Vox Populi:

In Memory of Sharon Sue Denk (1945-2023)

I moved around the house that Saturday morning in Kentwood, one of the finest suburbs in the sprawling Michigan city of Grand Rapids, preparing to leave the house. I had a bucket, some cleaning tools, and had slipped on my tennis shoes, ready to get to my first job. My husband and I had no car, but I didn’t worry about a car. I would have to walk the distance, probably, a little over a mile with these cleaning tools. These were not the sort of streets you could walk without notice, and Kalamazoo Avenue was one of the busiest streets in the city. After all, this was the life of a war survivor, a newcomer to America, that one opportunity to live again. I was fast learning how to navigate my new world.

We were some of the newest Liberian civil war immigrants to America, among some of the first survivors of Liberia’s ongoing series of civil wars. Our family of five had escaped the first in a series of wars that devastated our homeland during the first ceasefire, fragile, but a ceasefire anyway. The ceasefire allowed the West African Peace Keeping Force, led by the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, (ECOMOG) to install the first Interim Head of State, Dr. Amos Sawyer into office and bring a brief pause to the incessant fighting. ECOMOG liberated many regions, including our camp on October 23, 1990, and helped us return to our devastated home in Congo Town. In February, we learned that the Daniel Denk family, in collaboration with the US State Department, and their church friends, had negotiated our evacuation, and were inviting us to come to Grand Rapids.

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