Speaker Meeting with partners, 6.45 for 7pm

The title of our speaker’s talk was: “I worked for the CIA in Liberia.”  Really?  “Well actually, I didn’t”, he said, “ but Liberia’s President Charles Taylor declared I did and he had two secret policemen follow me all the time.”

Brian Barber spent 15 years working as an Aid Worker, mostly in Africa.  The Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) gave him a taste for adventure when it sent him to New Guinea some 50 years ago.

His after-school life began as an apprentice fitter and turner in Wroughton but he severely injured his arm in a motorcycling accident and after that didn't fancy returning to a factory.   A physiotherapist at Swindon's Princess Margaret Hospital urged him to apply to the VSO.  

The VSO works in developing countries combating poverty and providing education.  Brian’s work was based around radio stations and allied information setups in war zones.  Consequently he is no stranger to gunfire or the sight of bodies following the brutal killings he came across during his many escapades in war-ravished hotspots of Africa.

Africa‘s oldest republic, Liberia, was originally a place for freed slaves to create a fair society back on their home continent. Unfortunately, since gaining independence in 1947, Liberia has faced civil unrest and war, and a long road to becoming a developed nation despite its rich resources.  Brian worked there for two and a half years in which time he assisted with college fees for some, businesses for others and even funded a CD for a local band, the “Black Knowledge Boys”.  He set up Monrovia's first solar lantern workshop making lights for the surrounding villages.  He also spent a great deal of time helping out ex-combatants get their lives back together.  He was the first white person to go into the Gurley Ghetto in Monrovia to see what could be done to improve the living conditions.

Radio stations were under fire in Liberia.  “Charles Taylor said I worked for the CIA” said Brian “and he had two secret policemen follow me all the time.”    After one rebel attack Brian was rescued by French Special Forces but within 3 months he went back to complete the task of building 25 radio station in 2 years.”

It was a brutal war.  Young boys were forced into becoming soldiers.  They were taught how to use an AK47 and then told to shoot their parents with it.  It was either shoot their parents or be shot themselves.  If captured they would have limbs and hands cut off.  Disable the enemy rather than kill them.  And a sound that still haunts Brian is that of babies screaming until they got their first heroin fix of the day from their mothers’ milk.

It is something of an understatement when Brian says: “I'm not a nine-to-five sort of person doing the same thing in an office every day, I just haven't got it in me.”  

Clearly, he’s a man who’s had many adventures and probably has a wealth of other interesting stories to relate.  Perhaps a return visit sometime?