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Personal Stories

Beatrice Kekeh—Surviving Spouse, Liberia, Africa

Beatrice Kekeh smiles pleasantly as she speaks, but then her smile turns to tears. She recalls the hard times she and her husband endured while he led rural churches in Liberia. He eventually suffered a heart attack while preaching and died.

"It’s very hard now," she says, explaining how she depends on her retirement income to survive.

"They carried him to the hospital and then came to my house and told me he had died. The money was so low."

Her family eats all the food they can afford to purchase daily at a small market in Unification Town, a camp for displaced people where she now resides. When they can’t find anything else, they make do with bread.

"We’ve got to eat; it’s for our stomach. Before the war we ate rice," she says. "But rice has gone way up - forty American dollars - forty! Well, we can’t provide to get it, we can’t do that. So we can get a cup. Twenty Liberian dollars for one cup." (One U.S. dollar equaled 50 Liberian dollars in spring 2005.)

Hardship has not destroyed her faith. Living with her family in a house once belonging to her brother, she expresses resolve, even in sadness. "But now I just praise God to live, that’s all."