More Stories
Some Kind of Big Water
​At THINK, no case is too unusual, no problem too small. When others reach a dead end, our team keeps searching for solutions—because every person deserves to feel safe.
She was barefoot, weary, and confused—an elderly woman wandering through the streets of Monrovia. Locals watched, unsure what to make of her presence. Eventually, someone called the Liberia National Police. Officers from the Women and Children’s Protection Section (WACPS) arrived and questioned where she lived.​
“I came from up country to visit my son..." she said. "I left the house and went to a nearby shop, but couldn't find my way back." The lady couldn’t remember the name of the community. Couldn’t say the street. Just her son’s name—and that his house sat near a large body of water. Maybe a lake. Maybe a river. She didn't know.
After several hours of questioning her without concrete information, WACPS contacted THINK. We brought her to the shelter, where she provided her son's name and mentioned he lived in the Bomi Hills Zinc Camp Community. She described her son's house as near the banks of a large body of water.​
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Assuming it was Bomi County, our social worker called the police in Tubmanburg. They’d never heard of such a place. No Zinc Camp. No missing persons report. No clues.
Our team broadened the search.​ They began thinking about communities in and around Monrovia that had large bodies of water that maybe her son lived near. Slipway. Jallah Town. Vai Town. Maybe even 12th Street. We reached out to local police in those areas, hoping someone had filed a missing persons report. Nothing.
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Five days passed. Then came a break. The radio announced an elderly woman missing—her name sounded familiar. Our social worker called the number given, and her son answered. He explained that he lived on 24th Street, Sinkor, behind JFK Hospital—in a beachside community with the Atlantic Ocean just steps away.
Suddenly, it all made sense. The "lake or river" the woman had been describing with such certainty was the ocean. She’d never seen the open sea before. Coming from upcountry, a vast, endless stretch of water with no visible edge was just "some kind of big water." All this time, our team had been calling inland police stations, trying to locate a phantom “Zinc Camp” somewhere near a lake... when really, her son lived by the ocean. Everyone was relieved to see mother and son reunited. The shelter staff, who had grown fond of the elderly woman’s gentle presence, celebrated the happy ending with a good laugh.
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THINK’s willingness to take in a lost elderly woman speaks to the heart of the organization’s mission. The shelter wasn’t built only for the usual cases—it was built for women and girls in crisis. Women and girls in crisis don’t always fit neatly into categories.
