Sam Doe

I met Sam Doe the very first time seated at a big round table in the Martin Chapel in the Summer Peacebuilding Institute at Eastern Mennonite University in May of 1995. But my Sam Doe-lesson came several years later – the one I keep forgetting to remember.

At the time of that first encounter what I did not know, could not have known, was what Sam Doe had come through just months and weeks ahead of arriving for his first M.A. degree classes. I knew of course that Sam was from Liberia, that he had survived a war, and that he worked tirelessly throughout his native Liberia in favor of disaffected child-soldiers. I knew things about Sam, all of them important in their own right, but Sam is cautious about how and when he reveals the deeper side of events that formed his life…