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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