By Kat Silverglate © 2025

From 1989 to 2003, civil war ravaged the people of Liberia, Africa. Citizens representing nearly half the country’s population left whatever nest they called home to escape violence amongst combatant factions, conscription of children into war, and brutalization of the vulnerable. 250,000 children, women and men died. The physical, emotional and spiritual wounds in the surviving population were/are incalculable, overwhelming and paralyzing.

This is the story of God’s power in ONE woman who moved through the paralysis of overwhelming odds to the formation of safety-nests for future “mothers” of Liberia.

It is a glimpse into the life of “Ma” -- Rosana Glaypohkpay Dennis Hungerpiller Schaack.

“I was born in 1956 in Liberia. As a reflection of my Bassa tribal background, my parents included Glaypohkpay in my name. It means ‘God’s power.’  I’m certain nobody could imagine the things that would bring me to depend on that power. Especially my birth father who declared on the day I was born: ‘girls have no value because when they grow up, they get married and another family takes them away.’”  

He was a traditional Liberian father with traditional views. When her leg stopped working properly at two years old, any value she may have had in his eyes faded.

“I fell down one day running to greet my mother. When she picked me up, she felt my high fever. When the fever broke, my right leg was useless. To get from place to place, I dragged it behind me falling all the time. As traditional people, my parents thought my condition was the result of a curse. So, when a local bush doctor told them a dragon swallowed my leg, my father believed him and lost all hope. My mother refused to give up.”

While pregnant with her father’s next child, in the sweltering African heat, Ma Sarah strapped her daughter Rose to her back with her lappa [a traditional cloth] and asked one bush doctor after another for a cure. Finding none, and now ready to deliver her next child, a woman named Ma Massa agreed to care for Rose until her birth mother recovered.

“A few years before I was born, the first Christian broadcasting station in Africa started airing content in Monrovia.  Their call letters – ELWA – stood for Eternal Love Winning Africa. When my mother heard about a clinic on the ELWA property, she took me there. A white American missionary named Henry Hungerpiller examined me and then explained to my mother that I had polio and that with proper care and education, I could live a normal, productive life. He told her about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and how polio didn’t hinder his ability to lead a country. He knew a female with a physical disability in my culture wouldn’t receive what she needed to thrive, so he offered to raise me when he returned from his trip to America to marry his missionary fiancée. When I was five, they returned and extended the offer again. My birth father was thrilled, waited until my mother wasn’t home, and had me delivered to the Hungerpillers. My devastated mother knew I would receive opportunities I desperately needed to survive.”

Rose, renamed Rosana and then called Rosie for short, arrived to meet another Bassa girl three weeks younger than her, Rebecca, who had just been taken in by the missionaries. Now sisters for life, they communicated with their new parents through Comfort Charlie, the Bassa/English speaking nanny who would become their voice as they adjusted to their new nest. On weekends, their new dad preached in surrounding villages about God’s redemption and used his medical kit to care for the sick. He turned nobody away. Nobody. And their new mom, Doris, served as a tireless hostess for the ELWA station’s many visitors.

The school where the girls started their education was run by a group of five women known as The Single Ladies – African American missionaries who came to Liberia through the Carver Foreign Mission, a mission birthed by Uncle Bill in Atlanta, their father’s brother. Carver was founded, in part, to counter the resistance Black American missionaries experienced in requests for foreign assignments. Carver would eventually build a campus across the road from the ELWA compound. The Single Ladies were an early part of Rosie’s safety-nest equipping her for a future she couldn’t fathom.  

“Our first eight years of life were a bubble of comfort and love. At the radio station, we dramatized stories and sang on the air. We told stories for Children’s Hour. We eventually transferred to ELWA Academy, where we were surrounded by missionary kids. Most were white. And I only mention skin color because of what happened later. The color of our skin was irrelevant in the Liberian school. We functioned like brothers and sisters. Like a family.”

In their nest of comfort and love, neither girl knew the lengths to which their parents went to keep them. Missionaries were not allowed to officially adopt and they were required to go on furlough back to the United States for a full year about every fourth year. The Hungerpillers couldn’t afford to bring the girls to the US. Even if they could, two black children with white parents in the racially divided South in the 1960s would face issues they weren’t ready for their girls to confront.

