During my senior year of high school, my father was deployed to Monrovia, Liberia for six months. His mission was to aid the United Nations with addressing the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In doing so, he would be gone for most of my senior year, missing events such as senior prom, the college application process, and so on.

To make up for this, we set up a sort of correspondence where he would send me daily entries about his day to catch me up. Later, he compiled all of his journal entries into a book entitled “Living with Ebola” through which he hopes to offer readers a glimpse into his experience in Liberia. Here is one of those entries, called “Friends for Life:”

They walked down the gently sloping sidewalk together, past the Temple of Justice and the National Legislature, heading toward the bustling market and school-filled area on Broad Street.

The man on the right was blind. He wore shabby, dark clothing, mottled with dust and dirt, maybe from frequent falls. His shirt and pants hung loosely on his tired frame, his hair closely shorn. In his right hand, he grasped a long, wooden pole, a tree branch really. It had been cropped here and there, stray branches removed to give it a clean and functional appearance.

He tottered down the hill with an uncertain gait. His left hand rested on the shoulder of his companion.

The man on the left wore a wide brimmed hat and a loose, dark tunic. His pants showed evidence of long wear, frayed, patched, and bleached white in places by the hot, African sun. They hung loosely below his right knee, swinging freely where the rest of his leg used to be. He hobbled along with the aid of crutches, steadied during his descent by the hand on his shoulder.

I could not know where they earned their disabilities, one by war and another, perhaps, by illness.

UN Missions are not always successful, but in many ways UNMIL can claim success. Liberia is broken, and struggling, but largely peaceful.

One of the most important and immediate tasks of any new Peacekeeping Mission is that of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR). In essence, stop the fighting, rid the country of its weapons of war, and bring the combatants back into something resembling a normal life.

Before coming to Liberia, I learned about General Butt Naked (his nom de guerre), who claims to have presided over the deaths of thousands of innocents in cannibalistic rituals, designed to imbue his troops with bravery before battle. He received a full pardon for his crimes, and today is an evangelical preacher somewhere in the outskirts of Monrovia.

I watched the YouTube video where Prince William Johnson coolly sipped a beer as President Samuel Doe lost his ears, one at a time, the price of failing to answer Johnson’s questions. Johnson is now serving in the National Legislature as the Senior Senator from Nimba County. I asked myself how such things could be possible, and I assumed that these men were merely master manipulators, who traded one form of power for another as Liberia changed around them.

My sense of justice is offended by the fact that such people continue to walk about, and even to serve in positions of influence, as free men. I still don’t understand much about Liberian society and probably never will. That, perhaps, is the point. I can never understand.

This was a society gripped by Civil War for over a decade, a country where neighbor heaped abuse after abuse upon neighbor. During the Liberian Civil War, people treated each other so cruelly that many would have been morally justified to carry on fighting until the end of their days.

And yet, this is a culture where DDR worked. The various factions and combatants melted away, back into the fabric of normal Liberian life. The thousands of weapons disappeared, some buried and hidden in the event of future need, but many traded for motorbikes which now pepper the roads across the country. Liberia was deeply fatigued by the experience of long-term conflict, where sin was so uniformly spread across the population that everyone collectively decided to get over it and to get on with the task of living out the rest of their days in peace.

Ebola shocked this country, revisiting them with a trauma many would have preferred to forget. This most recent battle presented the people of Liberia with yet more death and destruction, and will again test their resilience. The country is only just beginning to feel the impact of the waves of disease which struck it over the past year.

The two companions bore different scars, remnants of their struggle with life in Liberia. One man could see, but could not walk. The other could walk, but could not see. They made their way together, friends for life.