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MaY 14, 2025
And then there was that time we found out our next door neighbor was the First Lady of Liberia.
When we moved to our house in Great Falls, VA in 1992 we met our neighbor Rosie who had bought the house next door several years earlier.
By the time we moved in, her husband was no longer around and we knew Rosie as a single mother raising a teenage son.
The pool in her backyard remained covered at all times and the wooden fence adjacent to our yard started leaning more and more each year.
Rosie worked in the administration at a local private school, and while we always exchanged pleasantries when we saw each other, we rarely had extended conversations.
In mid-2003, Rosie's adult daughter moved into the house, and when we asked about Rosie, she said she was fine and that she was traveling.
Where exactly she had traveled to - and what she was doing there - became clear on a cold weekend in February 2004.
It was a Sunday - February 8th - and we had just arrived home from church.
The day was chilly and there was still a coating of snow on the ground.
When we arrived home, Corinne went upstairs and climbed into bed to read a book-pulling the blankets around her to keep warm.
I went into the office and was getting ready to respond to some emails when I heard the dog barking.
I got up, looked outside, and noticed a couple of black Suburbans turning around in the cul-de-sac in front of our house.
Having grown up in the Washington DC area I recognized these as Secret Service vehicles and went outside to see what was going on.
There were a couple of members of the security detail walking up the hill from the cul-de-sac toward my neighbors house.
As they walked towards me I asked them who the VIP was and what were they doing in our neighborhood.
They asked me if I was the homeowner, and after assuring them that I was, they said, "The President of Liberia is staying next door tonight."
I said "That's Rosie's house. Wait-does he know her?".
They said, yes, and noted that Rosie was his wife.
That is when two black limousines crested the hill and pulled into Rosie's driveway.
As the agents walked up the hill, one of them commented to me, "You don't have anything to worry about; this will be the safest neighborhood in Northern Virginia tonight."
My curiosity piqued, I went back into the office and searched for information about the President of Liberia.
What I found was that Rosie's still husband, Charles Gyude Bryant, had been installed as Interim President and Chairman of the Transitional Government of Liberia on 14 October 2003.
The transitional government that Bryant led was set up as part of the peace agreement to end the country's second civil war, which had raged since 1999 as a pro-democracy group attempted to overthrow the government of military dictator President Charles Taylor.
So if Rosie's husband was the President of the Liberian government, that made Rosie the First Lady of Liberia.
I learned that Gyude Bryant and Rosie had been married in 1974 and he was a successful businessman operating a company that supplied machinery to the Liberian ports.
Apparently, he had returned to Liberia sometime in the 1980s while Rosie stayed in Virginia.
When he was appointed the Interim President he reached out to Rosie and she later told us that she felt it was her patriotic duty to return and do what she could to help the country move towards democracy.
After learning what Rosie had been up to, I rushed upstairs and told Corinne - "You are never going to believe this, but Rosie is the First Lady of Liberia! She and her husband, the President of Liberia, are both staying next door tonight."
Corinne paused her reading, put the book down and looked at me and said, "Well good for her. I hope that means they will finally be able to fix the Damn fence."
It turns out that Gyude Bryant had been in New York meeting at the United Nations the previous week and was scheduled to meet with President Bush on Tuesday, February 10th.
So to them, staying in their Virginia house made perfect sense and it also did make our neighborhood the safest place in Northern Virginia that night.
And yes, they did indeed fix the "Damn" fence later that summer.
