NEW YORK (AP) – The Rev. Philip Saywrayne speaks with a Southern drawl, tinged with the African accent of his native tribe in Liberia.On a sunny Sunday morning, his voice is steeped in sorrow as he remembers the 14-year civil war that desecrated a nation founded by freed American slaves who had returned to Africa.
“This is a week of resurrection,” he tells a congregation of Liberians at The Christ Assembly Lutheran Church on Staten Island.
They are celebrating a closing chapter in the torment of the country dubbed “America’s Stepchild” – the arrest of former Liberian President Charles Taylor.
One of the largest concentrations of Liberians outside their native land is found on Staten Island, and virtually every resident’s life has been scarred by the ruthless warlord.
Zachariah Logan says his father was murdered by Taylor’s men, and he himself barely escaped execution at the hands of drunken teenagers playing a sort of Russian roulette with their machine guns.
Taylor-backed rebels would kill at whim, slashing throats or idly hacking off the limbs, ears or lips “of anyone they didn’t like – even if they thought you looked too good, or too big, or talked too much, or not enough,” says Logan, an outreach worker who helps people with jobs, housing and health care.
But now, “all things will be OK. I fear nothing but to do wrong,” Saywrayne says from the altar of the church he founded in 1996, housed in a red brick former bagel factory. He preaches while pacing restlessly under a Liberian flag, its single star and red-and-blue stripes a tribute to the American flag.
During the years that Taylor terrified West Africa, ending in 2003 when he fled, at least 300,000 people died in conflicts he ignited in rubber-rich Liberia and diamond-rich Sierra Leone, where he faces charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including sexual slavery and mutilation.
The Taylor-fueled carnage drove tens of thousands of Liberians into a Diaspora that thrives in U.S. cities – New York, Minneapolis, Washington, Seattle and Philadelphia – as well as in England, France, Sweden, Switzerland and Australia.
In New York, thousands of Liberians live in neighborhoods of Staten Island called Stapleton and Park Hill, which look on New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty.
The inscription on this iconic figure that once welcomed immigrant boats could have been penned for the Liberian immigrants: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
Their journey into exile took them to refugee camps in Ivory Coast, where exploding civil unrest drove them out again to Ghana, Guinea and Mauritania.
Finally, they made it to New York – and for the most part, to peaceful new lives.
But on Staten Island, with the West African violence still fresh in their minds, some encountered crime in housing projects teeming with drug dealers and guns.
The neighborhood is heavily policed – not exactly a relief to Liberians for whom seeing an officer stirs up memories of being beaten by Taylor’s police when seeking help.
“You’re coming here from a war-torn country, and you end up in the middle of violence,” says Chea Dixon, who works as a security guard in a Manhattan building.
One day, this grandson of a Pentecostal bishop strolled into a New York park where gang members met. He was wearing a blue T-shirt that resembled those of a rival gang. The youths surrounded him, picked up rocks and stoned him before he fled.
“I said, ‘Oh my God! In America too?”’ says Dixon. “I don’t wear bright colors anymore – just neutral ones.”
But there was cause for celebration one day in late March when Dixon learned through the Internet on his cell phone that Taylor escaped from his exile haven in Nigeria.
The next morning, from his Staten Island bus, Dixon called Liberia and heard that the strongman had been captured.
“I was very happy. Now I’m free to talk. I couldn’t till now, because I was afraid Taylor would come back and my relatives would suffer retaliation,” says Dixon, 24, whose family was routed by Taylor’s army. That was in 1996 – the last time Dixon spoke to his mother, who he believes may be a refugee somewhere.
Patience Cooper, 9, is free of such nightmares. “I don’t know Liberia. I know about Disney World.”
Liberia’s new president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was inaugurated earlier this year, with U.S. first lady Laura Bush attending.
Liberia’s links to America are passionate – and enduring.
Sirleaf has a graduate degree from Harvard and worked for the World Bank. And the candidate she defeated in last year’s elections is George Weah, a former international soccer star who owned a home on Staten Island, where he helped start an immigrant services group. Taylor, a descendant of a returned slave, attended college in Massachusetts.
Saywrayne was schooled as a minister in the United States, surviving at first with a Kmart job; a plaque in his church office declares him a Kmart “employee of the month.”
Days after Taylor’s arrest, the pastor returned from a trip to Liberia, where he signed a contract to buy land on which will rise a new high school, and a training and worship center. He must now start raising funds for the construction in a devastated nation of 3 million with schools in shambles and an 80 percent unemployment rate.
The 47-year-old father of five beams as he pulls out a snapshot of the land. It’s a grassy field near the rickety road that leads from Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, to the airport – a road once paved with rivers of blood.
For Tenah Kermee-Ruff, who is eight months pregnant, the healing starts with the birth of her baby girl.
“I’ll tell my child that we come from a country where the people are very loving, caring and close-knit,” says Kermee-Ruff, a 37-year-old bank manager. “But I’ll be realistic about what happened. And hopefully, she’ll want to go back and try to make it a better country.