Succeeding, Part 8 of 10

This is the eighth part of a profile I wrote of my Liberian friend Jonathan Saah. I am posting one part each day, through Saturday, June 13.

Stories of Jonathan going above and beyond the call of duty are so plentiful that they hardly seem exceptional. A friend working for an international NGO had problems picking up a visiting consultant from the airport. He called Jonathan, who was already in the area. Jonathan created a sign with the consultant’s name, and in less than two minutes called back to say that he had the consultant in the car and they were driving back to town. “He loves his job and takes it seriously,” my friend said.

My brother visited me for his spring break earlier this year. While here, he got food poisoning and became dehydrated. At 1:00 AM one morning he started hallucinating, and I decided he needed to go to a hospital. Jonathan arrived at my apartment less than three minutes after I had called to explain the situation. He drove us across town to a hospital with his hazard lights on, the Liberian way of signaling that there is a sick passenger in the car. (Funny the understandings that develop from lack of basic services, like ambulances.)

In March 2007 the organization I worked for had a pro bono American lawyer come to Monrovia to assist one of our partner groups. The lawyer was so impressed with Jonathan’s character and ambitions that he left him with a $2,000 small business loan. Jonathan combined this with some personal savings and proceeded to build a small wooden building, about the length and width of two kitchen tables. He purchased two laptops, a generator, and an internet subscription. He gave cash to a friend traveling to the US, and she got him a Vonage phone, a type of broadband internet routing service that allows customers to make inexpensive phone calls around the world. Because many Liberians fled the country during the war, Liberians remain scattered throughout the globe. Almost everyone has relatives abroad who they want to keep in touch with, or send and receive money from, so Jonathan’s phone service has flourished.