My Trip to Liberia - Part 1

I just returned from the most amazing i opening terrifying and inspiring trip ever Liberia is an absolutely incredible country and I want to tell you everything but first I want to let you know that Liberia can kind of be crazy at times and so there were some times when I just didn't feel safe waving a camera around I mean I'm not Logan Paul I wanted to respect the people I wanted to respect the country and most importantly I wanted to come back alive so what this video is gonna be is a little bit of a narration of some of the sights and sounds of the wonderful country of Liberia let me introduce you to my team I knew I wasn't gonna travel to Liberia alone and so I recruited someone who had actually been there this is Carson and he used to live in Liberia as a missionary and he knows the country like the back of his hand this is Tim and Matt they volunteered to come on their own dime and be the sacrificial lambs meaning that if things got crazy they'd stay behind while I managed to escape I mean isn't that what friends are for what you got to know about the trip to Liberia is that it's long like 36 hours long but I knew that I was headed somewhere special because the lady sitting behind me sang and prayed to Jesus the entire time anyway we finally arrived at the airport and it was no bigger than a 7-eleven and it didn't smell much better either but we finally met up with our driver and we were on our way to the hotel and everything was pitch black I mean where are the streetlights you'd randomly just see people wandering in the dark along the side of the highway oh and there's fires everywhere I guess that's a normal people just throw their trash in the big piles instead of the blaze we finally made it to the hotel where I was happy to finally get some much-needed sleep and during the night I started to wonder what I'd got myself into but when I awoke I thought I was in the most beautiful country on earth I mean the place was just wonderful and tropical but then we started ahead into the city and I learned where this country had gotten its reputation the place just screams third-world there's traffic lights but they don't even work so basically you just do whatever the heck you want okay welcome to Liberia by the way this is John our driver he's the best driver in Monrovia when traffic is bad he just uses the express lane here's John just casually speeding past a cop car how do you get away with that so traffic isn't all that bad you've got people standing in the road selling you souvenirs cookies and these little water balloons to keep you hydrated someone in America needs to get into this business let me just give you a brief history of the country it was founded by freed American slaves in the 1800s well the freed American slaves started enslaving the natives and over the years the different tribes of people started to develop a little bit of bad blood Civil War broke out and you got coup d'etat is going on child soldiers and 20 plus years of people tearing each other to pieces the place is literally Ground Zero check out this neighborhood we ended up in it's known as West Point and some say it's the worst slum in the entire world there are literally 80,000 people living within a single square mile the place just smelled like a rotting garbage this is poo poo Beach and I'll give you one guess how it got its name we soon found ourselves on Broad Street and the markets were in full swing you can find anything you want here like this great shirt I noticed a place called a great World Trade Centre that was just buzzing with excitement so of course I peeked inside dozens and dozens of librarians were on their computers anxiously working on something what were they doing just across the street was lu lu sell a place where you could buy secondhand cell phones and laptops is this where your laptop ends up when you send it to Joe Williams that he never ends up paying you for it well we eventually got out of there and we stumbled across the five-star hotel called Hotel Africa and it sure didn't look like a five-star hotel at least not currently the place was huge and was sitting on prime real estate how does this happen how do you let such an amazing piece of property go to crap this is Gabriel he used to run the recreation program unity' before the war this place was five-star with and I can get anybody will be the best to West Africa you enter yet you need before the war is simple I assume rate of youth war breaks its destruction now Gabriel is out of work he hopes any praise for the day of an investment will come and bring back patrons from all over Africa and the world well soon we were off to meet George a native Liberian who served as a missionary with Carson George had the sweetest little family and Liberians always want to feed you so on the menu today we had well let me just have sister Freeman explain it dum ba and gran nuts yeah one thing that you need to know is that it's a huge insult to the people to not eat their food so when I offer it to you you eat it and you eat all of it yes even the chicken food at this point we considered ourselves lucky that we've done all of our shots and that our hotel had flushing toilets because the rest of the evening looked a little like this day two in Liberia was gonna be a good one because I was invited to the u.s. embassy to speak to young Liberians about entrepreneurship but on our way we saw tons of smoke and being the curious tourists that we are we decided to check it out hundreds of people from around the city we're gathering they catch a glimpse of the action the crowds just got bigger and that's when the police showed up and I want to apologize for the lack of footage here but when you think that you're about to die you tend to forget to hit the record button but the police hopped out of their vehicles and just started wailing on people in their clubs wrong - people just start rushing through the streets and I ran for my life but John got us out of that warzone just in time I thought it was like shooting your son to go along follow so it soon enough we made it to the US Embassy where I knew we'd be safe because if you've ever been in a US Embassy you'll know the security is tight like White House tight and so for that reason I couldn't even bring my camera or my phone in to take pictures but thanks to the good folks at the Embassy I'm happy to share with you these pictures we met with some of the brightest young minds in Liberia about creative marketing and setting yourself apart from the competition and listen to their ideas about what needed to change and what businesses they wanted to get off the ground that's when I decided to take Pleasant green investments to a new level so we held a mini Shark Tank competition and I listened to the different pitches from these bright young minds I can't tell you how much potential does the country has I knew right then that this is what we needed to be doing in Liberia we've got to get Liberians of working again we've got to get the economy back to where it was these vacant war-torn buildings in Monrovia stand as a testament to what librarians are capable of when given a chance this is exactly where I needed to be but first I needed to find the guy who got this ball rolling in the first place and in a dangerous city that was full of surprises it wasn't going to be easy but joel was out there and I was going to fight [Music]

Channel: Pleasant Green

Views: 491,989

Rating: 4.8043189 out of 5

Keywords: liberia

Id: sVNiT7X0Myk

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 08 2018