Steven Scher's Blogs

  • President Sirleaf’s interview with IRP Gatekeepers

    The senior editors of the International Reporting Project's Gatekeepers trip to Liberia spent our final day interviewing President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. It was a wide-ranging discussion about rebuilding her war-ravaged country. She was dressed in a blue print traditional Liberian dress, with her trademark Liberian head wrap.

    Ellen Johnson Sirleaf meets with IRP Gatekeepers

    She spent an hour with us in a conference room at the executive office building, answering questions about

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  • Sisyphus

    How does a failed state rebuild? How do chaos, destruction, murder, rape turn into peace, justice and prosperity?

    Bill Powers' book, Blue Clay People, concludes with a nod to Sisyphus. In a world of so much pain and poverty, is even a small push back up the hill worth the effort when the boulder slides back down again? Of course the mayhem must be quelled, but will outside help ever do more than gloss over intractable differences? Will international aid only create a weak dependent

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  • Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s Liberia

    Now we go see the president of this troubled but striving country. Then we leave it behind and head out to the airport. What do we possibly ask her? She knows the problems better than we do. She hears the complaints and pleas on a regular basis.

    Better roads! And after a bone jarring 7 hour drive on the best highway in the country, slaloming between potholes, dipping down onto the dusty shoulders millimeters from young boys and old women who appear out of the bushes, who make their

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  • Audio Postcard from Liberia #1

    Girls at THINK.


    Audio postcard from Liberia by the wrack line

    Steve Scher recorded this audio postcard on the Liberia Gatekeepers' trip to THINK (Touching Humanity in Need of Kindness) in Monrovia. While in Liberia, Steve is updating his personal blog and his Picasa

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  • “We Are Working For Liberia”

    Young girls and mothers and their teachers at THINK's school.

    We traveled across bustling, beat down Monrovia, past curbside markets where women sold potato greens and bottled water. We went through the Barcalounger Laz-Z-boy district. Couches and chairs lined the road. Men were wiping them down to keep them shining and attractive to potential customers. These were roadside sales. They must have had to haul them back to a warehouse at the end of the shopping day.

    We passed the

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  • A Conversation with Boakai Fofana, Liberian Radio Broadcaster

    Boakai Fofana, Liberian Journalist

    Today we got our first look at Monrovia. We also toured the site where the original settlers from America landed. Think of it as Liberia's Plymouth rock. More on that in future posts. Our fixer for this part of the trip, in addition to Louise Lief of the International Reporting Project, is Boakai Fofana, a young Liberian journalist at AllAfrica.com and a radio broadcaster. He helps produce a health and education program aimed at young Liberians on

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  • A Primer on Liberia

    We had a primer on Liberia in advance of our night flight to Brussels and Monrovia.

    Raymond Gilpin is a Cambridge educated economist who analyzes the complex economic forces at work in a country or region during and after conflict. He is the director of the Sustainable Economies Center of Innovation for the United States Institute of Peace. USIP is congressionally funded and charged with providing “independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by

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