On their first year-long furlough, an ELWA missionary couple, Herschel and Sammie Ries, took the girls into their own nest for a full year, treating them like their own children. While away on sabbatical, their mother gave birth to a girl they affectionately called Bertie. On their return, she gave birth to a second girl, lovingly called Georgie. Nine years their senior, Rosie and Rebecca began to mother their new sisters. Care for them. Nurture them. Look out for them. Protect and defend them. They were learning to become a foundational piece of others’ safety-nests, although neither really understood it at the time.

Four years later, a missionary nurse – Aunt Nancy – supervised their care while they attended boarding school 80 miles away. When Aunt Nancy was away, a married missionary couple – Aunt Mary Naff and Uncle David – cared for them. So strong was the attachment by these temporary nest mothers, the Hungerpillers had to negotiate for the girls’ return at the end of this second furlough.

Finally, as Juniors in High School, the girls were ready to join their parents in the United States for their third furlough.

“We did the final part of our senior year in Atlanta Georgia. Other kids warned us not to go in the bathrooms or walk in the hall alone. It was terrifying. I remember a girl coming up to me to ask how it felt to have white parents. When I told her it felt normal, she didn’t understand my answer. When we finally graduated and I threw my cap in the air, it felt like a declaration of my worth. That experience didn’t make me question my worth as a Black woman, but another one sure did.”

Before returning to Liberia, the family was personally invited to hear a speaker at a church in South Carolina. When Rosie attempted to enter, a man blocked the door and told her point blank, “You are not welcome here.”

“After my dad intervened, the man relented and said I could come for this one service, but I could not come back ever again. I turned to the pastor and told him I would not come in now or ever. I would be waiting in the car. My little sister Georgie’s white hand rested on mine as I sobbed. My mother Doris’ white arms held me as she repeated the words, ‘let it out, Rosie.’ As I sorted through it later with my dad, he spoke Genesis over me – ‘God saw everything He had made, and behold it was very good’ – assuring me that this was somehow preparing me for what God was calling me to.”  

Rosie returned to Liberia and got into nursing school. Her birth mother Ma Sarah came to see her off, singing and dancing and repeating over and over to the Hungerpillers, “Thank you for my daughter, thank you for my daughter.” After Rosie married and her first daughter was born with a severe handicap needing lifesaving surgery, Ma Sarah hid under the hospital bed at night so she could help with care. Rosie would give birth to three more beautiful children and bring another girl into her nest, treating her like one of her own children.  Ma Sarah would be instrumental in mothering each child.

By 1990, Rosie had lived a life she never imagined possible. While her journey was not without deep sadness, her eldest died suddenly at eight and her sister Bertie drowned in a rip-tide. A BBC News announcement on Christmas Eve 1989 marked the start of a 14-year civil war. She would now claim her Bassa name – God’s Power – because hers would take her again and again through the valley of the shadow of death beyond her own strength to the very lap of God.

By March of 1990, the reality of civil war moved from remote news reports to incidents close to home. Now a staff nurse in Yekepa, she hears of an American missionary couple who dies in the crossfire between rebels. By April, a train is ambushed, and two cousins are killed. By mid-April, news that her town will be invaded circulates. Her plans to leave are delayed by the delivery of critically injured soldiers to her hospital. “We burned their clothes because we knew that if an opposing faction showed up, they might kill us for helping the enemy.” Her kids and husband waited in the lobby for her 32-hour shift to end. They crossed the border Guinea then back again to make it to their home in Mt. Barclay.

By early May, various embassies order non-essential personnel to return to their country. By mid-May, 150,000 have crossed over the Guinea border for safety. Headless and mutilated bodies start showing up in Monrovia, the capital city where her parents’ mission operates. The last chartered flights out of Libera leave in June. Her father, mother and sisters make it out. She and two others are left in charge of the Carver mission where internally displaced people started to gather for safety. At the 130-acre adjoining ELWA compound, 22,000 internally displaced people have descended for safety.    

By July, rumors that ELWA will be bombed start to spread. 22,000 people evacuated, leaving Rosie and about 33 people at the Carver mission. Fighters arrive one day and shoot the dog. It’s time to go. She knows it’s time to go. And she realizes she’s the leader.

“For a shy person like myself, the leadership role was humbling. I did my best to deliver decisions with confidence, and I read Scripture out loud to stay steady and to encourage my kids and the people depending on me. An unexplainable calm came over me when it was time to go.”

