Kuwaa Mission

Kuwaa Bridges

With the completion, dedication and turnover to the Liberian Ministry of Health of the Kondesu Clinic in February of 2014 it was apparent that the next step was to improve access via the road system to facilitate the delivery of medical supplies as well as help assist in the economic development of the area.

There are 35 bridges that need to be rebuilt.  There are about 5 bridges that span a wide creek and needed much work as you can see from this photo.  Fortunately many of the bridges were less than 10’ in length so the work on them was much less intensive.  The condition of all the bridges however was much the same.  We had been able to get a vehicle to the clinic prior to this project but it was very time consuming to lay new logs down each time the pickup crossed.  Motorbikes were the main source of transportation.

We hired a man, Darlestone Coldheart, from Monrovia to supervise the work.  We then hired a local man who had a lot of experience with a “Power Saw” to cut the wood out of the jungle, or the “bush” as the locals call it.  He crew, along with the support of the villagers who live close to the bridges, hauled the wood to the bridge location and then Mohammed and his men rebuilt the bridges.  There are three villages along this section of the road.

Here is Mohammed cutting a log into planks.  A wedge is just visible under the saw motor to keep the already sawn planks from binding the saw as new planks are cut.

Here you can see the “Power Saw” and the workers installing the bridge deck.  Typically new logs are cut and hauled to the site and then man-handled into position spanning the creek.  The 4” thick planks are laid crosswise and secured into position with large spikes created out of sharpened pieces of ½” reinforcing steel rods.  These steel rods were bought in Monrovia, cut, sharpened and transported upcountry and carried to the various bridges sites.

While not part of our objective the road was often very overgrown with small seedlings, grass and bushes.  The local people brought out their “cutlasses” and brushed the road so that the gravel roadbed was clear for traffic.  This road is also used heavily by the people just walking from village to village or to their farms.  The main market for them to buy goods or sell what they have grown is a two day walk from the area we are working in and they usually do this at least twice a month.

This picture is of Mohammed and one of his workers at the side of the road with some of the wood for the bridges.  Cutting and hauling the wood was very difficult as the wood is a heavy hardwood resistant to moisture, it is green and not dried out and generally there was no trail through the “bush”.  It often was quite a distance just to get the timbers to the road and then they had to be transported to the actual bridge site.

Here is a motorbike crossing a shorter bridge before the road had been brushed.

With the completion of this project to Kuwaa people living in this area now have a fully functioning, government approved and operated clinic.  Additionally we have provided six wells between the clinic and the three villages.  None of this would have been possible without the generous financial donations to the Kuwaa Mission, the donation of helicopter time from of Samaritan’s Purse and the hard backbreaking work of the local Liberian people.