A dear friend of FUEL Youth, Toni Schneider, was able to visit the UCA campus in the Fall of 2009. Toni hails from the United States but is in Liberia working with the Ministry of Education and the World Food Program on an initiative to develop strong parent teacher associations across Liberia. Read Toni’s story of her visit.

UCA is a FUEL Youth-supported school right outside of Monrovia offering an education to over 340 students from the immediate area where there was once no opportunity for education at all. UCA faces challenges, but Toni’s story tells of a inspiring community ready to lift up and foster a school that works for their children.

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My counterpart slowed his pace and removed his shoes. After more than three hours of cramped rides in bush taxis along Somalia Drive from Duala Market to the Steven Tolbert Estates, I’d had enough. I rolled my eyes in exasperation at his “bush baby” behavior, frustrated that he was about to meet a FUEL Youth school principal without any footwear. But my mutterings ceased when my next steps were met with a kur-splash!

Borbor Swaggart Island is, in the truest sense of the word, an island. As community organizer for the Ministry of Education and UN World Food Programme’s (WFP) Parent Teacher Association development program, I had seen the worst of the worst when it comes to rural schools, including children coming to school in without shoes, taking their lessons out of doors, and going home hungry when the principal and head cook improperly managed WFP food rations. But what I had never seen was a community cut off from the rest of the city when the tide comes in.

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