Ebola hits home for a Liberian faith healer - LA Times

I found this to be a fascinating piece by Dixon, a small look into the beliefs and culture of Dorothy Sawer. Ignoring the whole "efficacy of prayer" issue, what I found troubling (as did some in the comments), Sawer, "never stops to ask herself, how many had died holding the bible and praying; how many had survived with no bible and no prayer."

It could be headaches, infertility, sorrow or bad luck. In New Kru Town, where the afflictions of the poor are plenty, there was always work for a prayer warrior like Dorothy Sawer.

People with nightmares would come to the faith healer, convinced that they were under attack as they slept. Once, a girl named Gladys took to running around the neighborhood naked and had to be saved. Some people were sick, and needed healing. Others had just lost their way in life.

Sawer would hold their hands, hard, to make the prayer powerful.

"Sometimes I pray loud," she says. "Sometimes I pray louder."

Sawer, an abandoned wife with six children — the child of an abandoned wife with five children — lives in a one-room tin house with holes in the walls in this crowded neighborhood of the Liberian capital.

It's a place where lines of colorful laundry flap like extravagant birds, stray dogs nose around for scraps and people dress up in lace for church on Sundays.

Sawer is a prayer warrior for a church called Conqueror's Tabernacle. Save for the miracles that she trades in, life could be disheartening for a woman with nothing but a dog-eared Bible and even less money than she used to have.

Sawer sees it as a biblical test.

If so, it's been a long one, and it hasn't been easy.

"My neighbors get vexed. They get angry," the 48-year-old says with a defiant, gap-toothed smile. "People laugh at me and mock me. They say, 'Every day, it's God, God, God business.' These neighbors say that's all they hear."

But a prayer warrior fears nothing — not ridicule, not spiritual darkness, not the witches waiting to steal the souls of children or weak old folk.

Then Ebola came to New Kru Town, and it attacked Conqueror's Tabernacle.

Ebola hits home for a Liberian faith healer - LA Times