Spark

To hear Comfort Enders’ MEd’07 story is to understand what it means to be a visionary thinker driven by patient resolve and an abiding faith. Enders started a career in science education and youth ministry, co-founded and then sustained a Christian school during Liberia’s civil war, and now serves as the senior deputy for student learning and faculty development at the University of Liberia’s College of Health Sciences.

After fleeing Liberia for Nigeria (her country of birth) during the civil war, Enders and her family returned in 1998 to build a youth ministry with Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ). However, in a country still reeling from war, their efforts floundered, leading Enders and her husband, Johnathan, to instead focus on establishing a Christian school called Kingdom Foundation Institute. They welcomed 77 children to their first schoolhouse—a hut built of sticks, straw, and tarpaulins on an acre of donated land.

Committed to growing strong, faith-based education, the Enders sought additional expertise. While intending to contact one educational nonprofit, they accidently sent an email to Christian Schools International that reached John DeJager ’65, who agreed to travel to Liberia to lead a conference in 2001. Thus began a long partnership.

Enders says Liberia faces significant challenges in educating its youth: many schools exist for profit, are under-resourced, and employ untrained teachers. Unethical practices, such as accepting bribes in exchange for passing grades on exams, seem commonplace.

In 2005, Enders became a full-time graduate student in Calvin’s master of education program. Both she and her husband believed the expertise she could gain from her degree would benefit their mission to bring stability to Liberia through strong education. She spent 18 months in Grand Rapids and built lasting relationships with the wider Calvin community.

She advocated in partnership with Partners in Learning Across Cultures (a nonprofit cofounded by De Jager and his wife, Elaine), a local church, and individual donors. “By the time I finished Calvin and came back, a one-story building with an office and 18 classrooms was built,” Enders says. For several summers, teams of Calvin professors came to Kingdom Foundation Institute to train 60 to 70 educators within the Christian school network Enders established. “And we are still building on those foundational things.”

Over the years, Enders’ mission and influence grew through numerous consulting opportunities with Liberia’s Ministry of Education, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the University of Liberia’s College of Health Sciences Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation. Today, she brings quality professional development to Liberian teachers on a national scale.

As senior deputy for student learning and faculty development at the University of Liberia, she currently leads a five-year grant-funded project targeted at faculty and student pipeline development. “It has been a joyful experience for me to be involved at the level this is happening,” Enders says.

Since the project’s inception, Enders and her team have shared their work on student pipeline development at the Consortium of Universities of Global Health in Washington, D.C.; implemented mandatory pedagogical and mentorship training for faculty at the university’s College of Health Sciences; and founded a summer science camp for high school students and their teachers, led by trained faculty on the university’s campus.

“We have learned a lot of lessons about how that collaborative arrangement can boost science teaching at the high school level before the students even come to university,” Enders says. “It’s so important to have teaching proficiency, because we are so resource deficient in Liberia.”

Back home at the private Christian school in Paynesville she and her husband still co-lead, Enders says 14 classes of 12th graders have graduated since 2011. “All together we have 191 graduates of our school. And among those, three, including my own daughter, have gone on to earn master’s degrees.”

“I see myself as someone who, by the grace of God, is really intentional and who is blessed with health and energy. All my life as I go on, I cannot seek to separate what I believe about the righteousness of God through Jesus Christ from the practical side of life. If I do what I have to do with intention, like the Bible would say, ‘with all your might,’ he will bless this nation even beyond my lifetime. I live with that every day.”