Woodworkers Craft Sustainable Futures

A year ago this month, Partners In Health was settling into its work in Liberia, helping to rebuild health care in the far southeast. Ebola was over. Staff and patients’ lives were looking brighter. Everything was falling into place. Except for the smallest little detail. The Formica-topped desks that PIH’s infrastructure team bought in the capital city of Monrovia were delaminating.

“It was just horrible,” says architect Christine Lara, director of infrastructure at PIH/Liberia. “We went to see about a refund and the shop owner assured us that the desks were ‘really good quality.’” In other words, there would be no refunds.

She and Operations Project Manager Sulaiman Nazier scrambled to find replacements. They visited more stores and a dozen woodworking shops and looked into wholesale imports from the United Arab Emirates. But nothing affordable would stand up to the onslaught of equatorial heat and humidity.

With the clock ticking, they decided PIH would make its own furniture. Near the facilities that needed it. And the stuff would rock. “We want things that are going to last at least as long as Partners In Health is in Liberia,” Lara remembers thinking. “We don’t want to do this again.”

They won’t have to. Fast forward a year. At the base of J.J. Dossen, an 83-bed hospital in the southeast, is a low-slung tin-roofed building with bay doors. Gospel or Senegalese hip-hop plays from a small boom box. Off-duty nurses and maintenance guys hang around shooting the breeze. And three craftsmen covered in sawdust—Ebeneser W. Sieh, Amowzeu K. Vanentin, and Daniel Kakpo—crank out custom-made furniture with noisy jig saws and disc sanders, to standards not seen elsewhere in West Africa, and at lower prices.

Their joined, stained, bespoke desks—built by Liberians from sustainably harvested Liberian wood—cost just $200 each. The flimsy, mass-produced desks bought in Monrovia had cost $300.

“Infrastructure has a maintenance team, an electrical team, a water collecting team, and a biomedical technician,” says Lara. “The woodshop is the coolest.”

How the five of them were able to pull this off has much to do with verve. Last August, a few days of legwork turned up no wood that wasn’t ethically suspect, no boards that could be guaranteed not to come from some poor guy hacking down an ancient Bubinga tree. So after some challenging moral calculus, Lara and Nazier settled on kiln-dried lumber from multinational Firestone Natural Rubber Company, which had recently begun harvesting, milling, and replanting rubber trees after the taps ran dry (rather than burning and replanting the trees).

Then they had to hire master craftsmen. Not surprisingly, many of the men wielding hammers and hand-planers on the side of the road focused on offering good value in a low-price market, not legacy-level quality. Lara and Nazier asked around. Word spread. In the middle of the month, they invited six carpenters to show off their skills by making a box. 

It was obvious who had “the hands for the craft,” says Nazier. Sieh, 28, a single guy who had worked in his father’s wood shop since he was a teen; Vanentin, 32, a part-time carpenter with a sharp eye for details; and Kakpo, 35, a churchly father who owned his own woodshop, were clear standouts.

Vanentin accepted Nazier’s offer without hesitation. “I’m so proud that PIH is here to help,” he says. Enticing Sieh and Kakpo proved more difficult. “I took the job because even if it’s not too much money, I can improve my skills,” says Kakpo.

In less than a week, they built out the woodshop and got busy learning new techniques. “I trained them every day for a month,” says Nazier. “It was quite strenuous.” Two of them had never used power tools and all of them needed to learn the basics of precision woodworking, he says. 

PIH woodworkers Ebeneser Sieh, Amowzeu Vanentin, and foreman Daniel Kakpo pose in the woodshop below J.J. Dossen Memorial Hospital on April 18, 2016. Photo by Eric Hansen / Partners In Health

The guys remember it differently. Nazier simply taught them some European designs and gave them better materials. “The way I used to finish a table was with an overhang, but Sulaiman taught us a new model with no overhang,” says Kakpo. “Also, now we use screws. Nails work, but screws are very guaranteed.”

In September, the three of them switched on the table saws, and working six days a week, their short assembly line quickly produced mountains of stuff—desks, tables, chairs, benches, cupboards, drawers, shelves, trusses, footlockers, molding, frames—all joined, sanded, and stained. The southeast headquarters was fully furnished in two months. A health center not only got the seating it needed, but solid-wood doors and interior trim.

And just up the hill, J.J. Dossen is getting a smattering of typical items, such as wall cabinets and tables, as well as custom pieces to help with a massive renovation that’s under way. The guys are building reception areas, marble-top counters, and benches for the expanding emergency rooms and operating rooms.

Nazier stops by mostly just to say, “Hi.” “They’re incredible,” says Lara. “They’re totally self-sufficient.”

Recently, the Danish Refugee Council, a development organization from the country synonymous with modern furniture, asked if they could place orders, and Lara and Nazier began looking in to selling the furniture in Europe.
“We hope that, through these kinds of sources and other income-generating activities, the infrastructure team could fund itself,” she says.

The guys aren’t waiting around. On their days off, they each work on their own projects, such as Vanentin’s bed, which is made with screws and baseboard overhangs. “I love my cousins,” says Sieh, referring to Vanentin and Kapko. “Thanks god to Christine and Sulaiman.”

Recently, Nazier asked them to make ceiling-mounted channeling to hide lightweight wires in J.J. Dossen. The guys not only did it in record time, they connected the channel’s sides and bottom with indestructible tongue-and-groove joints.

“It’s a little overkill,” says Nazier, clearly proud.