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Victor Taryor of Liberia came to Maryland because he has a story to tell.

Recently, Taryor spent a few weeks in the United States telling his story, which encompasses two civil wars in Liberia, the Ganta United Methodist Hospital and becoming a United Methodist missionary assigned to the hospital.

Taryor's association with the Ganta Hospital staff began in 1990, but as a newly commissioned missionary he is now assigned as the hospital administrator.

The hospital is on the 750-acre campus of the Ganta United Methodist Mission in northeastern Liberia, close to the borders of Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire. To get to Guinea, all one has to do is cross the river that makes up the border between the two countries.

It was to these two countries that Taryor and his family escaped for periods of time during the brutal civil wars that raged in the country from 1989 to 2003, except for a tenuous respite from 1996 to 1999.

During the wars, the Ganta Hospital was closed for only brief periods, in spite of being attacked more than once, "but the worst time was in 2003," he said.

"The outpatient services were closed and the primary health section was burned down," he said, as were the staff residences. Most of the staff had to leave for their own protection.

"Buildings were systematically looted, damaged and destroyed," he said. The rampaging soldiers burned the health records. "We (personally) lost everything."

At that time, they and most of the staff were evacuated from the premises. After a peace agreement was signed, the staff began returning in 2004.

In 1992, his wife, who is a midwife now in charge of the maternal and child health programs, and his four children and grandchildren left for safety, while he stayed at the hospital. He left for a short period in 1994.

"It was a very tough time, but we trust in God," Taryor said. "And my wife is very resilient."

Taryor was one of 22 new United Methodist missionaries the General Board of Global Ministries commissioned March 11 during the board's spring meeting in New York.

He is one of five global health missionaries, commissioned in the largest group of the last four years. They are assigned to hospitals in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Liberia.

Greeting him when he returns to Liberia from his U.S. tour will be Sue Porter, a Baltimore-Washington Conference missionary who is the dean of nurses in the nursing school. She began her assignment to Ganta in 2007, after five years in Central Asia.

In 2005, with the "most free, fair, and peaceful elections in Liberia's history," one Web site says, the country under the leadership of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a United Methodist who will be speaking at the General Conference, is for the most part calm and recovering from the devastation and pain of 14 years of war.

Part of Taryor's story is to seek support to help rebuild the Ganta Medical Complex and mission station. Even today, the hospital has only about eight hours of electricity a day.

The 120-bed hospital serves 500,000 people in northeastern Liberia, mostly from hard-to-reach villages where they live on less than $600 a year. With easy access, people also come to the hospital from Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire.

The hospital provides surgery, medicine, pediatrics and obstetrics and is the site for training nurses, the program that Porter works with. It has a state-of-the art eye clinic, built in 2005, which includes a portable cataract surgery unit.

One of its unique programs is a community health project that uses traditional birth attendants in the villages. A high rate of maternal/infant mortality comes from instances when a young pregnant woman unable to birth her child because of a blocked fistula. When a woman has spent six hours in labor, and is unable to deliver, the birth attendant, equipped with a cell phone from the hospital, calls. The hospital sends an ambulance and a Doctors Without Borders surgeon removes the obstruction and saves her life and that of the baby. The doctors have so far performed 96 such operations.

There are many ways to help, Taryor told a gathering of church members from Westminster UMC. These include:

• "First pray for us."
• Volunteers in Mission groups are welcome to help rebuild some of the buildings, including staff residences.

The mission is 130 miles from Monrovia, the capital, so it's often difficult to get workers who will move there. A few are available from nearby villages, but teachers, doctors, nurses and other professionals are not. Providing adequate housing is an incentive to move there.

• Volunteers who can train medical and ancillary staff are also needed. One new program being offered is vocational retraining for former combatants. When Herbert Zigbuo returns he will serve as the coordinator for the United Methodist Liberian Vocational Training Program, which provides training in selected high schools throughout the country.
• Medical supplies and funds for construction, maintenance and operating costs are also much appreciated.
• One of the best ways to help is to provide Covenant Relationship support for one of the missionaries at Ganta.