Nearly all 33 who left the Carver nest that day, including her birth mother Ma Sarah, made it to their first safe stop through an unspeakably brutal trip over countless dead bodies and across streams. A Nigerian teacher and Rosie’s stepfather were executed on the way. Yet, amidst all that death, life would not be denied. Literally, as they tried to calm themselves from the trauma of the trip, a woman went into labor. Rosie delivered the baby outside in the dirt while other women created a nest of privacy, holding their Lappas in a circle around the holy moment.  

Rosie would see, again and again, safety nests as if they were strategically placed at impossible moments. After walking six miles to find food at a refugee-ridden University campus, a young man spotted her and started to yell, “Ma! Ma! That’s my mother. This woman saved my life in Nimbia when I was seriously ill. She’s my mother. Take care of her.”  In Libera, when a woman nurtures someone like a mother, she is affectionately called MA. She had mothered him and now he was part of her safety nest. He walked her to the front of the ration line, where they gave her more than was allowed, and he got her a job as a nurse at the compound. She began walking six miles each way through rebel fighting to work.

Later, as food became scarcer, Rosie made the difficult decision to walk with two other women through rebel fighting back to the wrecked Carver campus to retrieve two $50 bills her father had given her for emergencies. The trip left her ill and in bed for 10 days. In an attempt to spend the money to care for the group, she and her sister [with her baby niece strapped to her body] set out to find food. When rebels threatened to shoot them, they hid and tried to find another path home.

“By some miracle, we stumbled on Ma Massa’s house. You know, the woman I told you about who took care of me when I was two, when my birth mother was delivering my sister? We had no idea where she lived. I hadn’t seen her since I was two. She gave us sanctuary. When rebels blocked our way home again, one fighter took compassion on my niece and forced a refugee to share his rice with us. We returned to Ma Massa and shared it with her.”

The group, eventually forced out of their home by brutal violence, made their way to the University, where they claimed a porch in the science building as their temporary nest. They could see everything from the porch, including executions.

“War had leveled all of us. It didn’t matter what color your skin was, if you had college degrees, or if you sold firewood to get by, when bullets flew, we were all the same. I felt the weight of the struggle in every person around me. In people I didn’t know. I didn’t know how, but I would spend the rest of my life refusing to let that weight of it crush them. Refusing to let it crush me.”

In the fourth chapter of Mark, the Kingdom of God is described this way: “

Eventually, five nurses and one human rights lawyer decided to interview women in displaced camps affected by the war. That tiny seed of God’s call grew in Rosie to the point where countless girls ravaged by the brutality of war and post-war Liberia would find safety-nests through THINK Liberia – Touching Humanity in Need of Kindness, the nonprofit she founded after the war.

“The idea was for women to spend nine months in the tenderness and love of nurturers to rebuild a foundation. It takes nine months for a baby to grow in the womb. So, we decided to give nine months for women to receive emotional, spiritual, and intellectual rehabilitation. We also ran a safe house for women escaping abuse.”

The first graduating class full of girl soldiers recovering from war marched into their graduation ceremony singing the song Mama, I’m Sorry by Brenda Fassie. They wanted to apologize for their part as soldiers in the war. They wanted to lead with forgiveness. The UN invited several of them to sing it again over a broadcast to the country.

While it would require a book length volume to begin to tap the stories of how girls found a nest in the now tall and wide branches of one willing woman, our mission this month will simply invite our participants to ask this honest question.

OUR MOBILE MISSION

Part One: Who has been a part of your safety nest? Spend some time meditating on who the Lord has sent to make it safe for you to live and grow physically, emotionally, and spiritually. As we celebrate Mother’s Day this month, consider reaching out to your MAs. In your Mission Pack, you'll find a green and a red key tag. Consider writing one name on that green key tag in your mission pack. Thank her for allowing the Lord to open a door that you couldn’t open. Write another name on that red key tag. Thank her for allowing the Lord to help you close a door that you had a hard time closing.

Part Two: How has the seed of the kingdom of God grown in you to the point where others nest in your branches? Find refuge in the Lord through you? In your mission pack, you will find a tiny envelope with the words “HELP, Please.” Pray that the Lord would open your eyes to the one He may be calling you to nest. And remember, a nest is built one twig at a time. Just one.

Amen? Amen!

Epilogue:

Rosie and her sisters would care for her birth father later in life, as he suffered from Parkinson’s Disease. He would come to be deeply grateful for their value as daughters and women. If you’d like to contact Rosie, you can find her on the contact page of ThinkLiberia.com. As she works to finish the book about her life as a warrior for women, keep her and the process of publication in your prayers.