying and now it's Belgium and the whole word is new. Sam, wide-eyed, seems overwhelmed by the size of the Brussels Airport. I tell him everything now might be more luxurious than he's ever seen. I tell him I never want him to become less proud of his country than he was when he showed me the Atlantic view from a bombed-out Liberian hotel on the hill. He tells me he knows. The warlords fought the despots, and none of them were heroes. But he knows.

And now we're landing and now there's Times Square and Sam sees a statue in New York harbor. And now here's Houston and here's my family and now they're his. For today America is our solution, and for today that's enough.

"We checked the test score. Come back this afternoon for your visa," the embassy lady had said.

"You, the people, should count. For me it is no longer important that I fight. What is most important is that you live," Taylor said.

"Everyone was happy. Everyone was fine. You have war then someone comes to help you and you're glad again," Sam says.

As a journalism graduate from The University of Texas at Austin, Phillip D. Orchard has previously written for the Austin American-Statesman, the Houston Chronicle and Exec Digital Magazine.