As we waited to get her signed in on the gangway, her cell phone rang. She answered, giggled, and hung up. That were my school, she explained. They wondering where I am. Any doubt about the purpose of her visit vanished, and we made our way down to my room.
Marion is twenty-one, and she's going to school again. Thanks to help from my cousins, Dave and Amy, and the junior high kids at my church, I have the money to sponsor Marion for the year. School fees aren't much here. Her tuition for each trimester costs 1,200LD. All the other costs (registration, books and such) are less than 2,000LD. Throw in another 1,200LD or so for uniforms, and you've got the total cost to send someone to school. Those numbers seem a little daunting, but add it all together and divide by sixty. Done? That's right. Less than 115 US dollars for a year of education. I counted out the money she still needed, and she tucked it carefully into a small plastic bag she extracted from her pocket.
She's in tenth grade now. If, somehow, she can find the money for two more years, she'll accomplish something that so few Liberians can claim; she'll graduate from high school. My life is too much invested in hers at this point to let her walk that road alone. We sat together on the end of my bed and tried to figure out a plan, a way for her to get the money for the next two years. We figured that it might be possible for me to wire money to her from whichever West African country I find myself in, but couldn't see how I would know what to send and how she would know when to pick it up. The answer glared back at me from the screen on my desk.
Marion! We can make you an e-mail account! Her eyes lit up, and she explained that, yes, there was an internet cafe that she could use and could I help her get started? I logged onto my computer, and within minutes, Marion had her very own e-mail address. I wanted to test her newfound skills, so I gave her a challenge. Come, write your first mail. Who should you write to? She laughed; it was a no-brainer. I will write to my Jennifer.
About twenty minutes later, her three-line e-mail was complete. She sat back with a sigh of relief, and triumphantly pushed send. We were headed back up to the gangway when she said something to me that I absolutely wasn't expecting.
My father wants to talk with you. If you remember, Marion's father is the one who cursed her, claiming for her life that she would never hold a live child in her arms. He was conspicuously absent in the whole of Greg's long hospitalization, and he never showed up after his death. We've all been praying for reconciliation, but it felt like one of those prayers you breathe over and over, never quite expecting it to be answered.
We are talking again. I told him about what you people did for me, and he wants to say thank you. And he asked me to please forgive him for what he did to me.
In the wake of Baby Greg, all I could see was the darkness; I was sure we had failed. But maybe that's okay. Because maybe, just maybe, a little boy had to die for a father to see the light.
If that were the only reason this ship was in Liberia this year, it would be reason enough.