Oretha Tarr, 21, has been in the United States for 5 1/2 years, after fleeing Liberia in the wake of civil unrest. With the help of her teacher Betsy McNeil, she has raised over $500 to send her four brothers to school in Liberia.

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

PROVIDENCE — Sometimes, the simplest gift is the gift of friendship.

Last year, Oretha Tarr, a teenager who fled the carnage in Liberia, was about to turn 20 years old. Betsy McNeil, one of her teachers at E{+3} Academy, had become fond of Tarr and wanted to buy her something special. She bought her a Roca Wear coat from Marshalls.

The next day, Tarr walked up to McNeil and burst into tears.

“I looked at that beautiful coat,” Tarr said last week, “and I knew it could have sent one of my brothers to school for the whole year.”

The coat cost $119.

McNeil was dumbstruck. She realized that she had no idea what life was like for so many children in Liberia. Although the 20-year civil war is finally over, the bloodshed has left the country and many of its inhabitants in ruins. Liberia’s infrastructure is in tatters and its public schools are accessible only to children whose parents can pay to send them.

“It was an incredible eye-opener,” McNeil said.

Hmmmm. One year of school for the cost of a designer coat, she thought. McNeil decided to do something and dashed out an e-mail asking friends and colleagues for donations to send Tarr’s four siblings to school. The request also went out to the members of Grace Episcopal Church in North Attleboro, where McNeil is a parishioner.

This fall, McNeil and Tarr mailed $300 to Tarr’s mother, who lives in a village without electricity not far from Monrovia, the capital. Then, Oretha made a call home.

“It was night in Liberia and her mother had to find a candle to see and a pen to write,” McNeil recalled. “Despite a language barrier, her mother spoke to me and asked that I thank everyone who helped. She said God would give back to us. She was crying.”

Since then, the two women have raised an additional $250, which they plan to send soon to Liberia. The friendship with Tarr has blossomed into a long-distance friendship with her father, a reporter for Liberia’s only free radio station.

“Sister Betsy,” Tarr’s father, Wellington Geevon-Smith wrote recently, “I always feel some sense of humanity each time I read an e-mail from you. For someone who is thousands of miles away to demonstrate such concern for others is so amazing. It is only God that can reward the person.”

Tarr, now 21, seems remarkably untouched by the trauma that roiled her childhood. She is attuned to the feelings of others, especially those students who are wounded in some way.

Tarr was 7 years old when the rebels attacked her village on the outskirts of Monrovia. Although the villagers fled to the country, not everyone made it out alive. Her grandfather was murdered before her eyes, his throat slashed.

“For many days, my family and I went to bed hungry,” she wrote in a school journal. “We slept in the middle of the forest for months because we were hiding from the rebels.”

In 2000, Tarr and her father escaped to Ghana, where she spent two years in a refugee camp. It was the last time she saw her mother or her four half-brothers. Four years ago, she came to the United States. Today, she lives with an uncle in Providence.

Although she is safe now, Tarr said she can never make up those “lost years” when her childhood was put on hold: “Because of the years lost to the civil war, I am in the tenth grade while other children my age are in college.”

Today, the two women marvel at what they have found in each other.

“When I look at Oretha,” McNeil said, “I see the Holy Spirit in her face.”

lborg@projo.com