ABSTRACT
Liberia is an Ohio-sized country (roughly 111,000 square kilometers) with a population of about three million, situated on the coast of West Africa. If one pictures the continent as a pregnant woman’s body, Liberia would sit atop her navel. A densely forested land with an equatorial climate (warm wet summers with slightly drier and hotter winters), it has one of the highest rainfall averages of any country on Earth. Plains on the coast give way to low hills in the immediate interior, divided by several river valleys, and up to 1,700 meter-high peaks in the deep interior, near the country’s border with Guinea. Its other land borders are with Sierra Leone to the northwest and Ivory Coast to the east; the country also has an approximately 360-mile long Atlantic coastline.
