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Personal Stories

Minerva Kekeh—Surviving Spouse, Liberia, Africa

Minerva Kekeh’s pleasant smile belies a life of hardship, dislocation and fear.

She has survived war, poverty and the loss of her spouse, a United Methodist pastor in Liberia, who died, she says, from the stress of ministry under war conditions.

Her family was forced to flee their house three times as "war came to meet us," she says. "The guns ran me out. They were shooting, so we ran away to save our lives."

One flight took three months to get to safety in neighboring Ivory Coast. "We walk. No car," she says. "It was a long way on the road. We walked by day and rested at night. We reached a place and we stayed one month, then we would move to another place and stay a month, and then we passed on to Ivory Coast. That’s how we were until we got there."

Today, Kekeh lives in a rented house in Monrovia, the capital city of the war-torn nation. She is afraid to return home and has no money to repair her house anyway. She lives on the small income she receives from her share of her husband’s retirement contribution and income from her children who live with her.

Kekeh’s income of $35 is not enough to buy a bag of rice at today’s prices. Rice is the staple food of Liberia and the measure by which many people assess their economic purchasing power.

Still, Kekeh is grateful. "What we’re getting, it’s small, but I thank God. But we have got to have more. What we’re getting, you can’t afford to buy a bag of rice."