Monrovia – Speakers from the Ted event at the Monrovia City Hall on Monday have added a more resounding voice to the power of resilience that has shaped the country’s recent history.
Report by J.H. Webster Clayeh – [email protected]
TEDx Monrovia is the first of its kind. TED showcased some of Liberia’s most inspiring thinkers, leaders, change-makers and community-builders through a unique interactive event.
One of the speakers, Liberia’s only Hollywood actor Zubin Cooper was quick to recognize veteran journalists Kenneth Best and the late Charles Gbenyon for being so inspiring.
Cooper said his acting career began from his childhood when he had so much love for television to the extent that his aunty used to call him “The Television Guy”.
According to him, due to his love for television, he memorized television channels by their numbers and their programming.
“Memorization made me to multitask. I flipped from channel to channel and as I flip, I will listen to people like Robin White, Elisabeth Blunt and, they helped to shape who I am today, how I think, how I act, how I speak and who I aspire to be,” Cooper said.
Cooper urged content creators to be conversant with the digital revolution taking place in Liberia and globally. He referenced Rodney Sieh, Henry Costa and the late Mamadee Diakety as few Liberians who took advantage of the digital revolution to get themselves at where they are today.
According to him, a simple cellphone could do much in terms of content creation and distribution if taken advantage of by content creators.
“Through this platform they are able to be content creators and distributors.”
“With the advancement of this digital technology people have learned how to process and create information in different ways as it shapes how we think, who we believed and who we interact with”.
The oldest speaker of the event, Sis Barbara Brillant who settled in Liberia since 1977 as a nurse said being young at that time, she thought she was going to cure every disease in Nimba County.
She said she got her strength through working with people, especially the traditional midwives.
According to Sister Barbara, the farming culture of the traditional midwives hindered the training she had come to provide.
“The traditional midwives were doing the best they could. They were taking close to a month, every day of the week for eight hours.”
“These women did not have that time. They were farmers; they had to be on the farms,” she explained.
Sister Barbara: “So we agreed that they will spend one day of the month staying in the village, from the farm work to learn safe delivery and that begins my education in resilience.
“Everybody asked me all the time when they meet me: ‘Thirty-nine years, how have you done it?’ You stay hopeful, you stay positive, and well I am a woman of faith. I have faith and hope also in the Liberian people.
“In the past 39 years I have seen the good, I have seen the bad, and I have seen the ugly. I have looked at evil in the war eye-to-eye.”
Being with the refugees for some time in Kakata, Margibi County; she said while there, she saw the insanity of the rebels behaving inhuman, but Liberians did not give up so she, too, could not give up.
“I define resilience in this way: ‘When you are overwhelmed, you are exerted, you are trumpet down, you’re fed up and you get up’ that is the power of resilience,” she said.
Being the youngest of all the speakers, Satta Shariff, 17, the Speaker of the Liberian Children Representative Forum told the audience to imagine the world without children, adding that the entire world would have ended with the first family of Adam and Eve.
She said: “Seventeen years ago, a sharp, brilliant girl was born in the maternal city of Bong, where the lands are rich with iron ore and natural resources. She was born innocently with no sense of the injustices perpetrated against children.
“Innocently born to uneducated parents, but loving, caring and a religiously tolerant family. She was born during the dark days of Liberia when children were made child soldiers. Women and girls raped, babies of her age killed, hundreds including close relatives died of hunger, yet she survived.
“She became an agent of change, educating girls on the importance of staying away from sex, fighting teenage pregnancy, sexual transmitted diseases, eradicating poverty at an early age. Ladies and gentlemen that’s my story”.
“My parent could not get a formal education but they believed the power of education. They were deprived but they never deprived us that the power of resilience. The power of a native Liberia parent to educate and to inspire, that the best give any parent can give to their child,” Satta explained.
TED is a nonpartisan nonprofit conference devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks.
TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, but today the talk covers almost all topics; from science to business to global issues and is in more than 110 languages.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.
At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.