Photo by Seyon Nyanwleh, the executive director of A-Mon-Nue Sports & Social Association

September has been a good month for the Ceasefire Liberia project. Not only have we had dozens of new blog posts from our writers — and several fantastic videos — but we are getting noticed too. Both Feministing and the Women’s Refugee Commission have mentioned our blog on their sites, widening our audience and ensuring that those who do not usually read about the Liberian community now know where to go for updates. We have also recruited some top new bloggers: Ronald M. Mulbah is our new sports blogger, with weekly updates on the fascinating and fast-paced world of Liberian soccer; Boima JV Boima has written several blogs, one about a youth who was slapped with a guilty verdict for attempted murder as well as a story about the Muslim community in Liberia. And our hardworking blog manager Nat Nyuan-Bayjay continues to impress with his local stories about issues important to Liberia: His most recent work includes a story about the reconstruction of the Monrovia-Buchanan highway and the trial for the murder of 13-year-old Angel Tokpa who was found strangled and hung over the bathroom rod of her guardians’ house. Both of these stories were not reported in the media so thank you Nat for keeping us informed.

For those of you who don’t know, I traveled to Minnesota in July to visit the Liberian community there, which is one of the largest in the U.S., to interview Liberians for my book, but also to try and recruit a group of Liberian bloggers in Minneapolis. I had the opportunity to meet with Doris Parker, the executive director of the Liberian Women’s Initiative of Minnesota, which runs the College-Bound mentoring program, pairing junior and senior high school Liberian girls with professional Liberian women to mentor, guide, support and encourage college enrollment. Parker’s organization also has a girl’s soccer team, which I had the pleasure of watching practice before the big game the following day. Doris and I spoke about the possibility of teaching the girls’ in her group how to blog. I hope in a future incarnation of Ceasefire Liberia we are able to start blogging clubs and run workshops across the Liberian diaspora.

I also met with Seyon Nyanwleh, the executive director of A-Mon-Nue Sports & Social Association, and watched his team practice. I was very impressed with the number of young people Seyon had recruited for his program and the level of involvement of the parents. One father came and sat through his son’s soccer practice despite being awake since early the morning to go to work. The father told me that he was there because that was one of the only times he got to spend with his son.

I’d also like to point out several Liberian bloggers who have not blogged with Ceasefire Liberia, but who I have had the pleasure of meeting (or at least speaking to) during my trip to Minnesota. Semantics King runs several blogs on Liberian and community news affecting the Liberian community; Emmanuel Liu has an active blog and Twitter where he writes about everything from some harsh words between Kanye West and Obama to Patrick Swayze’s death to a haiku he wrote for his daughter; MinneAfrica is a site dedicated to all things African in Minnesota and I had the chance to catch up by phone with Yeamyah, a Liberian woman who keeps the community in Minnesota updated on Liberian news of importance such as the expiration of the temporary protected status and male circumcision and HIV. Another not-to-be-missed source for Liberian news is The Bush Chicken an online magazine for the Liberian community in Minnesota.

Any other bloggers I’m missing — let me know.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to introduce myself to the Rising Voices community. My name is Ruthie Ackerman and I am running the Ceasefire Liberia blog project. Ceasefire Liberia is a project that has grown out of my journalism work over the past several years with Liberian youth in both Liberia and in Staten Island, New York. It started off as one story about the reconstruction of Liberia after its 14-year civil war and has grown into an all-encompassing multimedia project, including a book, documentary filmwork, and now a blogging project. The blogging project is very exciting for me because it’s a way to hear directly from Liberians about their communities –no middlemen — just their voices about the things they care about. My hope is to connect Liberians living in the Diaspora with those who remained in Liberia during and after the war so they can learn about each others’ lives through blogging, video, and photography.

The idea is to create a dialogue between those Liberians who left and those who stayed and eventually to have a team of citizen journalists in Liberia and the Diaspora who find those under-reported stories in their own communities and post them onto the blog. I hope everyone who comes to the site can join us by writing an encouraging comment, reflecting on their own experiences, or telling us about their communities. The dream is that by communicating here the boundaries that keep us divided will disappear.

Please visit us at: www.ceasefireliberia.com

Just west of Ivory Coast lies Liberia and its roughly 3.5 million inhabitants. Settled by free slaves from the United States in the early 19th century, Liberia fell into a 14-year dark period of civil war and lawlessness that concluded in late 2003 with the presence of ECOWAS and the United Nations. Today Liberia is slowly recovering despite inadequate infrastructure, unemployment at around 80%, and former combatants (many of them minors) who must be re-integrated into society. Many unemployed Liberians have put their hopes in friends and relatives living abroad in the United States. However, there is often a lack of communication and understanding between Liberians at home and those living in the diaspora. By partnering with African Refuge – a drop-in center for West African youth – and the Century Dance Complex in Park Hill, Staten Island (the largest Liberian community outside of Africa), and Amnesty International in Monrovia, freelance journalist Ruthie Ackerman aims to help foster a transatlantic Liberian blogging community.

Those Liberians who lived through the war — whether soldiers or not — experienced some type of trauma or displacement. By creating a community and sharing experiences with others, it has helped give these youth a purpose and vision that there is something larger than themselves. This will benefit the community (on both sides of the ocean) on many levels: Liberians, many of whom have difficulty adjusting to life in America, can reconnect with their families and dispel myths about what life is like in the U.S. There are also left-over tensions from the war, which may be able to be diffused through the dialogue created between the communities.