In recent years Pastor Cook and the church’s congregation have worked to transform a small community just minutes from the Liberian capital of Monrovia, which has been ravaged by the Ebola virus. 

Through fundraising, donations and hands-on work, volunteers from the church have helped to rehabilitate the community of Zuba Town, most notably through the building and furnishing of two schools and a church. 

While the Zuba Town community has so far remained largely unaffected by the deadly virus, Pastor Cook said he is still devastated by what is happening in the country. 

“It’s completely devastating, you see on the news makeshift isolation buildings made from corrugated iron and some tarpaulin,” Pastor Cook said.

“It’s heartbreaking, people there can’t even get Panadol or anything like that and now they’re being forced to deal with a disease like this. 

“When you think about it, it’s really one of those things that makes you sit back and just say ‘wow.’”

For Pastor Cook, one of his biggest fears is that the spread of the disease could plunge the country back into the chaos it emerged from after years of civil war ended around a decade ago.

“Obviously stopping the spread of the disease is important, but for Liberia I think it’s extremely important. 

“This is a country that had 14 years of civil that only ended about 10 years ago, that’s the thing I fear is that the disease and the unrest it causes could undo everything that’s changed in that time.”

While the approximately 5000-strong community of Zuba Town hasn’t been directly affected by the disease yet, the outbreak has put a hold to further work the church had hoped to carry out. 

“We had a trip planned to leave on October 8, but with the outbreak we decided it wasn’t going to be possible.

“We had planned to build a fish farm in Zuba Town that would be used as a source of food and income for the community, that’s been put on hold for now and we’ll just have to wait and see when we can get that happening.”

Fortunately for the church, the spread of the disease in recent months didn’t prevent a shipping container full of donations for the community from being sent to Zuba Town earlier this year. 

“The container had school equipment, like printers and computers, as well as food and other things like soccer balls and boots for the children and we got a phone call at midnight last night saying it would be there in about a day. 

“Hopefully it can help to make life a bit easier for them, it took us about a year to pack and probably had about $50 000 or $60 000 worth of equipment in it.”

As knowledge about the outbreak and the thousands of deaths it has caused in Africa increasingly become part of day-to-day news, Pastor Cook believes it is prime example of why more should be done to help the world’s poorer countries. 

“Ebola has been killing people in Africa since 1976, but it’s only now that it’s spread to western countries that people are saying that we need a shake up about how we help places like Liberia stop these kinds of things.”