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with abundance.
“He came through,” Taylor says. It
was a revelation.
Taylor set aside his doubt and dis-
trust, and then he did something else
he never could have imagined a few
months earlier: He traveled 6,500 miles
to Monrovia, Liberia. He wanted to
confront the man who’d tried to scam
him, although confront probably isn’t
the right word. Willie says scam isn’t
the right word either. He says he had
just been looking to make a friend. But
he also needed money.
By the time the two men finally met
in person, he had found both. “We
were business partners. And we were
friends,” says Taylor.
When he got to Monrovia, Taylor
felt surprisingly at home. “I saw the
places and the faces from the pictures
Joel had sent,” he says. When he got to
Willie’s street, he recognized it right
away. He found his friend sitting

outside his house, which was little more
than cinder block walls, a dirt floor, and
a tin roof. Inside were Willie’s wife and
some of his seven children, who also
greeted Taylor like an old friend.
Willie confessed to Taylor that he
used to send Facebook messages to
strangers, hoping to find some way
a new friend would help him out of
poverty. He said he was “more than
desperate.”
“To feed the kids, a lot of things run
into your mind,” Willie said. “Go and
do this—the wrong thing.”
Fortunately, “By D Grace of God,”
it never came to that. The booklets
kept selling (8,000 at press time).
People started taking pictures of
themselves holding their copies
and posting them on social media
with the tag #bookofjoel. Soon Wil-
lie had new friends in more than
40 countries, and Taylor’s fund-raising
campaign had raised $12,000.
Some of the profits went toward Wil-
lie’s basic needs, such as a new roof to
keep the rain out of his home. But the
two men decided most of the money
should be reinvested in the community.
Half the people in Liberia survive
on less than $2 a day. Over the past
20 years, the country has seen two civil
wars and an Ebola outbreak that killed
nearly 5,000 people in a nation of more
than four million. Because need is
everywhere, Taylor and Willie decided

Taylor expected that Willie would pocket all
their sales money. Then this photo arrived.

Reader’s Digest The Stranger Who Changed My Life

Free download pdf