Visiting the THINK home

April 19, 2012

Today we went to a very special place: the THINK home. This program (Touching Humanity in Need of Kindness) serves as a home, ministry, school and community support center for women who have experienced violence or abuse, including rape and commercial sex trade. There are 35 women at the THINK home currently, and many have small children who live and are cared for on-site. While the mothers are in school, counseling, and skills training, a caregiver watches over all of the children, most of whom are toddlers, in a little bedroom. As she said to me, “It is not easy!”

We were welcomed into the THINK home through song. The women and girls sat as a group at their school desks and sang to us, each saying their name and hometown one at a time, with the others singing ‘hallelujah’ between individual introductions. It was a warm and beautiful welcome into their home.

We were served another delicious Liberian lunch with Alaska herring, cooked in a spicy pepper sauce over rice. We were given spoons, but the women and their small children ate with their hands.

One aspect of the THINK home I really found amazing was the maternal community. The women and their children live and eat communally at the THINK home, and children are cared for by all of the women in the community. THINK provides counseling and skills training for the women who live there, and the women are taught to sew clothing, to bake pastries, and to dress hair. These skills will empower them after they leave the home. The women are nearing the end of their nine-month stay, and we were happy to see that they and their children are well-nourished and healthy.

Nina and Paul trained the THINK staff in anthropometry, and the staff measured the heights and weights of all of the women. They also took a MUAC (mid-upper arm circumference) of the young children and babies, and weighed them. The staff was happy to be able to keep the scale and the height rod, a gift from Alaska, because they are now better able to monitor the progress of their residents’ health, even after the herring project ends.

The THINK home was really a beautiful and inspiring place to visit. The women who live there come from extremely difficult backgrounds, and it is wonderful to see them thrive, learn, and heal as a community. The mothers are so young, some of them under fifteen years old, and their children are very small. Having the herring distributed here is a wonderful thing, and we are honored to contribute to the healing of these resilient women and their children.

Rosie Schaack, founder of the THINK home, will be receiving an award this summer in Washington, DC for her humanitarian work here in Monrovia.