Communities, too, can benefit from the power of transformational love

With the first step out of the car, the stench hit him.

It was like nothing he had ever experienced in his previous life, a pungent mixture of human feces and urine and who knows what else.

His stomach recoiled involuntarily. This was no ordinary smell.

Then again, Buduburam was no ordinary Christian summer camp. Originally created as a retreat center with small outdoor huts built to hold 4,000 guests, the 125 acres served as sanctuary to 80,000 Liberian refugees.

The condition of their existence, he would tell his friends back in the U.S., could only be described as deplorable.

They had no running water. No bathroom or cooking facilities of any kind. The makeshift cylinder block and mud shacks that served as their homes were so inadequate that people would take turns sleeping in shifts.

Most had malaria and/or tuberculosis. And the babies born on average to girls as young as 15, well, you wouldn’t want to know about the babies.

He wouldn’t have been there, never would have thought of going there, if it weren’t for a friend, a former parishioner of his Shoreline-based church.

This Port Orchard woman had pleaded with him to help her set up a nonprofit and address some of the refugee camp’s problems.

Still and all, he surveyed the sea of bodies oppressively crammed into this small space on the Christian campsite in Ghana in Northwest Africa and shook his head.

It would take a miracle to make a change here, a miracle dealing with the deeply entrenched corruption that plagues most African nations, that and a will of steel.

Plus compassion. It would take a vat of compassion so vast that you wouldn’t just take your obligatory pictures with the people and drive off never to be seen again.

Or worse yet, throw some money at an NGO, the term for non-governmental agency and walk away, believing or not really caring whether it would make a difference or not.

She had almost done that herself. When the letter came in from some Winifred Tickley in Buduburam, outside of Accra, Ghana, she read it with suspicion.

What woman would plead with another to adopt her children? She wrote back and a correspondence grew across the miles.

She sought an appointment with Rick Stearns, then director of World Vision, originally based in Monrovia, Calif.

He had recently moved the head offices to Federal Way and agreed to see her. She would tell him that she’d sponsor the woman’s family — if the circumstances were legitimate.

She planned to do that and then walk away. She had a demanding job and her own family; she couldn’t take on anything else.

Stearns introduced her to Dr. Joseph DeGraff Riverson, a doctor based in Accra. He told her that the children were actually Tickley’s siblings.

They were 2, 3 and 5 years old when the 16-year-old had carried them from Monrovia after their parents were killed in the war that Charles Taylor, a Liberarian native had started Christmas Eve, 1989.

He had swept in to Monrovia, Liberia, with no fewer than 100 Libyan-funded soldiers, no more than 500, and together with Prince Johnson executed the entire Liberian cabinet, the whole of its government and then started massacring its people.

He ripped open the country and gutted it, killing, some say, more than 600,000 Liberian people and stealing something like $100 million of the country’s assets, leaving it one of the poorest nations in Africa.

The Port Orchard woman, who didn’t own a passport and who had never traveled farther from home than Canada and Mexico, was invited to survey the damage that Taylor’s years as a warlord had inflicted on the Liberian people.

She didn’t want to go. She actually told Stearns, she says now with some self incrimination, “They’re not my problem.”

He explained to her that World Vision was created to support stable communities with the “five fingers of development” – clean water, education, microenterprise, nutrition and sanitation. The situation at the refugee camp was anything but stable; World Vision could not help. The people of Buduburam had no one.

So, while she didn’t want to go to Ghana, she did. Upon reaching American soil, she contacted her former Shoreline pastor and with a few friends, including Port Orchard author Debbie Macomber, Point Hope was born.

Without really intending to, this girl from a poor rural town in Oregon adopted a whole refugee camp and within five years transformed the living conditions there, creating three separate infant and children’s feeding programs, job-training programs for both men and women, sanitation policies and practices that reduced or eliminated the water and sewage borne diseases of the camp and found a source for water that wouldn’t require the people to walk three miles.

Not everything has been successful. The group’s first attempt at digging wells resulted in pools of water too saline to be potable. However, it was perfect for tilapia farming and she (or Point Hope) paid to have water piped in from Accra.

While she negotiated with local chieftains to purchase 20 acres for a soccer field, it proved too muddy to play and serves better as a vegetable farm.

Along the way, without really intending to, she adopted two more children.

Like Port Orchard’s Monty Mahan and his wife Sandy, she couldn’t get them or their living conditions out of her mind.

I met the two girls last year when they were in the country for just three days. Knowing what they had endured and where they had come from and seeing how much they have grown and changed over the year, one phrase comes to mind — the power of transformational love.

That’s what I think of when I think of my friend, Delilah – transformational love.

I don’t see her as a superstar, the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, a diva or someone who can get whatever she wants.

I see her as a friend, a little farm girl like me who grew up in rural America and acquired all those same, old wacky farm wife skills.

Sometimes I’ll walk into her kitchen and find her making butter or grinding wheat berries for fresh homemade bread.

Other times she’ll be busy painting or picking peas.

The girl who walked off with nearly every scholarship offered by her high school can talk about nearly anything. We’ll discuss worldwide water shortages, gas prices, kids and love — always love.

Her kitchen is hard to leave, which explains why I spend so many hours there.

Like last weekend, when she hosted her adopted daughter Tangi’s wedding. I don’t know how many hours I spent in that kitchen making cornbread and punch, helping with the vegetable and fruit trays and arranging decorations.

It was worth it, though, seeing Tangi walk down the aisle, just beaming.

It was all about transformational love, watching the young woman, who Delilah adopted as a small child from a known prostitute and drug addict, glow.

Delilah stepped aside and let this other mother, now clean, sober and married, take center stage and bask in the glory of her daughter’s wedding.

Halloween jumps to mind, too.

For weeks we sewed and glued and created costume after costume, but it wasn’t until Halloween night when I saw all these kids, some scrawny little things from the Oregon countryside, decked out in costumes we’d made, that it hit me – she thought of every single one.

In spite of how big her world is, she took the time.

She does that.

One morning she called me, woke me up and asked, “Where are you? I have some things for you.”

She had bought me a wardrobe, from Goodwill no less, but a wardrobe with sweater after sweater, nearly all red.

When I told her that my mother lived by the adage, “Ladies don’t wear red,” she laughed and said, “It’s your color. You’re more beautiful than you realize.”

I, who wear the same five articles of clothing until they fall apart and I buy five more, accepted this huge pile of clothes for what they were – gifts of love.

So when she came back from a trip to town and said, “I went into the Port Orchard Paint Store and saw your column on their wall and asked the owner, George, ‘You know my Mary?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ and told me how he had been a part of a ‘Paint the Town’ project years ago,” I could see where this was headed.

She wanted to offer a gift of love to her other adopted town, like she had to Buduburam, to the kids at the Halloween party, to Tangi, her mother and their entire family and to me.

I could see the wheels turning.

We could, she said, choose simple seaside colors, like the ones you find in communities along the coasts.

We could get everyone involved – the mayor, the city council, Girl and Boy Scouts, Seabees, business people and families.

We could have people working and playing together. We could close off the streets for a day and let people dance.

We could honor Debbie Macomber and ourselves in a most magnificent way, a way that would grab the attention of the national media, “Port Orchard Paints the Town.”

Why not? I told her, why not?

It’s really all about transformational love.

Contact paintthetown@ymail.com for more information and to get involved.

Mary Colborn is a Port Orchard resident.

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